Also, navigable waterways. Transporting goods by water costs 1/100th what it costs to transport over land. After the US established a corp of engineers to dredge our waterways to make them passable, the ability to transport goods increased substantially, making internal trade extremely cheap.
This is not the reason. Post WW II Europe was able to rebuild and for a long time they had some of the biggest companies and for a long time EU as a whole was a bigger economy than the US. It's only in the last 2 decades where the US is significantly outpacing the EU. And there are no signs of slow down.
WW II can not be the reason EU has few big tech companies. (relatively compared to the US, few exceptions always exist)
But the innovation has been around a singular avenue of software. It is a mistake to think that software is the most important driver of economic growth.
Interesting. I couldn't find a good graph showing this. Do you by any chance have a graph or a source?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-domestic-product?ta...
Starting in the 1980s US GDP inflected and EU did not. The gap appeared then and has got wider ever since. What happened in the 80s? Probably tech?
The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. It was enacted in 1948 and provided more than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent.
That’s about $187B in 2022 dollars. In addition to technology and trade.
… followed shortly after Breton Woods, which secured trade for the rest of the world in exchange for not joining up with the Soviets.
Not for much longer. But, hey, we created a lot of shareholder value along the way, right?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/bodies-water-north-america-drying-...