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

economist.com

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

#81

Post by gerdesj »

tmax6 wrote: post #47
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?

It sounds like he/she just read “A People's History of the United States.”

I have just read the Amazon puff on that beast (never heard of it before - being British.) I suspect I wont be adding it to my must read list.

Ta for the heads up 8)

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #80
nebabyte wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We hit Hitler comparisons fast on this thread, eh god forbid people bring up hitler in a thread about history/world politics In fact, let's just scrub history of any references to Germany so we can make internet threads marginally less annoying

You probably know as well as I do that Godwin's law is almost as old as the internet itself.

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by thesmallestcat »

ghaff wrote: post #75
pizza wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't really explain Argentina to nearly the same degree as e.g. Brazil-/which The Economist has written about at length over the past couple of years.

Argentina is a great place for ranching and certain crops, but it has very little mineral wealth. I would hazard that the two most likely reasons for South America's slow progress are that its colonies were attached to ailing empires, and that a rugged and challenging geography made unification difficult to unimaginable. American history has no analog to the horrific War of Triple Alliance, a historical microcosm of the continent's diplomatic challenges.

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

#84

Post by sremani »

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…

Geography happened to South America, unlike North America, connecting the Atlantic Coast with Pacific Coast in South America is not easy and most of their navigation/transportation is along coastal roads.

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

#85

Post by gerdesj »

ratacat wrote: post #70
gerdesj wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(No idea what the article says - I've apparently reached my article limit) How on earth can you describe a landmass as stolen or a continent as usurped?

It's kind of like, I come over to your house for dinner... Murder your family members, and sell you to a slaver, then your house is mine. Pretty straight forward.

A landmass and a continent: which bit of bloody great chunks of rock, soil, stuff etc are you having problems with?

You can do what you like but the continental plate it was performed on wont give a fuck. You could even destroy that continental plate or even the whole shebang but it will still not give a fuck.

Landmasses and continents don't give a fuck - they really don't.

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

#86

Post by admiralpumpkin »

jorvi wrote: post #2

When will this myth stop? Until the UK has left, the EU is the biggest economy in the world, not the US. Edit: damn, hit a painful nerve here apparently. For the tired old '28 countries vs 1 country', America its states and the EU its countries are very comparable in economic size.

Strange so much arguing with no data presented or sourced.

IMF US 18.6 EU 16.4 China 11.2

World Bank US 18.6 EU 16.4 China 11.2

UN US 18.0 EU 16.8 China 11.2

All figures nominal GDP, US$, trillions, 2016, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

__

Things are a bit different when switching to PPP though.

IMF (2017) China 23.2 EU 20.9 US 19.4

World Bank (2016) China 21.4 EU 19.7 US 18.6

CIA (2016) China 21.1 EU 20.0 US 18.6

All figures nominal GDP, US$, trillions, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

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

#87

Post by agumonkey »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #62
agumonkey wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The North American tribes had plenty of warfare and territory turn overs long before the Europeans arrived. The isolation of the americas did prevent diffusion of technology, but we also saw the same thing happen in Africa and even Asia to similar extents. It wasn't very unique.

Sorry I meant after the United states formed. They became the only player on that area weren't they ?

I always oppose their situation to Europe where many similarly large countries were shoulder to shoulder.

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

#88

Post by adventured »

maxxxxx wrote: post #44

It will be interesting to see how the next 400 years will go. For a long time the US could just keep growing into new territories and absorb a lot of ambitious immigrants that way. It seems this phase is over. The US is now a grown up country where everything is owned already so it will be much harder to grow. The Trump success seems a symptom of this. Instead of just growing as the US had always done Trump's message…

Your premise isn't very well supported by the facts. The US added $5 trillion to its GDP in the last ten years, despite the great recession - a time in which the most powerful economies of Europe didn't grow at all, nor did Japan. US wages routinely grow three to five times faster than those in Japan, Germany, France or Britain.

Where's the lack of growth? GDP per capita went from $46,000x to $57,000x over those ten years and shows no sign of actually stopping, in contrast to most of its peers.

To put the growth in context, that $5 trillion is more than Russia, Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Czech, Romania, Slovakia, New Zealand, South Africa - all added combined.

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

#89

Post by pizza »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #65
pizza wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but as an example (whose effect is only stark because of our present world history), the Nuremberg trials were also a replacement of world history. Many people on trial said "I was just following orders"; mere world history. Just because world history is symbolic, does not mean millions of people's duties do not depend upon which symbols are present.

We hit Hitler comparisons fast on this thread, eh? It is fine to condemn it if you want, we definitely don't want to repeat it, but if you think any culture really has the moral high ground on this, you should look deeper.

The looking deeper is exactly not defaulting to moral relativism AND not defaulting to the belief that universal goods, as defined by one culture, are universal simply because any culture says so.

The two perspectives aren't even very different.

The "world history is just how the circle of life turns round" stance is to the moral high ground stance what a sitcom with canned laughter is to a comedy without a laugh track: with the canned laugh track, you aren't even expected to bring the laughter. To forget your dilemmas, all that is expected of you is just to stare at the screen.

I get that Nazism is a topic people tend to be skeptical of the possibility of using examples in discussions both honestly and seriously. Not only does it flare emotions, it also makes it more likely that discussion will just split around calling the opponent a Hitler-sympathizer/trying to distance oneself from the cultural taboo "evil is a subset of 'the set of Hitlers'" (which is not the same as "Hitler is a singleton subset of the set of evils".

The evergreen task is finding the deficiencies of historical signifiers we used to use, both the ones that brought the most prosperity, and the ones that brought the most ruin.

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

#90

Post by sremani »

The 13 colonies fighting for self-determination would not have imagined becoming the sole super power of the world. Louisiana purchase for strategic depth, Texas joining the Union and the Mexican American War, leading to manifest destiny to the west ward expansion. The Civil war, would have ripped the continent into warring nations, the nation building of USA from sea to shining sea is never obvious, and its bloody, brutal and downright ugly. In spite of becoming bi-coastal power, US was still a poor country in 1880s, and what has transpired in Europe with two world wars and its own role in Pacific Theater thrusted US into its current role.

Its convenient to dismiss, and over simplify this whole enterprise of making of America. I am amazed, and simply amazed by the American experiment and I am not even "technically" American.

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