Americans typically don’t realize how lucky they were that World War II caused so much chaos in Europe and many of the best minds flooded to the US to kickstart the technology revolution and seed the economic powerhouse that it is today.
And, with all due respect, many people outside the US don't realise how lucky the best minds were that there was a stable, prosperous, (actively) welcoming society to bring these best minds out of the self-inflicted chaos of Europe.
It's ALL self-inflicted. But there was no sense of self at the time, what's new today is that Europe is starting, slowly and shakily, to see itself as a whole. At least I cannot imagine today ever wanting to murder a German more than a French. Ever.
We appreciate the sweet deal on the Louisiana Purchase, but "cause of the US" is a bit much, don't you think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
(look at the combattants section)
But ofc at the time it was very different, Europeans didn't exist per se, each country saw itself as completely different from the others.
What I meant is accusing the US to cause a problem in Europe is a tautology: we made the US in a way, so if the US come back to cause issues, well, it's ALSO our own fault. Every problem in Europe is "self" (that "self" changed with time) inflicted, it's not the Asians or the Africans causing conflicts, there is no external factor to blame, we MUST fix them our"selves".
Ironically, lots of problems in Africa or Asia were also inflicted by Europeans, they can claim an external factor, them. We really messed up a lot of the world, for reasons that are now beyond comprehension since we're raised by the people who stopped it, and it's a sin I have trouble to carry sometimes. Gladly, most alive today seem to have forgotten, forgiven or benefitted from it, doesn't make me forget those not alive today :(
Woodrow Wilson's proposed peace deal didn't involve imposing harsh reparations on Germany. That was the doing of Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France, who was under pressure to make Germany's reparations bill as large as possible as retribution for the war.
In any case, some sort of Intermarium probably was the only thing that could have prevented WWII in one shape or another.
In such a situation, the reparations are the straw that broke the camel's back, and lead to an economic catastrophe.
In WW2, consider the names of the top US general in Europe and the top admiral in the Pacific.
Edit:
Found it in seconds, second para in your link.
The Nimitz family stems from Bremen, and quite deeply so (13th century), which would fit, because Bremen/Lueneburger Heide is not that far from territories settled by Polabian Slavs.
In Europe you have the Enlightenment with all that entails.
Then in America you have Ben Franklin and then the revolution. Later Charles E Elliot gets frustrated and tours the great schools in Europe only to come back to boston and reform Harvard. Which leads to it being emulated at Stanford.
Later on the US military decides on Stanford to focus on its microwave research for radar setting the groundwork for what becomes Silicon Valley.
This is probably due a more indepth essay.
But to limit ourselves to the outcome of WWII, there isn't much more to say. The US actively sought these brilliant refugees. The latter were glad to escape to a country that wasn't a murderous dictatorship.
Franklin is a celebrity in his day, and is such a party animal and keen wit he wins over the french aristocracy. Leading to said fleet, which is undoubtedly the key factor in deciding the outcome of the revolutionary with their presence at the battle of Yorktown. But before all that he is going up down the colonies organizing philosophical groups, his Juntas, meeting and connecting the thinkers and subsequent founding fathers. While in addition running a printing press sowing popular dissent and none more influential than publishing Thomas Paine’s pamphlets. The dude was the original punk!
That was probably also because he was a good diplomat. I have read his autobiography, which is very interesting, and shows how versatile he was.
Also, I think the US will have something similar in reverse: Some of the brightest people educated in the US are going back to their home countries because they have visa troubles, social problems or simply better opportunities due to simple things like housing or structural things like the industry moved there.
Also, judging by the enormous hate stream on the social media, many can be nudged to move out of the US to have some piece of mind. After Brexit, many EU citizens choose not to stay in UK even if they had that option because they have become a political subject and since they are not desperate why stay and risk it?
China appear to be the next frontrunner in this. Many times, if you venture outside of the angloshpere you find out that somewhere(often in China) somebody is already doing it at the same level or better.
There probably is going to be a correction at valuations. Cool stuff is happening in China and elsewhere and the USA is in a disarray with idelogies so extreme that are not too far of from the stuff that ruined Europe in the first half of the 1900s. Coup attempts, assassination attempts, election denial, mainstream targeting of group of people, rich looking into capitalising on all that when social disparity is so large that some live like kings others teetering - this is not a healthy society.
The language barrier alone will stop Chinese cultural hegemony.
Anyway, with the banning of TikTok it's pretty clear to me: No more global companies without hard tech. The US used to be the bastion of free global trade but they resigned. Anything that relies on things like network effect or branding will become local because countries can enforce it. If some country has the engineering capacity to build a website where people post texts and media and others like and share that media then the American version wouldn't be allowed.
Therefore, the US economy will become as powerful as having about 300M citizens, not as global power. China has huge number of citizens, they win by default as long as they can do the hard tech good enough and they apparently can do that.
US embargoes only pushed them to make their local alternatives and they made them pretty good, whatever they make they make it for over a billion people.
EU has a version of this problem, that is they don't have one large chunk of people who speak the same language and trade on the same rules. The trading on the same rules is something that EU fixed a lot but the EU is still fragmented and this makes EU companies anaemic because they can't get huge without going global. When the global trade is gone, the US will have the same issue(probably still better situation than EU but much worse than China).
There are very few technologies where the US or EU has an edge over China. Embargoes helped a lot with that.
In fact it becomes absurd, for example the EU/US/UK wants to make the world a better place by replacing ICE cars with electric ones. China builds great cars for cheap in huge amounts and the EU/US/UK act like Gavin Belson saying "I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do". There you lose the environment claims, even if EU/US/UK have a point.
The west lost the technological edge, the Americans like to claim that EU regulated too much but in the American case it appears that not regulated billionaires didn't invest in tech but resorted into rent seeking and now they expect the politicians to protect them from the Chinese companies who allegedly received unfair support from their governments but nonetheless they made better products.
I don't know I'm not a clairvoyant or expert analyst in this stuff, I'm just pessimistic on the near future of humanity and the west will be the bigger losers because they lost the plot.
I'm not a China fan at all, in fact I'm very concerned that the west will imitate China and in fact banning TikTok was a sign of it. Banning is the Chinese way.
Remember when the US was pro-free speech and criticised dictatorships for blocking social media? Kiss good bye to that, now it's US that blocks it. Chinese citizen experience, imported into the west.
If Trump wins, there's Project 2025 where they plan to replace every government position with party loyalists - Just like China.
Outside congresspeople pushing for re-election I feel like I haven't heard this at all. Not since the Snowden leaks has the US been so happy-go-lucky with their denouncement of surveillance.
You have to think about this like a country that has the ability to globally project power or take part in regional war.
The US (and Europe) doesn’t want to lose its domestic auto manufacturing industry because it can be easily retooled to pump out war machines when required. [0]
You don’t let a foreign nation (especially an adversarial nation like China) destroy an industry that is critical during total war if you’re the global hegemon, or more realistically, a country that may go to war in the future (see Volvo in Sweden, Renault in France, etc)
Here’s GM Defense, Ford and Chrysler have similar histories during the World Wars, as do auto manufacturers in various European countries.
> World War 1: Over 90 percent of GM’s truck production was redirected to war manufacturing during the First World War.
> World War 2: GM began delivering war materiel as early as 1940 with all U.S. manufacturing plants – over 100 in total – eventually being converted to produce defense goods. Between February 10, 1942 and September 9, 1945, not a single passenger car for civilian use left the assembly line at any GM plant.
[0] https://www.gmdefensellc.com/site/us/en/gm-defense/home/abou...
Also, Chinese don't operate on western principles therefore you can't expect same outcomes. Aging population issues are much different when you have enough production base that can sustain old people with small number of young people(they no longer rely on manual labour as much as they used to). In the west aging population means reduction in consumption(therefore reduced investments, economy slowdown etc.), but in countries like China that doesn't have to be a problem, they can simply keep producing as needed. When the west was preoccupied with investing all the money into optimising advertisement, they invested in wast infrastructure.
I'm personally more concerned about the west than China. Well, of course I would be since I'm part of the west but yeah I think you get the point.
Not just cool stuff... I just finished listening to several podcasts with a Czech journalist who covered China for decades.
He said that under Xi, the country has become superparanoid. Before Xi's term, people would talk to journalists mostly freely, and even foreign journalists would get a pass in their daily activities unless they touched something really sensitive (Falun Gong, Tibet, Uyghur unrest).
After Xi came to power, the situation started to worsen, police started to follow journalists around and harass them for banal reasons, regular Chinese started being afraid of talking even about trivial topics. The former Overton window narrowed to a "compulsory vs. banned" dichotomy. One of his last experiences was that he went to a tomato processing factory to report on tomato harvest and was immediately arrested by the police because how dare you record something about a tomato factory.
I don't think this environment is going to be particularly conductive to economic growth, and the latest trends seem to concur. China is strangling its future growth in the name of National Security.
The American colonies led Great Britain in purchasing power per capita from 1700, and possibly from 1650, until 1774, even counting slaves in the population
The common view that American per capita income did not overtake that of Britain until the start of the 20th century appears to be off the mark by two centuries or longer.
This remark should leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. Obviously being immoral and exploiting human beings is an economic advantage. And excluding them in the census but benefitting from their work would be dehumanizing them even more.
James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Nina Simone. Others who didn't necessarily emigrate to Europe did spend much time there: Paul Robeson, John Coltrane, Lillian Smith, Alain Locke, and Ethel Waters amongst them.
You can also see patterns in movement of creative and technical talent within the US. There is of course the Great Migration from the South to northern, mostly industrial cities. California collected creative and technical talent from across the country, to a much greater extent than already established and notable Eastern states with large cities (New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, ...). In some specific cases (the establishment of Hollywood), we know that lax patent enforcement and ready escape to Mexico was a strong draw for the early film industry against Edison's lawyers. I suspect that in addition to the much-ballyhooed physical climate, reduced social strictures, ease of land development, and rapidly-growing metro regions particularly near Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, contributed. There's also of course the WWII and post-war / Cold War military economy which played a tremendous role.
You also saw organisations such as RAND moving wholesale to the West in the 1950s, for a combination of factors: more space, closer to major aerospace operations. Entire families were shipped west by railroad.
My hypothesis is that intellectual and creative talent seek freedom, in both positive (opportunity) and avoidance of negative (oppression, suppression, abuse) senses. As much as we talk of capital being more mobile than labour, creative labour being concentrated in a few individuals is especially mobile, and quite sensitive to conditions of oppression. One obvious risk shares some parallels with a paradox of transportation infrastructure: as transportation improves, formerly greenfield / undeveloped regions become developed and land values explode such that further improvements in transportation become exceedingly expensive, both financially and politically. In the intellectual and creative realms, moats and ramparts, institutional rigidities, commercial and political allegiances, etc., emerge, which actively retard further progress.
The challenge is in identifying where new regions (in the physical and geographic sense) of opportunity might be emerging.
They go the other way.
The US surpassed the UK in per capita income in the 1880s. However, American yeomen farmers, factory workers etc. were far better off than (non-UK) Europeans even in 1800, hence millions of Europeans immigrating. By 1913, the American was still earning almost twice as much as the German or French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...
But we are talking about US getting brains from all over Europe. The combined GDP of the top 3 European countries (Germany, UK, France) pre WW1/2 is larger than the US, just as the GDP per capita of any individual European country pre WW1/2 is higher as well.
Is that true? https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
Once the war started, the borders were closed.
It's easy to "innovate" when you're starting from a "clean slate".
We didn't trump up anything about American individualism, ingenuity and innovation. Rather, a visiting European, de Toqueville, wrote about it extensively as early as 1835.
De la démocratie en Amérique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America
He also said
"...I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, ... to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply,—to the superiority of their women."
"Tocqueville noted that religion played a leading role in American life in the 1830s, due to its being constitutionally separated from government. Far from objecting to this situation, he observed that Americans found this disestablishment quite satisfactory, in contrast to France, with its outright antagonism between avowedly religious people and supporters of democracy."
Happy to have my privacy, no company snooping on me
's all good, man :)
This is an interesting remark. It seems that countries like Estonia or Poland, which significantly overhauled their systems in the 1990s, are more innovative than Italy, Germany or France, whose systems are much older and somewhat ossified / clogged with bureaucracy.
But the US system is even older, and it still produces good results. Heck, the UK system is ancient, and the UK has a lot of innovation going on, both in tech and biotech.
The US started from 100m ahead - the level Europe was at the time - so they already had a foundation - and (imo) made it easier to look ahead from atop a (100m) mound.
An advantage that hasn't been put ti much use because once could make a strong point that things have been stagnant for 60 years.