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Comment by returningfory2 | Hacker News Reader

Given the US is one of the most (the most?) successful countries in recent human history, shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the 95% be looking at the US and seeing what to copy?

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To be fair a lot of it had also to do with the sheer immense amount of vast, mostly unused ,fertile land available in north America. I sincerely doubt the American experiment would have worked this well if they had rowdy neighbours and infighting due to resource constraints. For almost 200 years the solution to most things in the USA was to get a chunk of either their people or immigrant to move to the neck of the woods to find fortune

Not getting wrecked in major land wars during the 1800s and 1900s also helped

We got wrecked in a major land war in the 1800s, just to be pedantic.

But the success hasn't ended since the unused land became taken; in fact, the US became a superpower after the westward expansion era. My point is that looking at conditions today, the US still continues to succeed (by some definition of success) and other countries should try to emulate the aspects of the country that leads to that success. IMO one of the big factors is how well immigrants assimilate in the country, and birthright citizenship is a part of that.

I do agree with you that US success in the 19th century was due to many factors that are not relevant today.

> sheer immense amount of vast, mostly unused ,fertile land available in north America

it was not "available", it only became "available" after we killed off nearly all the inhabitants and stole their land

This exaggerated lie always gets posted, but it's entirely inaccurate.

The Indians were nomadic hunter-gatherers who were sparsely distributed around the US and moved seasonally. Diseases killed the majority. Inter-tribal warfare was the second leading cause of death (tribes that had been fighting for generations with rocks and sticks got access to horses, steel blades and guns and became much more lethal) and deaths attributable to European settlers were negligible compared to the first two causes.

stop whitewashing it

yes, diseases killed the majority, but the diseases didn't come out of nowhere, they came from the European occupiers. and inter-tribal warfare killed plenty. but we're talking about theft of "available" land: the Europeans took the land from the remaining inhabitants, killing those who resisted, and deceiving those who submitted through treaties which they repeatedly broke, leaving the natives, by design, with the worst, most infertile land in the country

don't try to gloss it over and hand-wave it away -- yes, the natives were greatly diminished through the causes you mentioned, I never said the European occupiers killed them all, but it was genocide to finish them off and take all the land from anyone who resisted, effectively destroying their civilization

and stop calling them "settlers", they did not "settle" the land, they took it by force and deception

Define successful?

(You'll probably want to avoid metrics like happiness indices and life expectancy though)

At a minimum, it's been a place that people wanted to come to, more than they wanted to come to anywhere else in the world. That's successful as measured by people.

(Or at least, people wanted to come until the last couple of years...)

I'm not sure it's true, that seems to be mostly for economic reasons (which might define success, arguably), but I bet a lot more people would dream about living let say in Thailand than in the US, they just can't because they don't have the means.

Fair point. Mainly I agree with the sibling comment: the revealed preference of many people around the world, including many people from the richest countries in Europe, is to move the United States and then settle permanently. I think that means a lot.

Obviously you can also say that the US is geopolitically successful because of its global military and diplomatic dominance, but I account zero value to this.

Nobel prizes? Manned moon landings? Reserve currencies? AC units per capita?

Are any of these stipulated as criteria anywhere?

There's also proportion of adult in prisons, people who believe in angels, and the mass-shooting high score

> AC units per capita

This gave me a laugh

Despite all of those things people still travel across the world to give birth in US just so their posterity can become a part of our country. What other metric do you need?

Not everybody across the world is doing that in equal measure (I've not heard of a concerted effort by Europeans travelling to the US to give birth in contemporary times).

People migrate for economic opportunity. South Africa is not a rich country, but sees millions come in from the SADC for this reason, despite some pretty big social problems.

The US is nothing special, it's just a particularly large market of economic opportunity with a history of allowing in migrants. If China was significantly more migrant friendly, we'd see the same happen there. None of this specifies that the US has some secret recipe for success that papers over some of its obvious and glaring deficits.

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