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A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

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Re: A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

#161

Post by oh_sigh »

adwhit wrote: post #19

Given that 400+ years of growth has got us into a position where the likelihood is that the planet will be unable to sustain human life within a few hundred years, I'd be curious to find out what future historians will make of the West's supposedly proud story of progress. In the end, would we all have been better sticking with the Native American way of life? Benjamin Franklin: “When white persons of either sex have…

Yes, and our growth in the 19th century put us into a position where the likelihood that the planet would be able to sustain our horse production within a few hundred years seemed incredibly unlikely. Gee, I wonder what happened, and why we aren't beholden to horses any more?

Re: A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

#162

Post by chrisco255 »

kamaal wrote: post #156
newsmania wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery actually held the USA back. It kept the south rural, whereas the north was far wealthier without slaves because it industrialized. Furthermore, the civil war was incredibly destructive and without slavery would not have occurred. Lastly the USA was not the biggest economy in 1850. As for a “usurped continent”, the land was very sparsely populated by the natives compared to the people who came in, and disease…

>>It kept the south rural, whereas the north was far wealthier without slaves because it industrialized. I feel for you. Those evil slaves didn't work hard enough till their deaths to make their rightful masters win. >>It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first. This is so Winston Churchill'esque, dog in the manger analogy where there ar…

Dude, Churchill was fighting the most horrific forces of fascism and evil that the planet has ever seen, a war in which nearly all of Europe fell to the Nazis and nearly all of Asia fell to the Japanese empire... London was enduring daily bombings and you're going to blame him for a famine halfway around the globe?

Re: A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

#163

Post by jcranmer »

ransom1538 wrote: post #111
zizek23 wrote: post #34

Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen along with unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe. The consequence is predictable. Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder without a hint of self consciousness or remorse, and cements a barbaric ideology that fuels more indiscriminate global plunder…

Sort of. The big advantage the US had was OCEANS on both sides and only stone age peoples to the south. Attacking the US on it's own soil has been a suicide mission for hundreds of years. Counties in order to attack the US would need to pile men on ships travel for a month(s) then attempt to skirmish on the beaches. On the other hand attacking Poland /Korea/China/Spain/Italy/Egypt is a matter of walking. Once ships w…

> Sort of. The big advantage the US had was OCEANS on both sides and only stone age peoples to the south.

By the time the US became a country, the indigenous peoples had access to firearms, certainly every one the US Army would have been fighting. It's also worth pointing out that the US bordered an English colony to the north and a mestizo former Spanish colony to the south.

Re: A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

#164

Post by eighthnate »

freeflight wrote: post #128
thesmallestcat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sweet smell of presentism. You can perhaps fault the US for the interlude between British outlawing of slavery and the civil war/abolition, which covers a few decades. But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries. It certainly wasn't "unlimited." Onto the next bit, "stolen...IP from Europe" is a modern characterization of what was in fact a healthy exchange of r…

> But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries. That's an odd standard to set. Racial discrimination, based on ethnicity, also used to be a global norm, yet that didn't and doesn't excuse the crimes of the Third Reich. While African-American GI's fought against the disfranchisement of European Jews, their own home country still had racial segregation laws in place f…

> That's an odd standard to set. Racial discrimination, based on ethnicity, also used to be a global norm, yet that didn't and doesn't excuse the crimes of the Third Reich.

It's a terrible habit we have as a nation. We are happy to forgive or excuse our sins but hold others to theirs.

Re: A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

#165

Post by aaron-lebo »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #154
aaron-lebo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound bitter. Find a society without historical sin and then we can talk. You went off on some tangent about jingoism without explaining where the book supports that. Did you read the book or the review or did you just want to rant?

> You sound bitter. Find a society without historical sin and then we can talk. You sound defensive. Why should there need to be a sinless society before you'll entertain someone's thoughts on the relationship between your sins and your success.

Don't get me wrong, like every American interested in history, I'm well aware of the sins of the United States. Hell, Texas was colonized by slaveholders who were illegal immigrants before it was stolen from Mexico. On the other hand, Mexico itself is a land full of people who are the offspring of the conquerors and the conquered. There's really no winning and nobody with a clean record.

What I object to is someone who's bitter because he's not American launching into an irrelevant tirade and acting like they are somehow better when 60 years ago Europeans were exterminating each other. It's pretty dishonest and it shows some hate and/or immaturity when a bunch of people have upvoted said tirade because of their own biases.

Re: A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

#166

Post by jcranmer »

pizza wrote: post #72
kryptiskt wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why didn't it happen in South America?

The settlers who went to South America with the dreams of plucking gold bars out of the fruit trees and using an enslaved population to make hard farm work a breeze met a harsher reality. I don't know for certain, but I assume that the land was harder to make arable, the weather was less forgiving, the rainforests brought additional problems (like persistence of mosquitos and ticks). Plus South America didn't unify l…

> The settlers who went to South America with the dreams of plucking gold bars out of the fruit trees and using an enslaved population to make hard farm work a breeze met a harsher reality.

Brazil had a higher slave-to-free ratio than the US, and imported more slaves than any other colony/country in the Americas (it was also the last country to ban slavery). Actually, the US was never a major slave importer--the US and Canada combined imported only about 4-5% of the total Atlantic slave trade, and the highest slave ratio in the US was only 57% (South Carolina), both of which are outdone by individual Caribbean islands. It's also worth pointing out that the truly productive gold and silver minds were in South America--Cerro Rico may have produced 60% of the world's silver at its height.

Put another way, South America was where it was, in fact, possible to have slaves dig free money out of the ground for you and do all of your hard labor, whereas this wasn't really possible in North America (at least not until after the invention of the cotton gin around 1800 and the discovery of highly productive mines in the late 1800s).

Re: A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

#167

Post by eropple »

chrisco255 wrote: post #162
kamaal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It kept the south rural, whereas the north was far wealthier without slaves because it industrialized. I feel for you. Those evil slaves didn't work hard enough till their deaths to make their rightful masters win. >>It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first. This is so Winston Churchill'esque, dog in the manger analogy where there ar…

Dude, Churchill was fighting the most horrific forces of fascism and evil that the planet has ever seen, a war in which nearly all of Europe fell to the Nazis and nearly all of Asia fell to the Japanese empire... London was enduring daily bombings and you're going to blame him for a famine halfway around the globe?

"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits."

When Churchill actively refused to allow food aid to come from external sources during the war, yes, he and his government bear an even greater portion of responsibility than the colonization of India, in the "you break it, you bought it" sense of responsibility, already merited. Similarly, Churchill's galloping racism and his government's nastiness spread similar misery elsewhere: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest...

And this is not a new happening for Britain, either; they did the same thing to the Irish during the famines. The Sultan of Turkey wanted to send ten times the money more money than the Queen of Great Britain and two ships of food; the British consul in Istanbul said that to send more aid than the Queen had herself allotted would be seen as diplomatically insulting. All the while, Irish shipments of food to England continued unabated.

Re: A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

#168

Post by cerealbad »

page 12[] is where the interesting numbers are.

machinery, iron and steel, cotton, lumber. that's how it became the world's economy. ww1 and ww2 is how it became the world's military power. the military industrial complex is how it maintained both of these positions.

manufacturing, construction and population is how china overtook them. america should be pushing open borders, tax relief on families with multiple children, ban on abortion, if it even wants to compete for the 21st century. a ussr type dissolution and depressing collapse is sure to come when their inevitable debt burden default happens by the 2040s or 2050s. the only question is, will this occur before or after the eurozone currency implosion and german re-armament.

[]https://web.archive.org/web/20081230063039/http://faculty.wc...

Re: A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

#169

Post by aaron-lebo »

eighthnate wrote: post #164
freeflight wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries. That's an odd standard to set. Racial discrimination, based on ethnicity, also used to be a global norm, yet that didn't and doesn't excuse the crimes of the Third Reich. While African-American GI's fought against the disfranchisement of European Jews, their own home country still had racial segregation laws in place f…

> That's an odd standard to set. Racial discrimination, based on ethnicity, also used to be a global norm, yet that didn't and doesn't excuse the crimes of the Third Reich. It's a terrible habit we have as a nation. We are happy to forgive or excuse our sins but hold others to theirs.

How exactly do you determine the habit of 300 million people? How do you differentiate that habit from the Japanese who refuse to officially recognize war crimes in China or the Belgians and Germans whose grandparents wre killing Congolese and Jews respectively?

If people in this thread were being honest they'd be well aware that this particularly American flaw isn't so specific to the US.

Re: A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy

#170

Post by chrisco255 »

agumonkey wrote: post #57
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you just describing world history, where tribes/peoples have replaced other ones many many times over?

tbh, and not trying to dismiss USA in anyway. I find their situation in time and space pretty exceptional. They had no aggressive neighbors and half a continent. At a time where new knowledge was popping out, having such a playground was very timely.

Then why did the U.S. fare so well compared with Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, etc. India, Russia and China had close to the same landmass for several hundred to thousand years prior but they didn't achieve what U.S. did despite a huge head start.
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