Modern economies, unfortunately, don't have that. The capital markets are already mature. What ventures left are uncertain. When governments pick winners there, the pie really doesn't grow.
Well regulated fair markets remain the best system in history to find a way forward to grow the pie.
Unfortunately, regulators have a habit of becoming captured by winners. The markets become no longer fair. Then real growth stagnates.
Nothing works forever.
America's remaining industries are subsidized or protected with significant non trade barriers- medicine, rockets, agriculture, light truck manufacturering, financial services.
Software services are the one industry that mostly seems to stand on its own two feet, but there was a ton of nurturing of that in the past, as well as onerous export controls on cryptography.
Hong Kong didn’t. Counter example disproves rule.
It’s really not surprising that people followed a successful model, given that people are fashion followers. See how there was so little variation in COVID response across countries.
Now, we're in a new era where national industrial capacity will at times take precedence over quality of life, and we have to make tradeoffs. But frankly it wasn't obvious that would happen again — China's policies over the past decade made it a reality.
The usual schtick conveniently ignoring the absolute marauding of resources from non-western countries and the effective slave labor extracted from Asia.
The social safety net and access to basic resources like housing and education in Asian democracies, makes the average citizen there much, much, better well off than the average citizen in the geographical “West”.
PS: China is completely different - makes no sense throwing it in the comparison.