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Comment by well_ackshually | Hacker News Reader

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We’re not the only ones with a wealth of natural resources. Canada, Russia, Argentina, Australia, Brazil all have per capita even more natural resources at their disposal.

With shitty climates. The surface area of optimal climate in the US is likely larger than that of all the countries you've named combined. What's optimal? For example in Canada most farmed areas yield only one harvest per year. And most of the land is barren wasteland. You have some of it as well, but it's not the majority of the territory.

Brazil is pretty damn fertile, and nearly as large as the US though... If we're just talking about farmable land area, I'd be surprised if the US is larger than Brazil. Farmed land area is a different thing though. Not sure how what compares.

Argentina seems like a counterexample here: the Pampas are one of the world's major temperate agricultural regions.

Argentina's arable land is just 27% of what the USA has. Fact-checking myself... the USA has more arable land than Canada, Australia and Argentina combined. Russia has a lot, but the USA has the most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_arable_la...

Not sure where to find an aggregate growing days figure, but there's clearly less of them per arable surface area in Canada compared to the USA.

The thread was about climate. US is 3.5x greater than Argentina.

Not strictly about climate, also about surface area in optimal climate.

Not per capita. Look, Japan (and S Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, etc) have shit for natural resources yet they are not technologically retarded. They have a highly advanced economies and societies.

This is drifting from the point. The thread was about the share of territory with optimal farming climate, not per-capita anything, and not whether resource-poor countries can be advanced.

Honestly if other countries did the same stuff as Argentina they'd probably be way worse off than Argentina as the country is still relatively wealthy. They were arguably too rich (and not populated enough with 4 million people in 1900) for a while making industry, especially export oriented industry, less viable sort of like dutch disease.

Geographic determinism is one of those theories that explains everything after the fact and predicts almost nothing

Most of this isn't geographical determinism, though. The death of the indigenous americans (allowing settlers to come in and take over), the brain drain after WW2, the first modern democracy (even if the Constitution is a bit kludgy), etc., all not geographical determinism.

You could say that about any other determinism. Nevertheless, it's a huge factor in the wealth of nations and a pillar of geopolitics. It's also why we don't all speak german today... /s

Who handed the US all these things?

Europeans with the money and investments. Native americans who taught the first americans to survive off the land. The slave labor that americans were very happy to have that built their country. Europeans again with two consecutive world wars that led to the rise of the american industries and military complex.

Americans are not the self made men they made themselves believe to be. Played it well? Certainly. Starting with all the possible cards in your hand and geopolitical stability makes it very easy to do so.

The native Americans, geology, climate.

> "country that lived in easy mode succeeds", yay.

or "How to say you know nothing about American history without saying you know nothing about American history"

Mate, american history is so recent it can basically be covered in detail in a single middle school year. The US has had zero real external threats post revolution, so much land and resources it can afford to burn them for fun and was the recipient of the entire world's brain drain. Take a random south american country and it'll have a dramatically harder history. Including the part where the US probably attacked them or manipulated their elections.

> american history is so recent it can basically be covered in detail in a single middle school year.

Here's yale spending a semester on the revolution ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shTBSGoYtK0&list=PLDA2BC5E78... ). Here's yale spending a semester on the civil war and reconstruction ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXXp1bHd6gI&list=PL5DD220D6A... ). If you took both in a year, you'd still only have the highlights of both events, covering about 40 years.

> The US has had zero real external threats post revolution

The US had external threats by Great Britain, Spain, Mexico, Barbary states, Native peoples, Japan, USSR, Italy, and Germany. They all took military and political action against the United States.

South american countries also have a fascinating history! But I'm not sure how that diminishes anything of the USA's struggle for existence. If anything, it heightens the fact that the founding of the USA is largely a miracle where the right people were in the right place at the right time. The fact that the USA's government has endured is by itself worth study.

and why limit it to external threats? are external threats the only one that threaten a country?

it wasn't handed anything. America is basically a rape baby old enough to know better, but willing to do exactly as it's predecessors did.

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