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

https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21729414-how-america-became-worlds-biggest-economy-400-year-story-progress

by mxschumacher • 9 years ago

131 218 9 years ago

economist.com

jorvi2• 9 years ago

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.

treehau53• 9 years ago

the EU is the biggest economy in the world

Yes, the EU, or otherwise known as that giant land mass consisting of 28 different countries with unique economies.

Ironically, trying to treat each member state as some homogeneous member is what is leading to the fracturing and growing nationalism. UK won't be the last to try and break off.

skissane3• 9 years ago

The EU in many ways acts like one big economy due to its customs union, freedom of movement of workers, capital, goods and services, extensive harmonised regulations, partially harmonised taxation, wealth transfers between members, a common currency to a substantial part of it, etc. It is a lot more tightly integrated than some mere 28 member free trade area would be, although still not as tightly integrated as say the 50 states of the US are. (And the 50 US states all have distinct economies from each other, with sectors that are big in one state being small or even non-existent in another.)

revelation• 9 years ago

Which isn't too different from the US. There is California, then... not much more. East coast and west coast is basically a different country.

meri_dian3• 9 years ago

The US has the biggest national economy in the world. It has a central government than can wield that economic power for its own purposes.

The EU as a singular entity can do relatively little with its members' wealth, which is why measures of that wealth aren't very meaningful.

It's like saying that Asia has the biggest economy in the world. Well yeah, but large chunks of that economy are segregated from one another along national boundaries.

orf2• 9 years ago

Well yeah, but large chunks of that economy are segregated from one another along national boundaries.

Except with a customs union, shared currency and free movement.

manojlds2• 9 years ago

Without your last para, you make a valid point. The EU is not a nation, but we all know that it can wield united power in lots of areas and you cannot compare the EU with the continent that is Asia.

copenja• 9 years ago

I guess the distinction is that the US is a single country?

Also, it seems there is a notable body of work out detailing the shortcomings of the US economy. At least in the US, it is thoroughly documented.

Maybe, because the general consensus is that the US is doing so poorly, this piece meant as a simple reminder to Americans that we are not completely doomed.

brownbat• 9 years ago

A bit of googling and it's really unsatisfying to try to get a clear answer to this question. I think you're right the US "wins," just... that may not mean anything.

One might argue the country distinction is a bit arbitrary and look for regions with the highest per capita GDP.

It looks like Washington, D.C., USA dominates that list. Then the Eastern Province in Saudi Arabia, then the Canton of Zurich.[0]

That top 20 contains 7 US regions ("political subdivisions"). Also in the top 20: Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, and France for the EU. Schengen members Norway and Switzerland would bring it up to seven. I don't know if we're comparing "Europe" or pretending that Norway and Switzerland are radically distinct from the rest of Europe by historical accident. Yet if we go that far then maybe Canada earns a point to the US.

Another odd thing, DC's incredibly high per capita GDP is odd, the area doesn't feel particularly rich. Home prices reflect it, I guess. But many places in California seem nicer. Hell, many places in Ohio seem nicer. I have a sneaking suspicion the numbers are skewed by lobbyists or businesses supporting government that don't impact the local area as directly. Or commuters who really live (and spend) in other areas. It's like saying Delaware is full of companies. Well, on paper, yeah... but it's not some bustling Trantor where corporate skyscrapers block out the sun.

Maybe we should be comparing median regions? Or judge governments by how well off their worst regions are? Would you rather visit the rural south or in the Balkans? Where would you rather live for a year or two?

I'm skeptical about comparing such sprawling areas, I'm not sure it tells us much about the world.

On the other hand I'm not going to be offended if someone refers to a region as the wealthiest in the world as a rhetorical device, they were just endorsing an economic history about the US, they're going to say it's important, which seems at the very least worth granting for the sake of argument.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_subdivisions_b...

demonshalo• 9 years ago

so you are comparing a country to a union of countries to demonstrate that one country is not equal to 28... Here is the funny thing: depending on how you look at it, the US is still bigger than all those 28 combined. So no it's not a myth, it's just you conflating two different things!

admiralpumpkin• 9 years ago

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)

adventured4• 9 years ago

Might want to include the population base for fair comparison:

China: 1.4 billion

EU: 743 million

US: 323 million

pizza11• 9 years ago

The plantation economy developed in the southern states, and the initial political dominance of Virginia (which provided four of America’s first five presidents) ensured the continued survival of slavery in the newly independent country. By 1860 auction prices suggested that the collective value of American slaves was $4bn at a time when the federal government’s annual budget was around $69m. That explains both why southern slaveowners, many of whom had borrowed against their slaves as collateral, would never give up the practice, and why a financial settlement of the issue was out of the question.

I guess this too would be an example of the 'banality of evil'.

(btw to get around the paywall just clink on 'web' to find it through google; it'll let you read it if google is the referrer)

lukas0992• 9 years ago

I agree. Although we like to think of them as psychopaths, people who do evil are mostly pretty normal people.

kolbe• 9 years ago

Just an aside, but I wonder if the north stood to profit from this dynamic. Like, if farms were held as collateral against the slave loans, did northern banks get to take that land when the owners went into default?

pizza11• 9 years ago

I know of a different way the North profited -- the opportunity cost of a firm refusing to do transactions with members from a different group (i.e. both hiring black labor or collaborating with black enterprise) is equivalent to institutionalized forfeiture of feasible income (of adding more laborers) [0]

Southern capitalism thus negated capitalism's mission: that society improves when parties can fulfill each other's desires efficiently if they each have something that the other desires. So Northern capitalism did tend towards greater capitalist prosperity, because it wasn't contradicting post-slavery capitalism like the South. That contradiction depends upon the Southerners not seeing blacks as anything but "technology", rather than economic agents.

But the result is that white refusal to cooperate with blacks hurts both blacks and whites: neither blacks improve their lot (no productivity), nor do whites improve theirs (forced to relinquish maximum efficiency and profit that would otherwise be allowed by allowing black employment) - simply because of racial stubbornness.

[0] https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/uploads/public/5...

vacri6• 9 years ago

No mention of an incredibly wealthy continent, both in mineral and agricultural terms (and a temperate climate), that was largely seized by killing the people who owned it and taking their stuff. No mention of the Louisiana Purchase. without which 'Manifest Destiny' would never have occurred, nor the Mexican-American war which added Texas and California, two of the engine-rooms of American wealth today. No mention of the point that once 'manifest destiny' was complete, the US was safe on all sides - much weaker countries to the north and south, and giant ocean-sized moats to the east and west; rather than deploy military in defense, it could be used to project power in support of the economy.

All of these things are pretty major additions to why the US is such an economic powerhouse today.

Edit: wow, I've really touched a nerve with this one. Enough to get some revenge downmodding on past comments of mine. Wow.

saryant• 9 years ago

It's a book review, not the book itself.

lukas0992• 9 years ago

I would guess and hope that the book covers those topics. Very good points.

AndrewGaspar• 9 years ago

Well, this is a one column review of a book that's 576 pages. :)

vacri6• 9 years ago

Given the significance of the items I mentioned, if the book does cover it in sufficient detail, the review should have at least hinted at it.

meri_dian3• 9 years ago

The fact that the US is separated from a huge chunk of the world by the oceans is tremendously important.

But pretty much all nations and cultures have spread by one group dominating other groups and taking their land. That's a given. What happens after the land is taken and the nation established is more important, which is what this book seems to address.

The US has huge material advantages over other nations, but it has also fostered a powerful innovative culture that is just as important to it's success.

vacri6• 9 years ago

is just as important to it's success.

Yes, but this is why I said the things I mentioned were 'pretty major additions', not 'the only reasons'. The Louisiana Purchase is routinely ignored in things like this, for example - with no Purchase, there's no Mexican-American war, no Texas or California, no Great Plains, no Mississippi trade, and France as a (friendly) neighbour.

DrScump4• 9 years ago

  No mention of an incredibly wealthy continent, both in mineral and agricultural terms

How is North America unusually "wealthy" in minerals? Per unit land area, probably only Australia is less gifted in initial (total value of deposits before human extraction) mineral wealth, even if you count commodities that are not presently allowed to be extracted. I would guess that South America or Africa is greatest.

vacri6• 9 years ago

You're hand-waving away both ease of extraction and also the minerals that were worthwhile in the industrial and pre-industrial ages. North America had plenty of iron and coal, and it was easy to get them around, and also easy to extract and use them for most of the year (the temperate climate). Minerals you can't reach or can't use are not useful - there was not a lot of call for Tantalum in the 1800s.

Compare to Brazil, which is a tropical country choked with rainforest. There's a reason why industrial powerhouses develop in temperate zones, and not in tropical ones. Or look along the Andes, where there are a lot of minerals, but there's pretty hostile geography.

Razengan• 9 years ago

Honest question: How much of it is thanks to the US being far away and largely untouched by all the wars in Europe, especially WW2, while still ostensibly profiting from them?

And then being the ones to end it with the strongest display of force?

losvedir• 9 years ago

None of it, technically. The U.S. became "the world's largest economy" before WW1.

afpx• 9 years ago

I wasn't sure, so I had to look it up. But, it seems like losvedir may be correct.

According to these numbers [1], the U.S. was the largest single country economy several years before 1914. And, if these numbers can be trusted, its growth trajectory would have sustained that position even without WWI.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of...

adventured4• 9 years ago

Not much. The US had demonstrated vast industrial capability prior to WW2 and had long since passed Britain, Germany and France as the world's largest economy and manufacturing center. It had also proven itself as one of the primary centers of invention prior to WW2 and throughout the industrial revolution. The US expansion west and the further development of cities including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle and others, is another example of how the US still had a lot of growth left just to fill into its own territory regardless of WW2.

The present alignment of global economies has seen the US return to a normalized position in terms of both GDP and manufacturing share globally. The temporary artificial expansion after WW2 lasted for roughly 40 years. During that time, the US spent vast treasure protecting other nations, rather than annexing territory or attempting to conquer other nations and plunder their resources (eg: Western Europe, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan).

reactor4• 9 years ago

A large part of it but it's ww1 that really sealed the deal: http://online.wsj.com/ww1/wall-street

jcranmer5• 9 years ago

The US became a country in 1783 (conclusion of the Treaty of Paris). In 1789, France had a revolution which kicked off the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars which lasted until 1814. The US was indirectly involved in this war because of dueling embargoes by Britain and France and counter-embargoes by the US (which eventually escalates into the War of 1812). After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, there are essentially no major European wars until 1914. The US became the largest economy somewhere around 1880-1890, and it only started industrialization around the 1830s, well behind Britain and France.

Basically, to summarize, in the time period between US independence and before the US became the dominant country in terms of economic power, there really weren't any major European wars for the US to be untouched by.

adwhit• 9 years ago

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 been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

Perhaps some kind of voluntary winding down is necessary. "It was good while it lasted. For some people."

orf2• 9 years ago

The native American life wasn't all roses, but there are things we could and should learn from them and other peoples about community and the environment.

TaylorAlexander3• 9 years ago

I write about a possible future where communities of people purchase robots that do most of the work they need for survival, and they otherwise live a simpler non-consumerist life.

I’d like to make this a reality.

http://tlalexander.com/sanctuary/

ViktorV• 9 years ago

I just wrote you a mail about that.

erikpukinskis9• 9 years ago

What's better about your future than the exact same future except humans do the work and the robots are just disembodied AIs who teach the humans how to be useful?

meri_dian3• 9 years ago

We will have transitioned to sustainable energy sources long before the Earth is inhospitable to human life.

agumonkey5• 9 years ago

Not only that but on the cultural side of things, look how quickly Trump farcical politics and neo nazi grouped resurfaced. Was the 20th century western world a bubble ?

ps: where was that Franklin quote from ?

ColanR• 9 years ago

Pretty sure that was before modern medicine. /s

bryanlarsen• 9 years ago

Humans live in Siberia and the Sahara, it'll be pretty much impossible to kill us off completely - we're definitely the hardiest large mammal.

It's a good question whether civilisation will be here in 400 years, but humanity will be.

wavefunction• 9 years ago

hardiest large mammal

Pigs.

bamboozled• 9 years ago

That's true now, but it's not going to be the same place over the next few hundred years

We might be tough, but we also will need to develop radically new survival skills in a short amount of time. Remember there will be less food, clean water ad more natural disasters to work with etc. So surviving in the "new" world will be more difficult.

gerdesj5• 9 years ago

"hardiest large mammal" - hopefully but you might want to be related to tardigrades for real hardiness.

erikpukinskis9• 9 years ago

Life will be fine. Rats, pigeons, raccoons, flies, jellyfish, quite a few plants, fungi, etc, will all be fine.

The Cretaceous was a thing. The atmosphere had about as much CO2 as it could hold. There were lots of animals. We're headed back to it.

Will there be Eastern Brown Pecker Grouse habitat? No. Will there be coral reefs? Lol no. Will most of the pages of National Geographic be unrecognizable by the naturalists of the future? Yup.

But life will continue. All we're doing is robbing future generations of the myriad beautiful and delicate old growth ecologies that we were taught about in school. We can go snorkeling in them, or hiking in them. They'll just watch 1080p videos of them on their AR glasses.

We're headed back to the Cretaceous. We're going to take the biodiversity of the planet down two orders of magnitude. Maybe four.

That's all.

If we coders get our act together we'll get a decentralized anarchist bioremediation movement going which will rehome millions of acres of biome to Cretaceous-friendly locations, we'll limit the biodiversity loss to that 100x range. 10x if I'm feeling optimistic and smoking really good weed.

I think we can do it!

freeflight5• 9 years ago

The Cretaceous was a thing. The atmosphere had about as much CO2 as it could hold. There were lots of animals. We're headed back to it.

Extinction scale events have been "a thing" in Earth's history for as long as Earth's been around [0], as you note we are very likely in the middle of another one right now [1]

The big difference this time being: Previous ones most certainly had not been man-made, this one has a very high chance of being man-made. Who's to say humanity is incapable of damaging Earths biosphere beyond a point where it can recover? If we can manage to fill the oceans with more plastic than fish by 2050, then I'm certain we can manage to do quite a bit of damage to this planet as a whole [2].

A while ago I read a paper reasoning something like that might be the explanation for the Fermi paradox; extraterrestrial civilizations getting so advanced that they destroy the biosphere of their own planet, beyond repair, but not advanced enough to escape said destroyed planet. Sadly I can't find it anymore.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#List_of_extin...

[1] http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/degradation_and_destr...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/2...

interfixus• 9 years ago

the likelihood is that the planet will be unable to sustain human life within a few hundred years

Clearly, I haven't been paying the amount of attention I ought. Is this the present level of orthodoxy I need to subscribe to, in order not to be deemed a climate denier? (Or is it "sceptic" these days?).

oh_sigh4• 9 years ago

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?

spodek• 9 years ago

The review implies the people and culture caused economic growth. I'd say they resulted from it, which resulted from two oceans and friendly neighbors that make the country difficult to invade, fertile soil, lots of natural resources.

dasil003• 9 years ago

Your conditions are necessary but not sufficient, I would say, considering the history of Brazil.

zizek23• 9 years ago

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 in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

aaron-lebo6• 9 years ago

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?

tmax6• 9 years ago

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

walterstucco5• 9 years ago

Find a society without historical sin

The Minoans

erikpukinskis9• 9 years ago

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.

seanmcdirmid5• 9 years ago

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

megous• 9 years ago

Sure, but it's not a reason to ignore it or brush it over.

pizza11• 9 years ago

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.

agumonkey5• 9 years ago

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.

kryptiskt• 9 years ago

So why didn't it happen in South America?

agumonkey5• 9 years ago

Climate is different for once. I'm curious about the parallel history lines though.

michalskop• 9 years ago

One possible explanation is in the popular book Las Venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America) by Eduardo Galeano.

pizza11• 9 years ago

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 like the USA did, which might have presented an obstacle.

I think I once heard a statistic like at the height of slavery 50% of the USA's exports were cotton. The industrial revolution was a great driver of the demand for America's cotton.

"The American South is known for its long, hot summers, and rich soils in river valleys making it an ideal location for growing cotton. By 1860, Southern plantations supplied 75% of the world's cotton, with shipments from Houston, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Savannah, and a few other ports.

The insatiable European demand for cotton was a result of the Industrial Revolution which created the machinery and factories to process raw cotton into clothing that was better and cheaper than hand-made product." [0]

It might be the case that this prosperity didn't happen in South America because they were not strategically fulfilling cotton demand of the industrial revolution. The reason that the conquistadors had started slaving was to fulfill a "gold revolution"; and they did at least gain prosperity in doing so. But the demand of the "gold revolution" for their monarchies was much smaller than the demand of the industrial revolution.

However, Egypt and India also had significant exports of cotton. The effect that did happen is that the Civil War led to great increases of prosperity due to cotton exports for those countries [0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-american-civil-war...

dboreham• 9 years ago

Catholicism

notfromhere4• 9 years ago

Niall Ferguson had an interesting thesis on property rights and the style of colonial gov't is what made all the difference.

Argentina had a good run, but internal politics have shit the bed in that country for a good century

thesmallestcat2• 9 years ago

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 research and invention between the Old and New World. Much perceived "theft" was fueled by reactionary governments making the US a more appealing locale for the learned.

gilleain• 9 years ago

Not to disagree with you, but I found this timeline of abolition very interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...

It took a long time, and a lot of treaties and individual countries to act to abolish slavery.

pizza11• 9 years ago

Retroactively arbiting "crimes against modernity" - if computed with modern measurement devices/standards - can be hypocritical. That's because calling the villain evil might ignore the fact that their behavior, being relitigated as evil in the present, did in a fundamental way depend upon their belief that they were doing something ethical in the first place. It is not sadism but sadomasochism; they are especially pained at their awareness of the pain they cause, but they see it as their duty - and the symbols of the time is what mediates their gap between their imagined duty and the reality they operate in.

(Referring to parent of this comment chain.) Something Zizek himself says is evil is not what makes bad people do bad things, but instead what makes good people do bad things. People doing something 'evil' will typically be distressed about it personally. But they would always see it like "I must be fully willing to destroy my own humanity so that I can protect the humanity of my people". They preserve their efficiency and ruthlessness in spite of the further fragmentation of their psyche and conscience.

Brutality relies upon limiting the aesthetic dissonance between the aesthetics of the greater good and the ugliness of violence.

"In early 20th-century France, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland declared [Beethoven's Ode To Joy] to be the great humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people, and it came to be called “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1938, it was performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In China during the Cultural Revolution, in an atmosphere of total rejection of European classics, it was redeemed by some as a piece of progressive class struggle.
In the 1950s and ’60s, when the West German and East German Olympic squads were forced to compete as a single team, gold medals were handed out to the strains of the “Ode to Joy” in lieu of a national anthem. It served as the anthem, too, for the Rhodesian white supremacist regime of Ian Smith. One can imagine a fictional performance at which all sworn enemies — Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush — for a moment forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic musical brotherhood." [0]

But what is there even to conclude from this?

Suppose we are 100% aware that we actively cause harm to people but our moral calculus says we must do it because it is for "the greater good". The more we are uncertain about the uncertainty of net social gain, the more we have reason to avoid doing it.

But this is the opposite of the commonly held belief. People say "we can't judge the people in the past, it's too easy to be certain an idea that was defeated was evil when looking from the future. Before it was defeated they could not have known that the pain they (knew they) were causing for the sake of helping out their own people, wouldn't have triumphed and raised real total benefit instead -- so that it hypothetically was moral".

Here I disagree vehemently. We must, in the strongest terms, condemn any rationalization of the actions of a gambler who bets he'll reach the greater good if he puts his children up for collateral.

edit: forgot link

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html?mcubz...

freeflight5• 9 years ago

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 for decades after WWII.

One could easily fathom an alternate reality where the Third Reich didn't happen/didn't turn out as extreme and as a result, racial segregation and bigotry would still be a "global standard" because humanity didn't see the worst and most extreme outcomes of it.

Who knows, a couple of decades from now the US might serve as yet another negative example for one of humanities many follies.

x0054• 9 years ago

Let me guess, you didn't actually bother to read the book. It's kind of sad that this comment is the top comment.

gerdesj5• 9 years ago

(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?

alex_anglin• 9 years ago

Killing the natives?

ratacat• 9 years ago

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.

newsmania• 9 years ago

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 cleared out more of them making a vast underpopulation. It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first. Also I would guess you are a liberal from your comments, and therefore likely support legalizing undocumented immigrants. According to your logic, undocumented immigrants are “usurping” America, which is quite unpopular among liberals today.

America committed plenty of evils, but that’s not what made America great. In addition to many bad things, the USA did a lot of things right. I believe the USA had a lot of benefits from geography, but the real thing that made the country great was recognizing the rights of the individual. It has been demonstrated over and over again that egalitarianism yields big dividends in groups. Because the USA had such an emphasis on equality (declaration of independence), innovation occurred on an incredible level. It took a long time for that equality to spread to blacks, but the very idea of even equality of whites was unheard of at the time of the USA founding.

Combine that with the fact that Europe was devastated by two world wars, it was inevitable that the USA should pull ahead.

phugoid• 9 years ago

It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first.

By that argument, it's just not right to say that multi-millionaires should control so much wealth just because they were born into privileged conditions. Wouldn't fairness require a forced redistribution of those resources?

Mithaldu4• 9 years ago

According to your logic, undocumented immigrants are “usurping” America

According to your logic integrating successfully into a different society and culture, is the same as arriving with superior weaponry and slaughtering the natives over 149 years. (1775-1924)

Your attempt at comparison and equivalence is pitiful and cruel.

pizza11• 9 years ago

I'm skeptical of the idea that the tragedy of the unintended epidemic resulted, fairly, in property rights for the invaders. It means that either:

- "collective pre-existing rights became held in abeyance because so many rightsholders died" -- This assumes the living natives were not the owners of what was still there, either because they were propertyless, or the dead rightsholders didn't have a way to transfer property rights - which they would necessarily, historically have had for rights to have been a pre-existing Native American cultural notion - at the very instant they met the explorers.

- "the natives didn't have a notion of property rights, but the explorers did. the explorers were able to respect property rights, so it was best and fair that they acquired as much as they could" -- If anything this suggests that the explorers had great disrespect or didn't even understand property themselves. It was peak hypocrisy to violate the Native American population's property rights -- that were still their rights even if they were unaware of them. You cannot steal something from someone else if you think they don't know it is theirs. I have a suspicion that this idea I keep hearing "natives didn't have the concept of property" is really just false and veiled racism.

- "even if natives did have property rights nevertheless the invading explorers had a different concept of property rights" -- yes, the explorers had the same idea of fair property rights as someone going into a convenience store and shouting "nobody move, this is a stickup!"

greedy_buffer• 9 years ago

Your second paragraph makes it seem like those weren't really humans - "cleared out", really? And having been decimated by plague diseases makes shooting the survivors equivalent to crossing a border illegally so you can work a better job? Maybe my knowledge of American history and politics is poor but those do not seem like the same thing at all.

kamaal5• 9 years ago

>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 are some superior people who have rights to exterminate existing people, and those existing people are evil for even resisting.

>Combine that with the fact that Europe was devastated by two world wars, it was inevitable that the USA should pull ahead.

The USA is the most successful imperialistic project executed by the western civilization ever. To separate the US from Europe is simply splitting hairs.

The same could have happened to the Indian subcontinent. But there were too many people to kill and the British got caught up in a few wars. Else Mr Churchill had pretty great genocidal plans. He even got along and executed a small project where he killed a few million people(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943).

WalterBright• 9 years ago

You're correct that slavery held the country back. The Confederacy could not even produce shoes for their soldiers. The reason Lee was in Gettysburg was he was after the shoe factory in nearby Harrisburg.

The Civil War economically devastated and flattened the southern states. It's hard to see how the later wealth of the US economy was based on that.

taway_1212• 9 years ago

It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first.

That logic could still be applied today. Asia and Arica combined are over 5.5 billion people. I bet a lot of those people would be more than happy to emigrate to the US. Why should so few (merely 300-400 million Americans and Canadians) control entire continent just because they got there earlier?

cryptonector6• 9 years ago

Other resource-rich countries haven't fared as well. Indeed, it is a truism that the more natural resources, the worse a country performs economically. Some of the wealthiest countries are deprived of natural resources (Israel, Singapore, Monaco, and others) while a bunch of resource-rich countries have done poorly or terribly (Brazil, Argentina, all of Africa, India, Russia, and others).

It's what you do with the stuff that matters.

If what was done in the U.S. is plunder, then what is it that you say is happening in "the Middle East, Latin America and Africa"? Be consistent.

jalayir• 9 years ago

India is hardly resource rich. Especially not per-capita.

HumbleGamer• 9 years ago

Well, should we consider some of the underlying factors for why African nations in particular are doing terribly? Seems the 1885 Berlin treaty set that continent back for at least a few centuries, the effects of which are still causing havok to this day.

boomboomsubban2• 9 years ago

Some of the wealthiest countries are deprived of natural resources (Israel, Singapore, Monaco, and others)

Not exactly great examples. All three contain excellent natural resources, ports on major trading routes, that drive or drove their economy.

thedevil• 9 years ago

Slavery hasn't been a factor for a century and a half. Natural resources play a meaningful role, but there's plenty of poor countries with resources. And the indigenous people before didn't have a juggernaut economy from those resources.

Slavery and a stolen continent are horrible, but they don't explain what happened economically.

pizza11• 9 years ago

In a goldrush, sell the pickaxes. Black men and women picked the cotton for free in captivitiy. Cotton fueled the textile industry. The textile industry blew up because of the industrial revolution. It's just rent-seeking by threat of murder. No, it doesn't explain who had what before this happened, but this is the clearest 'difference that made a difference' to me w.r.t. why America became rich in a very noticeable way while this was occurring.

The slaveowners made profits for nearly no work, and the banks made plenty of profit by giving out loans to the slaveowners to buy more slaves, too. It's hard to look for causality, but this seems like an obvious source of far-removed consolidation of capital that would last over time.

ransom15382• 9 years ago

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 were powered/quick enough to transfer men in mass it was too late -- the repeating rifle had been invented.

jackbravo• 9 years ago

stone age people to the south? Didn't Spaniards and Englishmen had the same technology?

maxerickson2• 9 years ago

The British stole the president's dinner and burned the White House during the war of 1812:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington#White_Ho...

A storm intervened on behalf of USA.

jcranmer5• 9 years ago

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.

plandis• 9 years ago

I'd love to hear your take on how Bill Gates owes his success solely to slavery?

Mithaldu4• 9 years ago

The modern form of it, which is having businesses with practically no worker protections (right-to-work, the health care situation) compared to other european countries.

mynameishere• 9 years ago

The entire planet was usurped. Over and over and over again.

oh_sigh4• 9 years ago

If the US was stolen, then the Native American tribes were also stealing it from previous occupants. Heck, there are tribes in the southwest which only got to the southwest by conquering other Native American tribes after Europeans were already roaming around here.

So, it's hard to really feel sorry for them, especially because Europeans put the land to much more productive use per acre than Native Americans did.

ionised3• 9 years ago

So genocide is excusable provided the excuse is productivity?

irrational• 9 years ago

But didn't the European countries usurp the entire continent of Africa, a giant fertile landmass rich in resources that was stolen along with unlimited slave labour? The land the USA encompasses is tiny compared to Africa (http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/18/true-size-of-africa/). Europe African colonialism was horrifying, but it should have resulted in a economy much larger the that of the USA. Someone screwed the pooch.

nikdaheratik• 9 years ago

So you want to argue that America shouldn't exist in a just world, but what exactly would be in its place?

I don't think we'd likely have a single continent spanning country ran by the many different nations that were there before. It'd be much more likely that colonialism that divided Africa and South America would be passed around North America, and there wouldn't have been any country to balance the European powers that continually fought each other in the 20th century or for Russia, Japan and China in the second half of that century.

You can acknowledge the wrongs that America took, but you also have to accept that it's mostly been a force for good, even today.

627467• 9 years ago

"Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen" for a moment I though you were talking about this event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas

maxxxxx2• 9 years ago

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 was about distributing the pie.

adventured4• 9 years ago

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.

maxxxxx2• 9 years ago

It seems the US is doing a lot of things right. But I still believe that its main advantage over the last few hundred years was the ability to grow into "empty" land and also the fact that it's protected by oceans.

Edit: Based on this the US is not really outperforming: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-europe-outperf...

walterstucco5• 9 years ago

You're right

Spying on citizen and companies of competing countries, including allied countries and their leaders, is highly profitable

I'm sure mob profits all over the world sky rocketed during the crisis, should we ask them for advices?

chrisweekly• 9 years ago

Wage growth for who? Citation please.

erikpukinskis9• 9 years ago

Detroit is, for most intents and purposes, "not owned".

We're in a brief moment where the internet exists, but has not yet disintermediated population centers.

Within 10 years there will be a new city born every week in the US with great jobs, great coffee, and "market housing" i.e. construction cost plus 50%. The property markets will collapse.

Along with this there will be a massive readjustment of wages in favor of workers. The average number of full time employees per corporation will go from 16 to 0.16. The Dow companies will lose 50% (only) of their market share over the subsequent 10 years to federated sole proprietorships and small partnerships, but the middle class will double in size, and population is still headed towards 10 billion, so big companies will grow in net revenue anyway.

From there you can start to see how we get to "everything owned"... 10 billion people and every one of them is extracting maximum utility from a couple acres (about the max area a single human can maximize utility of)... That's 20 billion acres of really "owned" property... Property you couldn't make an offer on without losing money.

We will get to "everything owned" in the U.S. but we're not close. It only looks like that from porches in boom cities.

oh_sigh4• 9 years ago

there will be a new city born every week in the US with great jobs

Okay but who is going to pave it? Are self driving asphalt machines a thing yet?

alistproducer2• 9 years ago

Why is this article on the front page? This is just troll bait.

gnasr• 9 years ago

Stop calling it america, it's north america..

JBReefer• 9 years ago

Hey can someone explain this position? You see it a lot on the internet - we all know it's just short for the mouthful of "The United States of America", right?

Is it just garden variety anti-Americanism, or is it based on something else? You also see the form "American means anyone from both continents," which is off in exactly the same way.

adventured4• 9 years ago

In the case of that topic, the answer to your question is always located in the tone of the person you're replying to.

myrandomcomment• 9 years ago

No one from Canada or Mexico would say “I am an American”. You only here that from someone from the USA. So whatever the official title is the popular usage is that is some says they are “American” it means they are a citizen of the United States Of America.

sremani2• 9 years ago

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.

tmnvix• 9 years ago

Defaulting on debt helps: https://mises.org/library/short-history-us-credit-defaults

cerealbad• 9 years ago

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...

eighthnate3• 9 years ago

The US became the world's biggest economy in the late 1890s. So how did we become the largest economy? Stealing a large landmass blessed with abundant resources and fertile arable land. Growing the population immensely via high birth rates and immigration. Industrious population and business friendly laws helped. But it was mostly OIL. The US was the saudi arabia of oil for nearly 100 years from mid 1800s to ww2. Standard Oil became the largest company in the world for a reason. We had a ridiculous amount of oil and we exploited it. Oil was discovered in the 1850s and it helped the american economy become the largest in the world.

churchill19442• 9 years ago

Oil was but one strong American industry. And oil itself didn't turn out to be in such high demand until the mass production of the automobile, which was another American thing.

ionised3• 9 years ago

Imagine playing a game of Civilization, but you start at 1700-AD-level technology, with only tribal natives as a threat, on a massive landmass with oceans on two sides rich in natural resources and you have no immediately threatening enemies.

That's the US. A game of Civ on easy mode.

googletazer• 9 years ago

America became the biggest economy because of brains and innovation driving it, its as true a hundred years ago as it is today. The opportunity to make money for yourself - thats what drove the American economy and still drives it today. A lot of people are commenting that American wealth came from slavery, but that is simply not so - nearly every country on Earth had some degrees of slavery, but how many had succeeded? Slaves didn't smelt steel, nor designed and built battleships to be sold to the Russian Empire in 1900s.

Today though, you can see countries like Germany take the lead with their better protections for inventors and better incentives and protections for the employees.

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

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