In 1939 the US had an outdated navy, army, and air corps. European instability is the direct cause of the change in US military and economic dominance.
One of my favorite historical fun facts was that despite the Wright brothers flying the first place in 1903, at the start of WW1, the US was completely incapable of building an airplane and had to buy them from France and Great Britain. Why? Because of patent wars [1].
The net effect of that was that Congress had to intervene and they created an avionics patent pool, a system that persists to this day.
So whenever anyone says that patents foster innovation, just look at this or any number of historical counterexamples.
As for WW2, the causes were historical. The US was still suffering from the aftereffects of the Great Depression and American isolationism. It's worth noting that there was a lot of sympathy towards Nazi Germany in the US with the American Bund Party who had a rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 [2].
The US has actively suppressed any development in countries that could become competitors or non-aligned regional powers. Think Chile, Argentina, and Brazil (at least twice).
I don't think that the corporations and the government would allow a cell phone manufacturer or operating system to be developed that wasn't under their control.
The history of engineering in the USA is actually SUPER important. The article touches on some restrictions the British imposed on their colonies, but it goes much further. The fight for 'Sovereignty' took a long time and was almost never certain.
I HIGHLY recommend the Yale lecture series. They're not engineering-specific, unfortunately. But still really, really, good (I mean... it's Yale)
I know it's the 250th birthday and everything, but can the US stop deepthroating itself for a second ? It got handed absurd amounts of wealth, land, resources, investment, lessons from the old world and isolation & political stability.
Europeans with the money and investments. Native americans who taught the first americans to survive off the land. The slave labor that americans were very happy to have that built their country. Europeans again with two consecutive world wars that led to the rise of the american industries and military complex.
Americans are not the self made men they made themselves believe to be. Played it well? Certainly. Starting with all the possible cards in your hand and geopolitical stability makes it very easy to do so.
Mate, american history is so recent it can basically be covered in detail in a single middle school year. The US has had zero real external threats post revolution, so much land and resources it can afford to burn them for fun and was the recipient of the entire world's brain drain. Take a random south american country and it'll have a dramatically harder history. Including the part where the US probably attacked them or manipulated their elections.
> The US has had zero real external threats post revolution
The US had external threats by Great Britain, Spain, Mexico, Barbary states, Native peoples, Japan, USSR, Italy, and Germany. They all took military and political action against the United States.
South american countries also have a fascinating history! But I'm not sure how that diminishes anything of the USA's struggle for existence. If anything, it heightens the fact that the founding of the USA is largely a miracle where the right people were in the right place at the right time. The fact that the USA's government has endured is by itself worth study.
and why limit it to external threats? are external threats the only one that threaten a country?
We’re not the only ones with a wealth of natural resources. Canada, Russia, Argentina, Australia, Brazil all have per capita even more natural resources at their disposal.
With shitty climates. The surface area of optimal climate in the US is likely larger than that of all the countries you've named combined. What's optimal? For example in Canada most farmed areas yield only one harvest per year. And most of the land is barren wasteland. You have some of it as well, but it's not the majority of the territory.
Brazil is pretty damn fertile, and nearly as large as the US though... If we're just talking about farmable land area, I'd be surprised if the US is larger than Brazil. Farmed land area is a different thing though. Not sure how what compares.
Most of this isn't geographical determinism, though. The death of the indigenous americans (allowing settlers to come in and take over), the brain drain after WW2, the first modern democracy (even if the Constitution is a bit kludgy), etc., all not geographical determinism.
You could say that about any other determinism. Nevertheless, it's a huge factor in the wealth of nations and a pillar of geopolitics. It's also why we don't all speak german today... /s
Argentina's arable land is just 27% of what the USA has. Fact-checking myself... the USA has more arable land than Canada, Australia and Argentina combined. Russia has a lot, but the USA has the most.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_arable_la...
Not sure where to find an aggregate growing days figure, but there's clearly less of them per arable surface area in Canada compared to the USA.
Not per capita. Look, Japan (and S Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, etc) have shit for natural resources yet they are not technologically retarded. They have a highly advanced economies and societies.
This is drifting from the point. The thread was about the share of territory with optimal farming climate, not per-capita anything, and not whether resource-poor countries can be advanced.
Honestly if other countries did the same stuff as Argentina they'd probably be way worse off than Argentina as the country is still relatively wealthy. They were arguably too rich (and not populated enough with 4 million people in 1900) for a while making industry, especially export oriented industry, less viable sort of like dutch disease.
"In 1839 [...] the United States had already defeated Britain’s navy in two wars"
This statement is wrong and trivially falsifiable. Perhaps the author meant that the U.S. had by that point won some naval battles against the British?
We did flex quite a bit on lesser powers, though, even in the 1800s. The US Navy was infamously rebuilt after the revolution to fight a war against Tripoli.
yeah, it's worded strangely; as if both conflicts were exclusively/divisively maritime.
Which is a shame because the role of the Colonial Navy and later the U.S. Navy in the war of independence and later in the War of 1812 is actually fascinating and often overlooked
Every successful country has done it. First they make liberal use of others' IP then when they are generating IP themselves they try hard to protect it.
Not limited to IP, they also do this with real property when they can.
Not limited to property, they do this with every single regulation. Think about Europe and chlorinated chicken.
I guess it's time for some jingoistic rewriting of history. If you want to sum up America's rise to power it's the slave trade, war and a healthy dose of luck (eg the Louisiana Purchase).
There is a concerted attempt to rewrite history on slavery. You will hear things like "slavery was an economic drain" or "slavery was inefficient" or even "it was technology like the cotton gin that created wealth, not slavery". All of it's nonsense [1].
It's true that industrialization (particularly the railroad ans mass production of steel) was a huge driver in the mid-19th century but what really kicked the US into high gear was war [2].
It's true that material conditions and real wages started stagnating in the 1970s but this piece writes that off as Wall Street shenanigans. This was a political goal to break organized labor. We had McKinsey producing reports to argue that executives were "underpaid" [3]. The post-war era went from a marginal tax rate of 91% and the CEO to median worker ratio went from 21:1 in 1965 to 351:1 in the 2020s [4]. But also the post-war economy shifted from housing being a utility to being a speculative asset. The median house price went from $18,000 to $26,000 between 1953 and 1973 (in nominal terms) [5] and decreased in real terms. And, well, we know what's happened since.
But what's less well-known is the link between money going into housing and decline in manufacturing. That's not an accident. Why invest money and run a factory when sitting on a house produces a 7%+ real returns that are government-protected?
As for the whole "right to repair" bit for tractors and the like, yeah, companies engage in rent-seeking behavior in a capitalist mode of production. Film at 11.
While I do agree for the most part, some countries which innovated/used resources/used labor better or at the same level as the US didn't have the ability to just send their surplus labor westward to get some 'free' land. We'll never know how the Swiss would've done if they were able to get a population of 50 million.
Follow-up question: who freed the serfs of 19th century Russia?
Here's another (not so) fun fact: over a million serfs were freed in 1959. "Serf" is actually generous because these serfs could be traded like property. You know, like slaves. Where was this? Tibet [1].
wait you're telling me an English-language website run by a company in California (which is the US) is not aimed predominately at the California tech startup scene?
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