You had a big wide land oozing with previously untapped natural resources, a population expanding and willing to exploit them and the wonders of the industrial revolution provided you the means to do so on an industrial scale. Perfect storm.
(and to quibble with your assertion that the USA invented everything that matters in the modern age, I’d suggest that the leaps made during the industrial revolution are of greater significance…and were mainly British)
Don’t you love the smell of American exceptionalism in the morning?
Australia became the richest country per capita in the early 1880s, less than a century after European settlement (the US took twice that long) and not withstanding social and economic impediments like universal healthcare, no Bill of Rights, compulsory voting and not playing baseball, has remained around the top of the OECD ranking through most of the time since.
Of course, if you had the immense good fortune to found a country like the US with a nearly clean slate, with resources unbounded by the horizon, able to take up the best ideas from around the world and able to deploy them without constraint of ancient legacy institutions, and still didn’t convert those advantages into “best-of-peers” wealth then you’d have to be classed as a bit of a muppet.
I think it is mainly technology and industrialization. Take a country like Sweden-in 1850 it was a poor, backward country. It had a 3rd world social structure-a small number of very rich people at the top, with lots of very poor people at the bottom. It was so poor that almost 1/4 of the population left (to immigrate to North America). But by 1950, this had all changed-Sweden by then had one of the highest living standards in the world-because it developed a technologically based economy.
Is that what constitutes “a great majority”?
And then sooner or later the wealthy in rich nations figure out that they can do that too . . . but that’s another thread.
There are alot of misconceptions in this thread. The US is not rich because it is large here is a list of the richest countries in the world (per capita GDP)
The US is the only geographically large country in the top 10, and the US and Japan are the only countries that are in the top 20 of countries in terms of population. Most of the richest countries in the world are relatively small. The only exceptions are Japan, which is the size of California, Canada and Australia, which are mostly uninhabitated, and the US.
The countries that have done the best since WW2 were not determined by the destruction of that war. West Germany, Japan, Italy, and France all surpassed the UK which had less destruction. Germany and Japan were destroyed, and had huge amounts of people die in the war but became two of the largest economies in the world, surpassing most of the countries that defeated them. South Korea has had a great economy since the Korean war despite almost being conquered by the North Koreans and chinese. Much of South America was not involved in the war at all and that region did not grow quickly.
Americans did not steal wealth from the Indians. What Americans took was land. The land currently has no more natural resources on it then when the Indians had it, yet we are much richer than the Indians ever were. Land can produce wealth but it by itself is not wealth. Americans have not taken any lands from the Indians for over a hundred years but America keeps getting wealthier.
America is not wealthy because wealthy nations are always wealthy. As has been mentioned already, China was the richest nation on earth for a very long time. The Middle East was also very wealthy at one time. They have since been passed by Europe and Europe has been passed by the US. When I was a kid, my parents sponsored a child in South Korea like you can in Africa now, and South Korea is now a first world nation. One hundred years ago Argentina was almost as rich as the US. China is a great example of how fast economies can change for the better or worse.
A good point of reference to compare the US economy is Europe since most american’s ancestors came from Europe. If you look at census tables, decesendants of immigrants from the fifteen countries of the EU, make 58% more income than people in the fifteen EU countries. That is roughly $19,600 per year extra in America. As a point of reference America is as richer than the fifteen EU countries as the EU countries are richer than Turkey. It won’t be like this for long since Turkey is growing rapidly, America slowly, and the EU not at all. (cite)
While slavery is certainly a point worth noting, that is not what that poster had in mind, and in 1860, the US was not the richest country in the world. In fact, the Southern, slave states dragged the country, as a whole, down in terms of average wealth.
America, until the American Civil War, exported lots of raw materials, just what you don’t want to do. Mainly plantation stuff like cotton, though, which was cut off by the blockade by the North. American industrialisation was largely driven by protectionism (once known as The American System). The opposite, in other words, of economic freedom, OP.
Whereas the wealthy in wealthy nations…
A recent development. Nothing to do with how, or whether, America became wealthy.
My reaction as well. Seems to be symptomatic of GD lately…
The majority of well-known inventions “support the modern lifestyle”, directly or indirectly. Just because concrete is thousands of years old and we completely take it for granted doesn’t mean it’s not important to the modern lifestyle. The USA is never going to win an inventions competition just by virtue of its young age.
Focusing on the 20th century, it’s true that many of the big developments happened in the US. Just as many of the big developments of the 19th century happened in Britain. ISTM inventions happen where there is wealth to invest rather than economic freedom per se.
I’m not seeing it. Are all countries at northern latitudes poor? Look at Canada, Britain, or Sweden. Are all countries at lower latitudes rich? Look at Mexico, India, or Indonesia. Latitude has nothing to do with wealth.
Russia had and still has plentiful farmland and lots of coal, oil, ore, timber, and other natural resources. If resources were the key to prosperity, Russia should always have been one of the world’s most prosperous countries. And yet, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Russia instead was notorious for its poverty and backwardness.
If you don’t want to read, this message board might not be the ideal place for you.
The entire economic history of ancient and medieval times is a big topic. The precise conditions varied by time and place. In Athens during the classical period, for instance, society was legally divided along class lines. Pulling yourself from poverty to wealth by your own bootstraps was not only blocked by economic barriers, but also by legal ones. Hence, though Athens gave us some decent playwrights and philosophers, it’s not known for new technology and great economic development. In ancient Greece, greatness was defined by conquering an empire and grabbing what other people had earned–that’s why Alexander the Great was called “the Great”. Earning a good living by hard work and innovation was not considered great.
In Elizabethan England there was a larger, more prosperous, hard-working middle class and more possibility for upwards mobility, yet legal barriers remained. If a middle-class businessman wanted to move upwards, he had to purchase various titles, coats of arms, and so forth. Without such things, his economic freedom was curtailed. The Guild System also put up barriers to starting businesses, regulated prices, and imposed quotas. While England may have been the most upwardly mobile economy in the world up to that point, it still had limitations.
The United States offered up an entirely new system, one in which anyone was allowed to produce anything, move it anywhere, and offer it at any price. As far as I know, such a system had never existed in any country anywhere.
Even today yields in the USA are much higher than the world average; twice as high for corn, for instance. I don’t have statistics handy for yields in the 19th century comparing the USA vs. the world, but given the fact that American farmers used technology such as the McCormick reaper and the tractor while most of the rest of the world didn’t, how could American farmers not have done better? American farmers also took the lead in scientific approaches to creating new strains of crops, better storage, and faster transportation. By the early 20th century, American farmers were using all these things while most of the rest of the world still plowed with oxen and harvested by hand.
The U.S. played a critical role in the rebuilding of Germany and Japan. They were both critical client states in the early Cold War period, and billions were spent on each. I don’t think pointing to their success really undermines the argument that the U.S. benefited greatly by being the only relatively untouched economic powerhouse in that period.
In other words “steal from the Indians? No, not us. We just took the only thing they had of value.”
Back to Russia just for a moment, their growing seasonpales in comparison to the US east of the Mississippi. As to why American farmers mechanized more quickly, my guess is that the size of the average American farm is much larger than the average European farm. Those government giveaways back in the 1800s where settlers got huge tracts of land for nothing meant a lot of people had huge farms. Pretty good government stimulus package, that was.
If you honestly believe this then you really need to read up on American history.
Beyond that anyone who believes that the US, the UK, and Canada aren’t prosperous countries(as you seem to believe) has an absurdly skewed view of the world.
For your sake, I hope you’ve never ridiculed people accusing Obama of being a socialist.
Just for the record, the highest it ever got in the US was 3%. I’m sure DT will be back swiftly to admit his error.
It should be noted that not all “Company Towns” were bad places. Many were enlightened, planned communities that greatly improved the lives of the workers. The danger, of course, was what happened if the sole company went bust or had to move. Basing an entire town or city on one industry is not a good long-term strategy.
A couple of things I’ll throw out:
[ul]
[li]The US is an immigrant country populated by citizens motivated to do better. I think this means more than anything else.[/li][li]Until the Cold War the US had a relatively small standing army with few threats to worry about. Standing armies are a drain on the economy.[/li][/ul]
Americans did give billions to the germans and japanese, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to the massive devastation that WW2 wrecked in those countries. Also Germans and Japanese had to give the Allies billions to pay for the occupation. Americans also give billions to countries who have not done as well. Germany was more devastated than France, which was more devastated than the UK, which was more devastated than Ireland which was hardly touched. Yet thirty years later, France was richer than Germany, which was richer than the UK, which was richer than Ireland.
The nations devastated by WW2 were poor for a while, but caught up quickly.
In 1921, Western Europe had an approximate GDP that was twice that of the US. By 1950, the U.S. was out front and Western Europe has never caught up. If you think it’s a coincidence that this happened to coincide with massive wars in Europe, you’ve got a tough case to make. And your case is made even tougher by the fact that you have no idea what Europe’s recovery would have looked like in the absence of the Marshall Plan.
None of this is to say that the relative isolation of the U.S. from these conflicts is the key reason for its success. On the contrary, relatively free markets have played a big role, just as they have in China in the late Twentieth Century. But to deny WWII as one of several important reasons the U.S. came to dominate the global economy just isn’t correct.
According to this Canada and Australia surpass the US in per capita income by each economic ranking group (IMF, world bank, CIA, UN). They are both geographically large countries.
I can’t say why France and Germany surpassed the UK. That would be an interesting thing to read, but the difference is minor, it is about 5k per capita.
South Korea’s economy didn’t start growing rapidly until a decade after the war, they stagnated at about $100 per capita for a decade until the early 60s.
Many latin american countries are growing rapidly now at 4-6%. It isn’t the 8-10% that east asian countries have seen, but they seem to be growing now. I don’t know the reason for it though. I assume economic and political reform, but I don’t know what kinds.