… and currently,… culturally, we’ve come to expect a lot when it comes to accumulating stuff.
Personally, I’m too naive to think it impossible to be a multi-millionaire long before I’m old, if I want it enough. I can just work smart to have stuff… and a great many of us are focussed on physical prosperity above other things. We really don’t put that much time into other pursuits. We’re willing to sacrifice happiness for it.
Busy as bees we are.
It seems to come from a type of thinking that wealth and value isn’t created., but that it is stolen (or transferred, depending on who is doing the stealing).
The US is ranked between 6th and 10th in terms of GDP per capita, depending on which source you reference and how you measure.
However, of the top 20 country in terms of GDP, we are the only one with a population over 100 million people and one of only a few over 50 million people.
IOW, we manage to keep a much greater number of people much more productive than countries of similar population.
In all seriousness to the OP, it’s mainly due to the fact that America just happens to be F^CKING AWESOME.
I mean seriously dude! What else could it be? Just ask James, John, Mary and Patricia!
In this country if you have will, then you have a way and the sky is the limit. ***
U!!!S!!!A!!! U!!!S!!!A!!!
[QUOTE=Sailboat]
What raw materials? Cotton for textiles and maybe tobacco, yeah, but it’s not like the slave system was cranking out iron, coal, lumber, gold, or other raw materials for the north.
[/QUOTE]
Cotton. Look at the large amount of textile manufacturing that used to be concentrated in the North and consider what fed those mills during the slave owning period in the US. I’m not saying that this was the sole reason or even a major reason why the US is wealthy today, but it certainly had an effect on the early stages of US development…as did the fact that the South was able to export large amounts of raw materials to Europe for hard currency, which the early US lacked.
-XT
Your original graph was uninformative if you wanted to ask about personal income. As** Kimmy **already pointed out the x-axis is simply GDP per capita. That is not personal income. Simply normalizing GDP to population. As we know, quite a bit of our wealth exists in a few hands. I don’t understand why you made the x-axis logarithmic. Anyway, since you graphed GDP vs GDP/population, you could get different trends per country depending on changes in population, not necessarily GDP. Also, having the Y axis as un-normalized GDP skews everything since the US has a big economy (big country and all). The best graph to compare temporal trends for certain countries was the GDP per capita vs. time as posted in by Kimmy. But, again, that says nothing about personal income. Most likely means that a few rich Americans started getting really rich starting in the early 80’s.
The X-Axis says "Income Per Person (GDP/Capita PPP$ inflation adjusted). That SEEMS to indicate it’s at least nominally about, well, Income Per Person. The Y-Axis says "Total GDP (US$ inflation adjusted) which, I presume, is about the total GDP of a country. Yeah…that part is certainly skewed towards the US, since we have a larger economy with a higher GDP than any other single nation. That was sort of the point.
At any rate, it was just a cool graph that I like to play with. If it wasn’t relevant then I was fine letting that go over a page ago. Unless you are saying that the US isn’t wealthy it’s sort of a moot point, and one I’m willing to just let go, unless someone wants to go to the trouble of educating me as to why the graph that says it’s about personal income, and seems to show the fact that afaik US average income is, indeed over $40k, isn’t really about personal income on the Y-Axis at all, and doesn’t show a graph of personal income vs total GDP for the countries being graphed.
-XT
There are really only three guaranteed ways of becoming wealthy in the world today.
One way is theft. In a unipolar world, wars of conquest tend to be frowned upon.
An abundance of natural resources is another way. Unfortunately, the financial benefits of these resources tend to accrue into the hands of a very few: witness post-communist Russia, the Persian Gulf states, etc. Likewise, the sustainability of this wealth is tied to the value of the resources-- if someone tomorrow invented personal cold fusion devices, the wealthy people of Qatar aren’t going to be quite as wealthy as they were today.
The third way, and in my opinion the FAR more relevant explanation for the financial success of the United States-- is the adoption of Western capitalism (and the small-l liberal culture of property rights that enables this). The ability of the United States to unleash the power of its human capital over the past 200 (and especially 100) years is unparalleled in history.
Before anyone cries “jingo,” let me point out that this model is repeatedly successful. Where were the slaves that made Hong Kong and Singapore the richest pieces of real estate in the world? Where were the abundant natural resources that made Japan and Germany economic powerhouses in the 1980s? Why wasn’t China wealthy before they liberalized their economy in the 1980s and 1990s?
People who work for themselves work harder. The United States (and other Anglo nations) “got” this truth at a far earlier stage than the rest of the world. Combine that dynamic with our history-- as others have noted, whereas the rest of the world was devastated by World War II, America had a surplus of productivity-- and it’s no surprise the U.S. is as wealthy as it is.
Now, whether it can remain that wealthy is another debate for another time. But again, from a purely empirical standpoint, it’s worth noting that nations that have liberalized capitalist economies are by and large also the same nations that score as the wealthiest. (And the freer the nation politically ties in comfortably with its economic wealth).
Wasn’t criticizing, I just wasn’t sure if you were agreeing with Kimmy, so added my 2 cents.
Here’s more of what I’m talking about.
http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=5.59290322580644;ti=2000$zpv;v=1$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj1jiMAkmq1iMg;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=pyj6tScZqmEcjeKHnZq6RIg;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0XOoBL_n5tAQ;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=log;dataMin=282;dataMax=119849$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=19;dataMax=74$map_s;sma=50;smi=2$cd;bd=0$inds=i239_t002000,;i37_t002000,;i82_t002000,;i76_t001995,;i110_t001993,;i217_t002000,;i44_t002005,
Anyway, yeah, those are cool graphs. I first saw them in a TED video.
No worries…I just included the graphing tool since I saw it in another thread and thought it was fun. 
-XT