The plantation economy developed in the southern states, and the initial political dominance of Virginia (which provided four of America’s first five presidents) ensured the continued survival of slavery in the newly independent country. By 1860 auction prices suggested that the collective value of American slaves was $4bn at a time when the federal government’s annual budget was around $69m. That explains both why southern slaveowners, many of whom had borrowed against their slaves as collateral, would never give up the practice, and why a financial settlement of the issue was out of the question.
I guess this too would be an example of the 'banality of evil'.
(btw to get around the paywall just clink on 'web' to find it through google; it'll let you read it if google is the referrer)
Just an aside, but I wonder if the north stood to profit from this dynamic. Like, if farms were held as collateral against the slave loans, did northern banks get to take that land when the owners went into default?
I know of a different way the North profited -- the opportunity cost of a firm refusing to do transactions with members from a different group (i.e. both hiring black labor or collaborating with black enterprise) is equivalent to institutionalized forfeiture of feasible income (of adding more laborers) [0]
Southern capitalism thus negated capitalism's mission: that society improves when parties can fulfill each other's desires efficiently if they each have something that the other desires. So Northern capitalism did tend towards greater capitalist prosperity, because it wasn't contradicting post-slavery capitalism like the South. That contradiction depends upon the Southerners not seeing blacks as anything but "technology", rather than economic agents.
But the result is that white refusal to cooperate with blacks hurts both blacks and whites: neither blacks improve their lot (no productivity), nor do whites improve theirs (forced to relinquish maximum efficiency and profit that would otherwise be allowed by allowing black employment) - simply because of racial stubbornness.
Honest question: How much of it is thanks to the US being far away and largely untouched by all the wars in Europe, especially WW2, while still ostensibly profiting from them?
And then being the ones to end it with the strongest display of force?
The US became a country in 1783 (conclusion of the Treaty of Paris). In 1789, France had a revolution which kicked off the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars which lasted until 1814. The US was indirectly involved in this war because of dueling embargoes by Britain and France and counter-embargoes by the US (which eventually escalates into the War of 1812). After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, there are essentially no major European wars until 1914. The US became the largest economy somewhere around 1880-1890, and it only started industrialization around the 1830s, well behind Britain and France.
Basically, to summarize, in the time period between US independence and before the US became the dominant country in terms of economic power, there really weren't any major European wars for the US to be untouched by.
Not much. The US had demonstrated vast industrial capability prior to WW2 and had long since passed Britain, Germany and France as the world's largest economy and manufacturing center. It had also proven itself as one of the primary centers of invention prior to WW2 and throughout the industrial revolution. The US expansion west and the further development of cities including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle and others, is another example of how the US still had a lot of growth left just to fill into its own territory regardless of WW2.
The present alignment of global economies has seen the US return to a normalized position in terms of both GDP and manufacturing share globally. The temporary artificial expansion after WW2 lasted for roughly 40 years. During that time, the US spent vast treasure protecting other nations, rather than annexing territory or attempting to conquer other nations and plunder their resources (eg: Western Europe, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan).
I wasn't sure, so I had to look it up. But, it seems like losvedir may be correct.
According to these numbers [1], the U.S. was the largest single country economy several years before 1914. And, if these numbers can be trusted, its growth trajectory would have sustained that position even without WWI.
Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen along with unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe. The consequence is predictable.
Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder without a hint of self consciousness or remorse, and cements a barbaric ideology that fuels more indiscriminate global plunder in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.
The sweet smell of presentism. You can perhaps fault the US for the interlude between British outlawing of slavery and the civil war/abolition, which covers a few decades. But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries. It certainly wasn't "unlimited." Onto the next bit, "stolen...IP from Europe" is a modern characterization of what was in fact a healthy exchange of research and invention between the Old and New World. Much perceived "theft" was fueled by reactionary governments making the US a more appealing locale for the learned.
> But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries.
That's an odd standard to set. Racial discrimination, based on ethnicity, also used to be a global norm, yet that didn't and doesn't excuse the crimes of the Third Reich.
While African-American GI's fought against the disfranchisement of European Jews, their own home country still had racial segregation laws in place for decades after WWII.
One could easily fathom an alternate reality where the Third Reich didn't happen/didn't turn out as extreme and as a result, racial segregation and bigotry would still be a "global standard" because humanity didn't see the worst and most extreme outcomes of it.
Who knows, a couple of decades from now the US might serve as yet another negative example for one of humanities many follies.
"Disenfranchisement" is an understatement at best. They were being exterminated. However, I don't think the world was entirely aware of just how bad it was. Information travels much much faster nowadays. At any rate, there is no other nation or point in time prior to the 20th century that you can pretend those values even exist. Even "equality" itself is a Western value. Every nation in human history has spilt blood, has violated basic human rights, and has been tribalistic in it's treatment of outsiders at various points in history. We could all be living under a North Korean-like regime right now, but instead we live in a privileged Western society that loves to loathe itself.
> At any rate, there is no other nation or point in time prior to the 20th century that you can pretend those values even exist.
These "values" existed all over the world back then, driven by a scientific movement we aptly named "scientific racism" these days. You know, a whole section of science busy trying to explain why some humans are just so much "better" than other humans based on their skin color, size of the head or other arbitrary physical attributes. This followed right on the tail of an era of colonialization which was also fueled by the racial stigma of "We gotta civilize those heathen savages by enslaving them and taking their lands".
It's exactly those values being so widespread and accepted which lead to the Nazis taking the "next step", which wasn't a really big one. The difference between treating a whole group of people as "lesser humans" by law, having them act as a slave class, and "exterminating" these very same people because there are supposedly too many of them, isn't that big of a difference.
The "values" behind these two approaches are exactly the same, labeling a whole group of people as "lesser humans", the difference was only a matter of execution in how to deal with those people. The US commercialized this behavior by using the slave force, putting a price on people like they are property.
Similarly, forced labor drove large parts of the Third Reich's war machine and economic progress.
This might sound cold-hearted or like I'm trying to excuse the crimes of the Third Reich, none of this is my intention, my intention merely to point out how whole nations can be hypocrites about their own moral position because they didn't kill disfranchised people on a supposedly "industrialized scale", but "only" on a commercialized one.
Do you know how scathingly critical the French and English were of each other for centuries? At one point, France and England participated in a hundred year war. Europe was engaged in intra-racial international war for hundreds if not thousands of years. Nations and tribes on every continent battled each other with fierce brutality. Look at how the Japanese conquered the Chinese during WWII. When I look at world history, I just see ugly bitter wars and disputes going back to the stone age punctured by precious few moments of relative peace.
The idea of world peace and equality in general was laughable until nuclear proliferation made total war among the world powers suicidal somewhere around the mid 20th century.
> Do you know how scathingly critical the French and English were of each other for centuries?
Which was exactly my point, it was the de-facto standard for the longest time and one of the major factors for colonialization, that went on until the Third Reich and at that point, most of humanity decided: "Nope, don't want anything like that anymore".
That still didn't excuse the Third Reich or their crimes, it still serves as a "negative example" and will most likely do so for the foreseeable future. In that regard you are vastly underestimating the importance of the Nürnberg trials in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its influence on the world community.
> The idea of world peace and equality in general was laughable until nuclear proliferation made total war among the world powers suicidal somewhere around the mid 20th century.
Nuclear proliferation mostly impacts governments behavior imho you are overestimating its impact on social progress and people generally becoming more accepting.
Factors like globalization and the Internet play a way bigger role in facilitating understanding between different people, it's also helpful to have a generally accepted standard of "Universal human rights", applying to every human being regardless of ethnicity or nationality.
MAD, with it's attached red scare, only generated generations of paranoid and distrustful people whos paranoid fear rules most of their worldviews, in some cases to this day.
> That's an odd standard to set. Racial discrimination, based on ethnicity, also used to be a global norm, yet that didn't and doesn't excuse the crimes of the Third Reich.
It's a terrible habit we have as a nation. We are happy to forgive or excuse our sins but hold others to theirs.
How exactly do you determine the habit of 300 million people? How do you differentiate that habit from the Japanese who refuse to officially recognize war crimes in China or the Belgians and Germans whose grandparents wre killing Congolese and Jews respectively?
If people in this thread were being honest they'd be well aware that this particularly American flaw isn't so specific to the US.
> I see no "excuse" of American sins, only a response to a tirade which makes very targeted and laughable statements like "unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe".
Okay. I can see you are passionate about this but you need to calm down. The guy offered his opinion. It wasn't a tirade.
> Who established the Atlantic slave trade if not Europeans?
Sure. And britain was the largest slave trading nation and they were the largest world economy, until the US took over. I don't think anyone is denying that it was the europeans who created the atlantic slave trade.
> Only pointing out the sins of others because some dick decided to turn a fun historical thread into smug hate the US thread.
There is really no need for this. You are better than this.
I can see this is getting a bit too heated so I'll just end it here. You are entitled to your opinion and the op is entitled to his. No need to attack people or use vulgur ad hominems.
Sorry, I just have a real problem with ignorant hatred and prejudice, which this thread is dripping with.
Just because they don't use words like dick doesn't mean they aren't using vulgar ad hominems. The mistake is believing that people can distort history but as long as they're being nice about it, it's cool. The US is no more the beneficiary than any other country, so acting like the US is what it is only because of 400 years of loot and plunder (OP's phrasing) is ignoring that the Germans, French, and Russians would have looted and plundered each other and others (and did) for centuries. Therefore, the loot and plunder can't be the sole or even main reason behind American success, which is what the article was talking about.
If an African-American was to wander into a thread with similar sentiments about African-Americans, it'd be recognized for the prejudice it is, and ironically most of the posters here would recognize it there, too.
You're forgetting the unique differences in geography and demographics of the USA area compared to what the germans, french and russians had to "work" with.
So your argument is that because the Russians stole lots of cold land, full of natural resources, that explains their shortcomings relative to the US?
Could there be other things at play, like absolute autocracy dominating the Russian state even today? The Germans had plenty of space and resources had they not lost it trying to dominate their neighbors.
Only pointing out the sins of others because some dick decided to turn a fun historical thread into smug hate the US thread.
You are kind of proving his point.
He made a valid criticism of the US and its people's tendency to excuse their own bad behaviour, while noting that it is likely a common thing across most nations, and you get really defensive and angry because he had the audacity to do so.
That's the American exceptionalism thing we all know and love. You interpret criticism as a smug US hate thread which is fucking ridiculous and only serves to kill any debate.
No, I'm interpreting "criticism" as smug hate because the criticism isn't really related to the article and isn't even accurate.
stolen along with unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe
Exaggerated bullshit.
Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder
Where's the jingoism in that article? The thread was a good excuse to get the hate on. If the OP would like to make accurate and measured claims, then we could have a discussion.
> Where's the jingoism in that article? The thread was a good excuse to get the hate on. If the OP would like to make accurate and measured claims, then we could have a discussion.
Ain't that a tad bit thin-skinned? If you consider this "hate" then boy ain't you lucky that you are no German. As a German, the only thing most people know about the country or culture pretty much boils down to "Oh Hitler and you killed millions of Jews!" maybe throw in some "beer/sausage/sauerkraut" for good measure.
No nation is perfect, pretty much every nation has some "ugly spots" in their past, the difference being in how nations treat these ugly spots. Imho that is where the US, as a nation, has been failing and keeps on failing because it considers itself so "exceptional" that even morals don't apply and as such it supposedly did never do anything wrong at all. A very one-sided narrative, a view of human history like it's all just a comic book story about the "good guys fighting the bad guys" where the good guys could never do wrong because for them the ends of "beating evil" always justify the means, it's like a "Hollywood reality".
This isn't meant as an attack on the country or the people, but merely as an outside observation: The US pretending to be "the good guys", regardless of what kind of methods they use or motivations they have, is one of the reasons why so many people around the world consider the US a nation of hypocrites and the biggest and most dangerous "rogue nation" on this planet.
Yes, this also exists in other countries, but no other country has such a global cultural/military reach and influence as the US does, so it sticks out the most and ends up influencing world affairs the most.
Again: This is not "hate", it's an observation from an outside-the-US PoV that's merely meant to inform.
I just don't believe that US as a whole is really so unaware of its past. I grew up in Texas public schools and we learned about the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment camps, Jim Crow, etc. We're very aware of a very dark history.
If the US was really such an intolerant and unrepentant place, you wouldn't even have a debate about race. By and large we are a society that acknowledges wrongs and tries to fix them, even if it take decades to do so. I believe that's because the US is really not a singular culture but a mix of many, which ends up being a great advantage.
If it appears from the outside that the US sees itself in Hollywood good vs evil terms, everyone does. I guarantee you Merkel believes she is on the right side of history and a lot of Germans that they are culturally superior to others (you can observe it in this thread; maybe they have good reason). Yeah, US media promulgates a biased message, but that's Hollywood, US media at the same time is very ready to criticize such absurdities (see World Police, or modern political humor which is huge worldwide - Stewart, Colbert, Oliver).
It's just annoying to hear people from outside cultures try and shrink down a nation of 50 mini-nations and 300 million people into some kind of comprehensive worldview. It's not reality.
I assume other countries aren't perfect places, but I'm not on French and German message boards telling Germans how they're just thieves and murderers and that's why they have been successful. If you'll reread some of the comments in this thread, that sentiment is barely hidden.
Awareness ain't everything, case in point: Millions of neo-Nazis are aware that the Holocaust happened, that still didn't and doesn't change a thing about their beliefs.
That's because it's about more than merely "being aware", it's also about taking responsibility and learning a lesson and sadly it looks like that hasn't really happened in the US yet, exemplified by statements like this one:
> If the US was really such an intolerant and unrepentant place, you wouldn't even have a debate about race.
It's funny how you think that's something positive when it's anything but. It's the year 2017, that's probably a couple of decades too late for a "race debate" which isn't even a debate at all.
What happened in Charlottesville wasn't a "debate", it was a show of force by the US American far-right, which only acts so emboldened because the US never really dealt with its race issues besides "being aware" of them and acting decades too late, Charlottesville was the result of this half-arsed behavior and I fear it won't be the only nor the last one.
> If it appears from the outside that the US sees itself in Hollywood good vs evil terms, everyone does.
The difference being that the US has such a massive and far-reaching cultural influence that the "good guy" tale ain't only influencing US Americans in their patriotism, it basically ends up brainwashing large parts of foreign populations.
Of course, Merkel believes she is on the right side, so did Hitler, so did Raegan, so did Stalin. The difference being: Merkel is at least aware that this ain't always true, due to cultural history, the same doesn't apply to the US to the same degree if at all.
The US, as a country, never has acknowledged or atoned for any "national shame", that's why "US patriots" feel so comfortable bathing in their ultra-nationalism while being hilariously unaware of how fanatic it makes them.
Yes, there are Germans who consider their own culture superior to others, the difference being: It's not socially accepted in Germany at all, people like that are usually considered bigots. This is because we Germans are not only aware of our past mistakes, we take responsibility by trying not to repeat them.
And one of the mistakes Germans made was following unfettered fanatism in the form of patriotism. Patriotism and national pride had both been major driving elements for the Nazis taking over power and being able to commit their crimes.
In that regard, the US shares many similarities with the Third Reich, more than most people would like to admit. Way too many US Americans are complicit in their countries crimes as they rather indulge in their patriotism about being "Number One" in "everything".
> US media at the same time is very ready to criticize such absurdities (see World Police, or modern political humor which is huge worldwide - Stewart, Colbert, Oliver).
I'm sure Colbert and Oliver have just as much international reach and influence as Hollywood blockbuster movies like Black Hawk Down, American Sniper, Top Gun or even Casablanca, which have been shaping world opinions about the US for decades.
> It's just annoying to hear people from outside cultures try and shrink down a nation of 50 mini-nations and 300 million people into some kind of comprehensive worldview. It's not reality.
The US ain't "50 mini-nations", the cultural, linguistical and geographical differences just don't support a statement like that. There's also a reason these states are United because they share "some kind of comprehensive worldview", which at its most basic level starts with the "American Dream" and at the extreme ends results with "America Number 1, America First" fanatics.
> I assume other countries aren't perfect places, but I'm not on French and German message boards telling Germans how they're just thieves and murderers and that's why they have been successful.
Excuse my naivety, but to me, this ain't a "US American message board", I rarely think in such terms when I'm surfing online, to me, it's foremost an English language message board devoid of any national connection. There are lots of international topics and people around here, just because somebody speaks English, or a board uses it as its language, does not make them US American.
I think we're both emphasizing different things and that comes from a different background. I don't really disagree with much of what you are saying, I just don't see them to the same degree as you, and that's probably because of that different experience making it impossible for us to understand each other.
I'm not happy with everything my country does, I'm not happy with everything they've done. There's a lot of progress that needs to be made but at the same time progress is being made and has been made. There are horrific as well as laudable things my native culture/country has done. We have a lot to teach others as well as learn from others, and we as a culture would do well to find respectful ways to interact with other cultures in the world, because ultimately we're human and we have shared interests.
That's what I believe generally, and I believe that above statement is true or should be true of every culture. You're free to disagree.
> I just don't see them to the same degree as you, and that's probably because of that different experience making it impossible for us to understand each other.
Sadly that might be true to a certain extent, but that shouldn't stop us from still trying to understand each other.
Imho we've managed, at least, a little bit of that, have a good one!
Retroactively arbiting "crimes against modernity" - if computed with modern measurement devices/standards - can be hypocritical. That's because calling the villain evil might ignore the fact that their behavior, being relitigated as evil in the present, did in a fundamental way depend upon their belief that they were doing something ethical in the first place. It is not sadism but sadomasochism; they are especially pained at their awareness of the pain they cause, but they see it as their duty - and the symbols of the time is what mediates their gap between their imagined duty and the reality they operate in.
(Referring to parent of this comment chain.) Something Zizek himself says is evil is not what makes bad people do bad things, but instead what makes good people do bad things. People doing something 'evil' will typically be distressed about it personally. But they would always see it like "I must be fully willing to destroy my own humanity so that I can protect the humanity of my people". They preserve their efficiency and ruthlessness in spite of the further fragmentation of their psyche and conscience.
Brutality relies upon limiting the aesthetic dissonance between the aesthetics of the greater good and the ugliness of violence.
> "In early 20th-century France, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland declared [Beethoven's Ode To Joy] to be the great humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people, and it came to be called “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1938, it was performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In China during the Cultural Revolution, in an atmosphere of total rejection of European classics, it was redeemed by some as a piece of progressive class struggle.
> In the 1950s and ’60s, when the West German and East German Olympic squads were forced to compete as a single team, gold medals were handed out to the strains of the “Ode to Joy” in lieu of a national anthem. It served as the anthem, too, for the Rhodesian white supremacist regime of Ian Smith. One can imagine a fictional performance at which all sworn enemies — Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush — for a moment forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic musical brotherhood." [0]
But what is there even to conclude from this?
Suppose we are 100% aware that we actively cause harm to people but our moral calculus says we must do it because it is for "the greater good". The more we are uncertain about the uncertainty of net social gain, the more we have reason to avoid doing it.
But this is the opposite of the commonly held belief. People say "we can't judge the people in the past, it's too easy to be certain an idea that was defeated was evil when looking from the future. Before it was defeated they could not have known that the pain they (knew they) were causing for the sake of helping out their own people, wouldn't have triumphed and raised real total benefit instead -- so that it hypothetically was moral".
Here I disagree vehemently. We must, in the strongest terms, condemn any rationalization of the actions of a gambler who bets he'll reach the greater good if he puts his children up for collateral.
Other resource-rich countries haven't fared as well. Indeed, it is a truism that the more natural resources, the worse a country performs economically. Some of the wealthiest countries are deprived of natural resources (Israel, Singapore, Monaco, and others) while a bunch of resource-rich countries have done poorly or terribly (Brazil, Argentina, all of Africa, India, Russia, and others).
It's what you do with the stuff that matters.
If what was done in the U.S. is plunder, then what is it that you say is happening in "the Middle East, Latin America and Africa"? Be consistent.
Well, should we consider some of the underlying factors for why African nations in particular are doing terribly? Seems the 1885 Berlin treaty set that continent back for at least a few centuries, the effects of which are still causing havok to this day.
See my replies below. There are certainly countries that did well in spite of plunder. And countries that reverted from wealthy to poverty with no plunder in sight.
And, all things considered, India's hardly done "terribly".
It's a remarkable achievement to maintain a united, democratic, mostly peaceful nation for 70 years straight (and counting). Most former colonies collapsed into destructive civil war, then military rule, within decades of independence. India has so far avoided that fate. Heck, most developed European countries have barely managed to avoid it in the past century.
India has as much (probably more than) linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious variety as the European continent, far lower levels of education, absurd amounts of competition for resources, education, and jobs due to population pressure. All of those things are potential triggers for conflict and civil war.
I can't comment about other countries that may or may not have lived up to their economic potential (Brazil, Argentina, Russia etc) because I know next to nothing about them. But India is doing terrifically well, considering the hand we were dealt.
The colonies that fell apart we're ones where there wasn't much organization and what organization existed was for resource extraction.
The Dominions were built for settlement, so they were sustainable states. India and other Asian colonies already had their own very established cultures and civilizations, and hence fared much better.
Pretty remarkable India hasn't exploded into separatism due to resource pressure, but I don't know how sustainable that is given that the population is still increasing
It's hard to compare India to any other country except for China. No other nation is of a comparable size. It's all well and good to say "well Japan, South Korea, Singapore did great after being devastated by war and depression and famine". Just like software, scale matters for national development.
Japan post-war still had the relative advantages of having been an advanced industrial nation pre-war, with all that that entails: educated population, knowledge of how to run industry and finance, culture of industrial entrepreneurship etc. Plus it got tons of help from the US getting back to its feet. Ditto for South Korea; US help to keep them from falling over to the Communists. Both nations are also relatively homogenous ethnically, religiously, and culturally.
Singapore is tiny: a city-state. It's half the population of metropolitan Mumbai and has 1/3rd higher GDP. If Mumbai was an independent city-state with immigration controls, we'd likely be talking about it as an up-and-coming Asian tiger.
I'm not downplaying any of these countries' achievements. They are tremendous and they've done very well for themselves. I'm just pointing out the context of their achievements and how that doesn't apply to India.
I think it's impossible to say India hasn't lived up to its full potential because we can't run history backward and forward like a simulation, change a thing here (eg. make India a liberal free-market economy in the 60s instead of a closed, socialist one) and see the difference. China is doing great now but they had to go through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution on the way there. India is doing not-as-well but at least millions didn't die.
Plunder is a silly excuse. Whatever plunder, it's been over for a long time. A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea. Argentina (then reverted -- what foreign power plundered them from the 50s onward, eh?!). The U.S., naturally. And others.
China is the latest: from the depths of the Great Leap Forward (backward) to now. And that's even though China too was plundered. That's a huge "so what" to the plunder thing.
Stop making excuses.
Incidentally, Argentina is a hugely important case-study. It was never really plundered. Its history has tremendous parallels to the United States', oddly enough. It had a tremendous growth between the 1880s and the Great Depression, and grew to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world at the time of WWII. Yet somehow it has missed out on decades of growth potential, and is now full of shanty towns, with a huge proportion of the population in true poverty (not what we call poverty in the U.S.). HOW IN THE WORLD DID THAT HAPPEN?! There were no significant wars in Argentina since its peak. There has been no foreign power plunder in Argentina in that time. The make-up of the population didn't change much. So what happened?? Well, it's easy to see what happened there: bad ideas.
"People, ideas, materiel. In that order!" - John Boyd, COL, USAF.
It's really isn't. "Colonial plunder" isn't a horde of soldiers rampaging through your country taking your gold and women. Colonial plunder is generations upon generations of domestic industry killed by high taxes to favor imports from the ruling country, turning peasants into serfs bonded to the land to pay taxes, exploiting and inflaming pre-existing class, caste, and religious differences time and time again to keep the people from uniting against the rulers. People (at large; there are outliers) stop getting an education or starting any business larger than a shop because what's the point? The financial system doesn't grow beyond small moneylenders. People become bitter and try to keep the little they have from their grasping neighbors, everyone fighting over the few crumbs the ruling country throws you. For hundreds of years.
> A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea.
As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, they are much smaller, and had plenty of help from the US. Do you have any other examples?
> China is the latest: from the depths of the Great Leap Forward (backward) to now. And that's even though China too was plundered. That's a huge "so what" to the plunder thing.
Incontestably true; India hasn't done as well as China. China still isn't quite a developed country yet and India is maybe 20 years behind China. I don't think it's a great shame to come second to China. Their political system has always optimized for getting things done no matter the cost. India went a different, maybe softer, way. Probably not even deliberately, I'll admit.
To this day it saddens me when middle-class, educated, relatively well-off Indians say things like "I wish we had a government like China's so our roads won't have potholes anymore".
I don't think colonial plunder remotely explains Latin America. Also, why aren't plunderer Spain and Portugal super-wealthy? (Incidentally, the degree of "colonial plunder" in Latin America varies a great deal, from genocidal in Mexico, to practically none in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, but economic performance of the entire region has been lackluster, with the exception of Argentina between the 1880s and the 1930s.)
You're not entirely wrong about the impact of plunder being many generations-long, because, for example, Paraguay's bad performance almost certainly goes back (at least in part) to the ruinous Triple Alliance War, way, way back in the 1870s (in that war Paraguay lost almost all its males aged 12-60). But it doesn't have to be like that, and it isn't always. If it had to be like that then Europe might never have risen again after WWI or WWII, yet there it is. South Korea wouldn't have risen after Japan's occupation of it. China wouldn't either after the Japanese war, or the Opium wars.
> > A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea.
> As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, they are much smaller, and had plenty of help from the US. Do you have any other examples?
Sure. I mentioned Argentina in another post, which grew fabulously fast between the 1880s and the Great Depression. China, of course, I mentioned above. Since the Industrial Revolution I think we've had these amazing growth stories: UK, US, Germany, Argentina, Japan, Japan and Germany again, South Korea, China. I'm probably missing a few. Many others had less spectacular but steady growth rates (think Australia, Canada, France, ...).
As for China, it's certainly on the cusp of first-world status. They have... a lot of bad ideas weighing them down though. The SOEs, for example, and the state-owned banks and their terrible lending practices, financial repression, unbelievable malinvestment following the 2008 crisis, unresponsive government, corruption, pollution, and so on. These bad ideas could easily sink China just as a very different set of bad ideas sank Argentina.
My thesis here is that some ideas are bad, and some are _terrible_, and others are at least not bad enough to crush the human creative spirit. Peronism (Argentina) falls into the 'bad' category, while Maoism (China) falls into the 'terrible' category. Capitalism inarguably is at least neither bad nor terrible -- I would argue it's awesome, and that it's not even an idea, but rather what results when you have freedom (which _is_ an idea, and a very good one at that), but I'm willing to let you have the last word (for this post's threads anyways) to the contrary provided you're willing to tell me how it is worse than Peronism or Maoism, or even just comparable to either (please don't blame Belgium's genocides in Congo on capitalism; that's a very lame and boring argument).
To me all of this is blindingly obvious. Again, the Argentine example is instructive, as it is one of the fantastic growth stories, but one that ended poorly when bad ideas were applied. China is another great example, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being calamitous, with the rape of Nanking and the Opium wars not all that far in the past, yet it rose up when Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nonsense and brought a good enough measure of individual freedom (at least to trade) back into the picture, and then China bloomed. The difference between Mao's and Xiaoping's China is so stark that it is impossible not to see it as the difference between awful ideas on one hand and at-least-OKish ideas on the other.
The Argentina/China examples cannot be explained otherwise than above, or at least I've not seen alternative explanations -- none! not even unbelievable ones, or at least I don't recall any. China is certainly a counter-example to the plunder-explains-it-all theory. Though I expect that you'll tell me that the plunder of China was minimal in proportion to its population (but recall that the famines of the Great Leap Forward were not minimal that way!). At the end of the day, good ideas can lift a nation from a poor history, or they can sink it from a great history -- this much should be clear, and if that's true, then plunder is no excuse, or not enough of an excuse anyways.
This debate about the impact of plunder reminds me too of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Prussia won that, and imposed what it thought would be crushing reparations on France, which it intended to use to improve the wealth of the German people. But it didn't work. France managed to borrow what it needed to pay those reparations, underwent very fast growth, and paid off its debt in just a few years, all the while Germany under-performed. One might call what Prussia did "plunder" (is it not?), yet it failed, just as the Versailles reparations in the other direction after WWI had the same exact effect, but reversed because the reparations direction reversed too. Plunder is not the explanation that you think it is -- it can be in specific cases, but may not even be a good rule of thumb.
> Also, why aren't plunderer Spain and Portugal super-wealthy?
Well they're not exactly poor either. They're still considered first-world, advanced nations. And they've had some "bad ideas" like, military rule, since the end of colonialism. Seems like their past plunder has insulated them somewhat from these missteps.
> Since the Industrial Revolution I think we've had these amazing growth stories: UK, US, Germany, Argentina...Many others had less spectacular but steady growth rates (think Australia, Canada, France, ...).
Right but the thing all these countries have in common: they weren't under the colonial yoke during the Industrial Revolution like India was (Argentina attained independence in 1816, for example). India wasn't allowed to have an Industrial Revolution; it was suppressed by British tax and trade policies. Don't you think that's at least a partial explanation for why India's behind today?
Post WW2 Japan, Germany don't count: they still had most of their pre-war population and memory of being a prosperous society. South Korea benefited from generous US aid (and still does, in terms of military aid). The US was highly incentivized to help SK as much as possible because they feared it turning communist. India, at the time of Independence, hadn't been a prosperous nation for at least 200 years; the educated, skilled class was tiny.
> Capitalism inarguably is at least neither bad nor terrible -- I would argue it's awesome, and that it's not even an idea, but rather what results when you have freedom (which _is_ an idea, and a very good one at that), but I'm willing to let you have the last word (for this post's threads anyways) to the contrary provided you're willing to tell me how it is worse than Peronism or Maoism, or even just comparable to either
I'm with you all the way there. I never contested the benefits of capitalism for a country; it has a much better track record than Peronism or Maoism. The evidence shows it's been great for poverty reduction. But, and I keep coming back to this, India didn't have the opportunity to determine its own economic policy until only 70 years ago. And we ended up with a socialist for our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Arguably he earned the right to be the Prime Minister by being the most prominent freedom struggle leader after Mahatma Gandhi and he was accordingly popular, no matter his economic policies. You can't legislate for randomness like that.
> My thesis here is that some ideas are bad, and some are _terrible_, and others are at least not bad enough to crush the human creative spirit.
To me it seems like there's two ways for good ideas to take hold: the people have the freedom to choose their leaders, can recognize good ideas and choose accordingly, or the government isn't democratic but the leadership is "enlightened" and focused on national development over personal enrichment (or at least makes development a priority).
In India's case it had a government focused on enriching Britain till 1947. Afterwards voters simply voted for the most popular guy (sort of like George Washington) who happened to be a socialist who espoused five-year plans and centrally-planned growth. Remember, at the time, those ideas hadn't been completely discredited. And this may be slightly controversial but, lacking any sort of democratic or political culture, and having a low level of education on average, voters may simply not have known "good" ideas from "bad". As a counterpoint, he US didn't initially have universal suffrage: only white property-owning males could vote. This, while unfair, ensured that voters were educated, somewhat prosperous, and invested in growth rather than populist handouts. Whereas by the time India attained independence, universal suffrage was expected of any democracy.
Also an important factor: the nation isn't acted upon by negative external forces. Chile, Argentina, Guatemala (to name just 3 South American underachievers) have suffered from foreign countries (I won't name which ones but it's easy to find on Wikipedia) financing military coups and assassinations against socialist leaders and socialist governments. You can argue all you want that a socialist government isn't good for growth but any democratically-elected government has more legitimacy than a military junta.
There's so many factors that can blunt the impact of good ideas or ensure they never take root.
> To me all of this is blindingly obvious. Again, the Argentine example is instructive, as it is one of the fantastic growth stories, but one that ended poorly when bad ideas were applied. China is another great example, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being calamitous, with the rape of Nanking and the Opium wars not all that far in the past, yet it rose up when Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nonsense and brought a good enough measure of individual freedom (at least to trade) back into the picture, and then China bloomed.
And what I'm saying is history is far more random than that. What if Mao had been replaced by someone with even worse ideas? What if they'd gone to a liberal democracy immediately rather than a government laser-focused on development at the cost of everything else?
That's not oil, land, water, etc. By your definition almost every country has tons of natural resources, and yet results are so disparate.
Lots of other countries have strategic trading locations: Malaysia, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Argentina (well, not since the Panama canal, I guess), Egypt, Saudi, Iran, and so on.
Maybe, just maybe, ideas matter?
"People, ideas, materiel. In that order!" - John Boyd, COL, USAF.
>By your definition alm every country has tons of natural resources, and yet results are so disparate.
Not really, being the easternmost port on the Mediterranean and southernmost point of Asia are fairly special things. Add in the almost city-state nature of those examples, and they do noting to prove your point.
Yes, but as an example (whose effect is only stark because of our present world history), the Nuremberg trials were also a replacement of world history. Many people on trial said "I was just following orders"; mere world history.
Just because world history is symbolic, does not mean millions of people's duties do not depend upon which symbols are present.
We hit Hitler comparisons fast on this thread, eh?
It is fine to condemn it if you want, we definitely don't want to repeat it, but if you think any culture really has the moral high ground on this, you should look deeper.
The looking deeper is exactly not defaulting to moral relativism AND not defaulting to the belief that universal goods, as defined by one culture, are universal simply because any culture says so.
The two perspectives aren't even very different.
The "world history is just how the circle of life turns round" stance is to the moral high ground stance what a sitcom with canned laughter is to a comedy without a laugh track: with the canned laugh track, you aren't even expected to bring the laughter. To forget your dilemmas, all that is expected of you is just to stare at the screen.
I get that Nazism is a topic people tend to be skeptical of the possibility of using examples in discussions both honestly and seriously. Not only does it flare emotions, it also makes it more likely that discussion will just split around calling the opponent a Hitler-sympathizer/trying to distance oneself from the cultural taboo "evil is a subset of 'the set of Hitlers'" (which is not the same as "Hitler is a singleton subset of the set of evils".
The evergreen task is finding the deficiencies of historical signifiers we used to use, both the ones that brought the most prosperity, and the ones that brought the most ruin.
Godwin's law is not a law of nature, and Godwin himself stated that it is being abused to stifle debate;
From Wikipedia;
Godwin's law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate. Similar criticisms of the "law" (or "at least the distorted version which purports to prohibit all comparisons to German crimes") have been made by the American lawyer, journalist, and author Glenn Greenwald.
In December 2015, Godwin commented on the Nazi and fascist comparisons being made by several articles on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying: "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician."
On August 13, 2017, Godwin made similar remarks on social networking websites Facebook and Twitter with respect to the two previous days' Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, endorsing and encouraging efforts to compare its alt-right organizers to Nazis.
It means there are people out there who believe they can win arguments by creating false analogies to Hitler, who is basically indefensible. Godwin's law then makes it really easy to identify trolls, and you can avoid feeding them by not taking the bait.
Godwin's Law doesn't state that as soon as the Nazis are mentioned, that the quality of the conversation is zero.
There is a difference when drawing a comparison about something entirely unrelated, but when you're talking about topics involving wiping out a people, claiming Godwin's law is silly.
Hitler wiped out a huge number of people. That's the topic of this comment thread. Therefore, bringing up Hitler is totally fine because it is directly relevant.
tbh, and not trying to dismiss USA in anyway. I find their situation in time and space pretty exceptional. They had no aggressive neighbors and half a continent. At a time where new knowledge was popping out, having such a playground was very timely.
The North American tribes had plenty of warfare and territory turn overs long before the Europeans arrived. The isolation of the americas did prevent diffusion of technology, but we also saw the same thing happen in Africa and even Asia to similar extents. It wasn't very unique.
Then why did the U.S. fare so well compared with Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, etc. India, Russia and China had close to the same landmass for several hundred to thousand years prior but they didn't achieve what U.S. did despite a huge head start.
> India, Russia and China had close to the same landmass for several hundred to thousand years prior but they didn't achieve what U.S. did despite a huge head start.
Uh they did.
"The Mughal Empire began a period of proto-industrialization, and Mughal India became the world's largest economic power, with 24.4% of world GDP, and the world leader in manufacturing, producing 25% of global industrial output up until the 18th century. The Mughal Empire is considered "India's last golden age" and one of the three Islamic Gunpowder Empires (along with the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia)." [1]
Can't find a similar citation for China but before colonialism, India and China were the world's two largest economies. It's telling that European explorers were searching for a sea route to India and not the other way around. Europeans wanted silk and spices from India and China. But Europe had nothing India or China wanted. Or at least, knew they wanted. Arguably they could've used the superior maritime knowledge[2] and gun manufacturing techniques Europeans possessed.
I guess if there's anything that history teaches us, it's that attaining a lead is no guarantee of maintaining it.
There's a whole Wikipedia article exploring why these two nations fell behind the Western World in the 18th and 19th centuries.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#Possible_fact...) I'd argue that colonialism was certainly a major factor for India. Being treated for 150+ years as a source of cheap raw materials and captive market for exports will do terrible things to a country's industry and economy.
Except maybe for Canada, these weren't invasion though. I have to admit there were lot more conflicts I knew about. We shouldn't learn history focused around our own country only .. it makes us foolish about the rest of the world.
Sort of. The big advantage the US had was OCEANS on both sides and only stone age peoples to the south. Attacking the US on it's own soil has been a suicide mission for hundreds of years. Counties in order to attack the US would need to pile men on ships travel for a month(s) then attempt to skirmish on the beaches. On the other hand attacking Poland /Korea/China/Spain/Italy/Egypt is a matter of walking. Once ships were powered/quick enough to transfer men in mass it was too late -- the repeating rifle had been invented.
"One force [British] burned Washington but failed to capture Baltimore, and sailed away when its commander was killed. In northern New York State, 10,000 British veterans were marching south until a decisive defeat at the Battle of Plattsburgh forced them back to Canada.[b] Nothing was known of the fate of the third large invasion force aimed at capturing New Orleans and southwest. The Prime Minister wanted the Duke of Wellington to command in Canada and take control of the Great Lakes." [i]
Sure, they burned the White House [battle won], but lost the war.
> Sort of. The big advantage the US had was OCEANS on both sides and only stone age peoples to the south.
By the time the US became a country, the indigenous peoples had access to firearms, certainly every one the US Army would have been fighting. It's also worth pointing out that the US bordered an English colony to the north and a mestizo former Spanish colony to the south.
Nominally, yes. In practice, the control in most of that region didn't really extend outside of the presence of a few trading posts. (It should also be noted that Mexican control of Alta California outside of the coastal region was similarly nominal)
The settlers who went to South America with the dreams of plucking gold bars out of the fruit trees and using an enslaved population to make hard farm work a breeze met a harsher reality.
I don't know for certain, but I assume that the land was harder to make arable, the weather was less forgiving, the rainforests brought additional problems (like persistence of mosquitos and ticks). Plus South America didn't unify like the USA did, which might have presented an obstacle.
I think I once heard a statistic like at the height of slavery 50% of the USA's exports were cotton. The industrial revolution was a great driver of the demand for America's cotton.
"The American South is known for its long, hot summers, and rich soils in river valleys making it an ideal location for growing cotton. By 1860, Southern plantations supplied 75% of the world's cotton, with shipments from Houston, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Savannah, and a few other ports.
The insatiable European demand for cotton was a result of the Industrial Revolution which created the machinery and factories to process raw cotton into clothing that was better and cheaper than hand-made product." [0]
It might be the case that this prosperity didn't happen in South America because they were not strategically fulfilling cotton demand of the industrial revolution. The reason that the conquistadors had started slaving was to fulfill a "gold revolution"; and they did at least gain prosperity in doing so. But the demand of the "gold revolution" for their monarchies was much smaller than the demand of the industrial revolution.
However, Egypt and India also had significant exports of cotton. The effect that did happen is that the Civil War led to great increases of prosperity due to cotton exports for those countries [0][1]
> The settlers who went to South America with the dreams of plucking gold bars out of the fruit trees and using an enslaved population to make hard farm work a breeze met a harsher reality.
Brazil had a higher slave-to-free ratio than the US, and imported more slaves than any other colony/country in the Americas (it was also the last country to ban slavery). Actually, the US was never a major slave importer--the US and Canada combined imported only about 4-5% of the total Atlantic slave trade, and the highest slave ratio in the US was only 57% (South Carolina), both of which are outdone by individual Caribbean islands. It's also worth pointing out that the truly productive gold and silver minds were in South America--Cerro Rico may have produced 60% of the world's silver at its height.
Put another way, South America was where it was, in fact, possible to have slaves dig free money out of the ground for you and do all of your hard labor, whereas this wasn't really possible in North America (at least not until after the invention of the cotton gin around 1800 and the discovery of highly productive mines in the late 1800s).
Geography happened to South America, unlike North America, connecting the Atlantic Coast with Pacific Coast in South America is not easy and most of their navigation/transportation is along coastal roads.
Before artificial soil fertilization was practiced (and the importance of nitrogen was understood), lands in the Eastern seaboard used for tobacco and cotton were quickly depleted. This helped accelerate the push westwards.
Doesn't really explain Argentina to nearly the same degree as e.g. Brazil-/which The Economist has written about at length over the past couple of years.
Argentina is a great place for ranching and certain crops, but it has very little mineral wealth. I would hazard that the two most likely reasons for South America's slow progress are that its colonies were attached to ailing empires, and that a rugged and challenging geography made unification difficult to unimaginable. American history has no analog to the horrific War of Triple Alliance, a historical microcosm of the continent's diplomatic challenges.
Not to mention that Argentina was doing quite well for itself at the onset of the 20th century- unfortunately political instability and other challenges hamstrung it since then. If some rolls of the dice had gone differently, it would be solidly in first place status by now, same as Chile.
That was my main point. Given different political culture and other factors along those lines, southern South America may not have the great resources and land mass that the US did and does, but you can't really write them off for geographical determinism reasons. Were those countries really in a worse position with respect to resources, climate, etc. than, say, Australia?
So you want to argue that America shouldn't exist in a just world, but what exactly would be in its place?
I don't think we'd likely have a single continent spanning country ran by the many different nations that were there before. It'd be much more likely that colonialism that divided Africa and South America would be passed around North America, and there wouldn't have been any country to balance the European powers that continually fought each other in the 20th century or for Russia, Japan and China in the second half of that century.
You can acknowledge the wrongs that America took, but you also have to accept that it's mostly been a force for good, even today.
But didn't the European countries usurp the entire continent of Africa, a giant fertile landmass rich in resources that was stolen along with unlimited slave labour? The land the USA encompasses is tiny compared to Africa (http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/18/true-size-of-africa/). Europe African colonialism was horrifying, but it should have resulted in a economy much larger the that of the USA. Someone screwed the pooch.
"Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen" for a moment I though you were talking about this event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas
Slavery hasn't been a factor for a century and a half. Natural resources play a meaningful role, but there's plenty of poor countries with resources. And the indigenous people before didn't have a juggernaut economy from those resources.
Slavery and a stolen continent are horrible, but they don't explain what happened economically.
In a goldrush, sell the pickaxes. Black men and women picked the cotton for free in captivitiy. Cotton fueled the textile industry. The textile industry blew up because of the industrial revolution. It's just rent-seeking by threat of murder. No, it doesn't explain who had what before this happened, but this is the clearest 'difference that made a difference' to me w.r.t. why America became rich in a very noticeable way while this was occurring.
The slaveowners made profits for nearly no work, and the banks made plenty of profit by giving out loans to the slaveowners to buy more slaves, too. It's hard to look for causality, but this seems like an obvious source of far-removed consolidation of capital that would last over time.
A landmass and a continent: which bit of bloody great chunks of rock, soil, stuff etc are you having problems with?
You can do what you like but the continental plate it was performed on wont give a fuck. You could even destroy that continental plate or even the whole shebang but it will still not give a fuck.
Landmasses and continents don't give a fuck - they really don't.
In any case, humans had been living here for several thousand years before Columbus arrived 500 years ago. Is it so difficult to see a distinction between millions of people with hundreds of years of history and thousands of people arriving on ships?
Slavery actually held the USA back. It kept the south rural, whereas the north was far wealthier without slaves because it industrialized. Furthermore, the civil war was incredibly destructive and without slavery would not have occurred. Lastly the USA was not the biggest economy in 1850.
As for a “usurped continent”, the land was very sparsely populated by the natives compared to the people who came in, and disease cleared out more of them making a vast underpopulation. It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first. Also I would guess you are a liberal from your comments, and therefore likely support legalizing undocumented immigrants. According to your logic, undocumented immigrants are “usurping” America, which is quite unpopular among liberals today.
America committed plenty of evils, but that’s not what made America great. In addition to many bad things, the USA did a lot of things right. I believe the USA had a lot of benefits from geography, but the real thing that made the country great was recognizing the rights of the individual. It has been demonstrated over and over again that egalitarianism yields big dividends in groups. Because the USA had such an emphasis on equality (declaration of independence), innovation occurred on an incredible level. It took a long time for that equality to spread to blacks, but the very idea of even equality of whites was unheard of at the time of the USA founding.
Combine that with the fact that Europe was devastated by two world wars, it was inevitable that the USA should pull ahead.
I'm skeptical of the idea that the tragedy of the unintended epidemic resulted, fairly, in property rights for the invaders. It means that either:
- "collective pre-existing rights became held in abeyance because so many rightsholders died" -- This assumes the living natives were not the owners of what was still there, either because they were propertyless, or the dead rightsholders didn't have a way to transfer property rights - which they would necessarily, historically have had for rights to have been a pre-existing Native American cultural notion - at the very instant they met the explorers.
- "the natives didn't have a notion of property rights, but the explorers did. the explorers were able to respect property rights, so it was best and fair that they acquired as much as they could" -- If anything this suggests that the explorers had great disrespect or didn't even understand property themselves. It was peak hypocrisy to violate the Native American population's property rights -- that were still their rights even if they were unaware of them. You cannot steal something from someone else if you think they don't know it is theirs. I have a suspicion that this idea I keep hearing "natives didn't have the concept of property" is really just false and veiled racism.
- "even if natives did have property rights nevertheless the invading explorers had a different concept of property rights" -- yes, the explorers had the same idea of fair property rights as someone going into a convenience store and shouting "nobody move, this is a stickup!"
It means merely that there were very few people laying claim to a very large piece of land. That they were killed by disease means that they weren't killed intentionally in order to take the land.
Property rights don't actually exist. The idea of property rights is a way nations like to explain the division of property they allocate to their citizens. In reality, there is very little earth that needs to be divided among all. A small group cannot claim an unfairly large portion, no matter how long they've lived there, nor what means they used to claim it.
Yes, I agree property rights are not physical law. That said, who determines what is fairly or unfairly allocated is never who is most sanctimonious but who is holding the gun.
Your second paragraph makes it seem like those weren't really humans - "cleared out", really? And having been decimated by plague diseases makes shooting the survivors equivalent to crossing a border illegally so you can work a better job? Maybe my knowledge of American history and politics is poor but those do not seem like the same thing at all.
> It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first.
By that argument, it's just not right to say that multi-millionaires should control so much wealth just because they were born into privileged conditions. Wouldn't fairness require a forced redistribution of those resources?
That's why we have such massive forced redistribution of those resources (e.g. progressive income taxes), yes.
There is a limit in either case. Nobody would say one person should be allowed to control all global wealth, or that one person should be assigned all of North America. It's just a matter how where you draw your line.
One might consider that the fortunes and income of the very wealthy are, for the most part, not subject to income tax, nor progressive taxes of any other sort of which I am aware. Dividends, capital gains, etc.
>>It kept the south rural, whereas the north was far wealthier without slaves because it industrialized.
I feel for you. Those evil slaves didn't work hard enough till their deaths to make their rightful masters win.
>>It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first.
This is so Winston Churchill'esque, dog in the manger analogy where there are some superior people who have rights to exterminate existing people, and those existing people are evil for even resisting.
>>Combine that with the fact that Europe was devastated by two world wars, it was inevitable that the USA should pull ahead.
The USA is the most successful imperialistic project executed by the western civilization ever. To separate the US from Europe is simply splitting hairs.
The same could have happened to the Indian subcontinent. But there were too many people to kill and the British got caught up in a few wars. Else Mr Churchill had pretty great genocidal plans. He even got along and executed a small project where he killed a few million people(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943).
Dude, Churchill was fighting the most horrific forces of fascism and evil that the planet has ever seen, a war in which nearly all of Europe fell to the Nazis and nearly all of Asia fell to the Japanese empire... London was enduring daily bombings and you're going to blame him for a famine halfway around the globe?
>>Dude, Churchill was fighting the most horrific forces of fascism and evil that the planet has ever seen
He did no such thing. He was simply protecting the United Kingdom from getting invaded by Germany. As far as political ideologies are concerned, Britain was no saint. They had their own 'We are superior to other races' projects going on in other parts of the globe.
>>you're going to blame him for a famine halfway around the globe?
"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits."
When Churchill actively refused to allow food aid to come from external sources during the war, yes, he and his government bear an even greater portion of responsibility than the colonization of India, in the "you break it, you bought it" sense of responsibility, already merited. Similarly, Churchill's galloping racism and his government's nastiness spread similar misery elsewhere: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest...
And this is not a new happening for Britain, either; they did the same thing to the Irish during the famines. The Sultan of Turkey wanted to send ten times the money more money than the Queen of Great Britain and two ships of food; the British consul in Istanbul said that to send more aid than the Queen had herself allotted would be seen as diplomatically insulting. All the while, Irish shipments of food to England continued unabated.
"I am seriously concerned about the food situation in India….Last year we had a grievous famine in Bengal through which at least 700,000 people died. This year there is a good crop of rice, but we are faced with an acute shortage of wheat, aggravated by unprecedented storms….By cutting down military shipments and other means, I have been able to arrange for 350,000 tons of wheat to be shipped to India from Australia during the first nine months of 1944. This is the shortest haul. I cannot see how to do more.
I have had much hesitation in asking you to add to the great assistance you are giving us with shipping but a satisfactory situation in India is of such vital importance to the success of our joint plans against the Japanese that I am impelled to ask you to consider a special allocation of ships to carry wheat to India from Australia….We have the wheat (in Australia) but we lack the ships. I have resisted for some time the Viceroy’s request that I should ask you for your help, but… I am no longer justified in not asking for your help." -Churchill to FDR
War is hell. Thank goodness we had leaders like Churchill. And thank goodness the Allied forces won.
Yeah, Britain did want to feed a few farmers and peasants, that is because they wanted the next generation of slave labor to be ready from whom they could grow, snatch and tax heavily to build awesome infrastructure and quality of life for people in Britain. So please this whole facade of a benevolent imperialistic power is just pointless.
>>Thank goodness we had leaders like Churchill
Thank him for him for considering the entire Indian subcontinent as some kind of lesser people and race compared to whites? What exactly is the difference between this and the race superiority theories of Adolf Hitler?
>>And thank goodness the Allied forces won.
Oh please. Europe created an untenable political situation in Germany by imposing upon them harsh punishment in forms of war reparations of WW1. Then you create a vacuum for a dangerous political ideology to rise, and then try to stop their imperialistic ambitions.
Beyond all this, why does Churchill expect Indian people pay the price for whatever political blunders any party in Europe had committed.
I'm no fan of imperialism. However, I think trying to paint Churchill as an evil man rather than an elected PM who inherited a half-millenia of imperial legacy at one of the most pivotal moments in human history is a long shot at best. You can believe what you want about the predictability of WWII. From an armchair in 2017, it's easy to predict how things play out from 1919 onward.
The difference between Churchill and Hitler is that Churchill didn't slaughter millions of people and subvert half the globe to totalitarian dictatorship. That supplies and shipments are limited under dire circumstances should come as no surprise to any student of historical warfare.
>>The difference between Churchill and Hitler is that Churchill didn't slaughter millions of people and subvert half the globe to totalitarian dictatorship.
He did precisely that. Britain has inflicted more damage to humanity, with its imperialistic policies than even a fraction of Nazism did. Britain was for all practical purposes was a far more evil force than Nazism would have ever been.
>>That supplies and shipments are limited under dire circumstances should come as no surprise to any student of historical warfare.
It comes as a surprise to us because Britain invaded India, stole and plundered the country.
If you don't want people to call you bad names, stop doing bad things.
It is certainly and unambiguously possible to charge Britain with imperialist policies without claiming that they're worse than the Nazis were. Like, there is a difference of kind in there that I feel you're eliding.
Given the choice of living under British colonialism or Nazis...you would choose Nazis? I reckon you should study fascism a little more closely. The closest parallel we have today of what a Nazi regime would be like is North Korea.
> It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first.
That logic could still be applied today. Asia and Arica combined are over 5.5 billion people. I bet a lot of those people would be more than happy to emigrate to the US. Why should so few (merely 300-400 million Americans and Canadians) control entire continent just because they got there earlier?
You're correct that slavery held the country back. The Confederacy could not even produce shoes for their soldiers. The reason Lee was in Gettysburg was he was after the shoe factory in nearby Harrisburg.
The Civil War economically devastated and flattened the southern states. It's hard to see how the later wealth of the US economy was based on that.
> According to your logic, undocumented immigrants are “usurping” America
According to your logic integrating successfully into a different society and culture, is the same as arriving with superior weaponry and slaughtering the natives over 149 years. (1775-1924)
Your attempt at comparison and equivalence is pitiful and cruel.
The immigrants over the course of 149 years weren't offloading from the boats with rifles in their hands The vast majority of them faced major discrimination themselves. That's why their descendants (who often are also the descendants of natives) object to such biased portrayals.
Individual people may not be guilty of this, and even major parts of the USA may not have been guilty of it, but as an entity, this is what "the USA" did. If that makes people angry, they should search themselves to see where such anger should be directed.
The modern form of it, which is having businesses with practically no worker protections (right-to-work, the health care situation) compared to other european countries.
If the US was stolen, then the Native American tribes were also stealing it from previous occupants. Heck, there are tribes in the southwest which only got to the southwest by conquering other Native American tribes after Europeans were already roaming around here.
So, it's hard to really feel sorry for them, especially because Europeans put the land to much more productive use per acre than Native Americans did.
No, because it was par for the course at that point in history and the people who were genocided were themselves genociding other people simultaneously, and only came to live on the given land because they enslaved, pillaged, raped, and killed the previous native americans who were living on the land.
You sound bitter. Find a society without historical sin and then we can talk. You went off on some tangent about jingoism without explaining where the book supports that. Did you read the book or the review or did you just want to rant?
> You sound bitter. Find a society without historical sin and then we can talk.
You sound defensive. Why should there need to be a sinless society before you'll entertain someone's thoughts on the relationship between your sins and your success.
Don't get me wrong, like every American interested in history, I'm well aware of the sins of the United States. Hell, Texas was colonized by slaveholders who were illegal immigrants before it was stolen from Mexico. On the other hand, Mexico itself is a land full of people who are the offspring of the conquerors and the conquered. There's really no winning and nobody with a clean record.
What I object to is someone who's bitter because he's not American launching into an irrelevant tirade and acting like they are somehow better when 60 years ago Europeans were exterminating each other. It's pretty dishonest and it shows some hate and/or immaturity when a bunch of people have upvoted said tirade because of their own biases.
>>What I object to is someone who's bitter because he's not American launching into an irrelevant tirade and acting like they are somehow better when 60 years ago Europeans were exterminating each other.
75 years ago Europeans were exterminating each other. Today, they are united and peaceful for the most part, and their union is one of the largest and most successful economies in the world.
75 years ago America entered World War 2 and helped defeat the Nazis. Today Nazis are openly marching in the streets and running over counterprotesters with cars, and the President suggests that "both sides" have "very fine people".
If we want to talk about perspective, it's ironic that "zizek" is very possibly Russian or Eastern European, and if so lives in a country that has a far bigger issue with Neo-Nazis than the US, they just don't have the same media exposure.
I think it's delusional to believe that the prejudices that led to literal genocide in Europe within living memory (more recent than that even, see the Balkans) have faded more than the prejudices of slavery in the US which show up at events like Charlottesville. The hatred is alive and well in European societies like it is anywhere else. You're citing a single counterprotester getting run over (horrible, yes) when in the Ukraine there is an ongoing invasion and throughout Europe, Islamic terrorism (due to divided societies) will last for a generation.
Your perspective (which sees as a vice the suggestion that both sides of any conflict might have some realistic grievances) is a myopic, tribal one which too often parades around in places like HN and sees itself as diverse and open minded when it is anything but. You don't realize how: "Today, they are united and peaceful for the most part, and their union is one of the largest and most successful economies in the world." is just as applicable to the US and such an optimistic view of Europe is an incomplete portrayal. If that's not how you intend for it to come off, I apologize, but it has a very strong undercurrent of bias.
All I'm saying is Americans are humans, descendants of the same Europeans, Africans, Asians, and native Americans that came before them, so it's not shocking that we'd have the same flaws as every other society, and in fact, historically, the actions of the US have at times been no more or less deplorable or laudable than any other people.
The 13 colonies fighting for self-determination would not have imagined becoming the sole super power of the world. Louisiana purchase for strategic depth, Texas joining the Union and the Mexican American War, leading to manifest destiny to the west ward expansion. The Civil war, would have ripped the continent into warring nations, the nation building of USA from sea to shining sea is never obvious, and its bloody, brutal and downright ugly. In spite of becoming bi-coastal power, US was still a poor country in 1880s, and what has transpired in Europe with two world wars and its own role in Pacific Theater thrusted US into its current role.
Its convenient to dismiss, and over simplify this whole enterprise of making of America. I am amazed, and simply amazed by the American experiment and I am not even "technically" American.
It will be interesting to see how the next 400 years will go. For a long time the US could just keep growing into new territories and absorb a lot of ambitious immigrants that way. It seems this phase is over. The US is now a grown up country where everything is owned already so it will be much harder to grow. The Trump success seems a symptom of this. Instead of just growing as the US had always done Trump's message was about distributing the pie.
Your premise isn't very well supported by the facts. The US added $5 trillion to its GDP in the last ten years, despite the great recession - a time in which the most powerful economies of Europe didn't grow at all, nor did Japan. US wages routinely grow three to five times faster than those in Japan, Germany, France or Britain.
Where's the lack of growth? GDP per capita went from $46,000x to $57,000x over those ten years and shows no sign of actually stopping, in contrast to most of its peers.
To put the growth in context, that $5 trillion is more than Russia, Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Czech, Romania, Slovakia, New Zealand, South Africa - all added combined.
It seems the US is doing a lot of things right. But I still believe that its main advantage over the last few hundred years was the ability to grow into "empty" land and also the fact that it's protected by oceans.
Detroit is, for most intents and purposes, "not owned".
We're in a brief moment where the internet exists, but has not yet disintermediated population centers.
Within 10 years there will be a new city born every week in the US with great jobs, great coffee, and "market housing" i.e. construction cost plus 50%. The property markets will collapse.
Along with this there will be a massive readjustment of wages in favor of workers. The average number of full time employees per corporation will go from 16 to 0.16. The Dow companies will lose 50% (only) of their market share over the subsequent 10 years to federated sole proprietorships and small partnerships, but the middle class will double in size, and population is still headed towards 10 billion, so big companies will grow in net revenue anyway.
From there you can start to see how we get to "everything owned"... 10 billion people and every one of them is extracting maximum utility from a couple acres (about the max area a single human can maximize utility of)... That's 20 billion acres of really "owned" property... Property you couldn't make an offer on without losing money.
We will get to "everything owned" in the U.S. but we're not close. It only looks like that from porches in boom cities.
Given that 400+ years of growth has got us into a position where the likelihood is that the planet will be unable to sustain human life within a few hundred years, I'd be curious to find out what future historians will make of the West's supposedly proud story of progress.
In the end, would we all have been better sticking with the Native American way of life? Benjamin Franklin: “When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”
Perhaps some kind of voluntary winding down is necessary. "It was good while it lasted. For some people."
Life will be fine. Rats, pigeons, raccoons, flies, jellyfish, quite a few plants, fungi, etc, will all be fine.
The Cretaceous was a thing. The atmosphere had about as much CO2 as it could hold. There were lots of animals. We're headed back to it.
Will there be Eastern Brown Pecker Grouse habitat? No. Will there be coral reefs? Lol no. Will most of the pages of National Geographic be unrecognizable by the naturalists of the future? Yup.
But life will continue. All we're doing is robbing future generations of the myriad beautiful and delicate old growth ecologies that we were taught about in school. We can go snorkeling in them, or hiking in them. They'll just watch 1080p videos of them on their AR glasses.
We're headed back to the Cretaceous. We're going to take the biodiversity of the planet down two orders of magnitude. Maybe four.
That's all.
If we coders get our act together we'll get a decentralized anarchist bioremediation movement going which will rehome millions of acres of biome to Cretaceous-friendly locations, we'll limit the biodiversity loss to that 100x range. 10x if I'm feeling optimistic and smoking really good weed.
> The Cretaceous was a thing. The atmosphere had about as much CO2 as it could hold. There were lots of animals. We're headed back to it.
Extinction scale events have been "a thing" in Earth's history for as long as Earth's been around [0], as you note we are very likely in the middle of another one right now [1]
The big difference this time being: Previous ones most certainly had not been man-made, this one has a very high chance of being man-made.
Who's to say humanity is incapable of damaging Earths biosphere beyond a point where it can recover?
If we can manage to fill the oceans with more plastic than fish by 2050, then I'm certain we can manage to do quite a bit of damage to this planet as a whole [2].
A while ago I read a paper reasoning something like that might be the explanation for the Fermi paradox; extraterrestrial civilizations getting so advanced that they destroy the biosphere of their own planet, beyond repair, but not advanced enough to escape said destroyed planet. Sadly I can't find it anymore.
Wasn't that Great Filter even tho it might qualify as a Great Filter, I managed to find the paper [0], it's about applying the "Principle of Mediocrity".
That's true now, but it's not going to be the same place over the next few hundred years
We might be tough, but we also will need to develop radically new survival skills in a short amount of time. Remember there will be less food, clean water ad more natural disasters to work with etc. So surviving in the "new" world will be more difficult.
Not only that but on the cultural side of things, look how quickly Trump farcical politics and neo nazi grouped resurfaced. Was the 20th century western world a bubble ?
The native American life wasn't all roses, but there are things we could and should learn from them and other peoples about community and the environment.
>the likelihood is that the planet will be unable to sustain human life within a few hundred years
Clearly, I haven't been paying the amount of attention I ought. Is this the present level of orthodoxy I need to subscribe to, in order not to be deemed a climate denier? (Or is it "sceptic" these days?).
I write about a possible future where communities of people purchase robots that do most of the work they need for survival, and they otherwise live a simpler non-consumerist life.
What's better about your future than the exact same future except humans do the work and the robots are just disembodied AIs who teach the humans how to be useful?
In the future you describe, humans continue to be treated as tools to be used by others. In the future I describe, people are not exploited for their labor but are free to follow their own desires.
Or more succinctly, in my future people don’t have to work.
Not all work involves people being treated like tools. Much work involves people being treated like magicians.
By finding "someone else" to treat like a tool (a robot) you are not only solving the wrong problem, you are keeping yourself stuck in the mindset that allows the problem to persist.
Very few enjoy the privilege of being treated like a magician. Practically speaking, workers are treated like cogs in a machine whose labor buys them another day’s survival. It’s difficult and painful for people and it doesn’t have to be that way.
Furthermore I have no qualms against treating machinery as a tool. There is no exploration of intelligent beings when you take advantage of the output of a tool. I want to end exploitation of living things.
Yes, and our growth in the 19th century put us into a position where the likelihood that the planet would be able to sustain our horse production within a few hundred years seemed incredibly unlikely. Gee, I wonder what happened, and why we aren't beholden to horses any more?
America became the biggest economy because of brains and innovation driving it, its as true a hundred years ago as it is today. The opportunity to make money for yourself - thats what drove the American economy and still drives it today. A lot of people are commenting that American wealth came from slavery, but that is simply not so - nearly every country on Earth had some degrees of slavery, but how many had succeeded? Slaves didn't smelt steel, nor designed and built battleships to be sold to the Russian Empire in 1900s.
Today though, you can see countries like Germany take the lead with their better protections for inventors and better incentives and protections for the employees.
The review implies the people and culture caused economic growth. I'd say they resulted from it, which resulted from two oceans and friendly neighbors that make the country difficult to invade, fertile soil, lots of natural resources.
machinery, iron and steel, cotton, lumber. that's how it became the world's economy. ww1 and ww2 is how it became the world's military power. the military industrial complex is how it maintained both of these positions.
manufacturing, construction and population is how china overtook them. america should be pushing open borders, tax relief on families with multiple children, ban on abortion, if it even wants to compete for the 21st century. a ussr type dissolution and depressing collapse is sure to come when their inevitable debt burden default happens by the 2040s or 2050s. the only question is, will this occur before or after the eurozone currency implosion and german re-armament.
Imagine playing a game of Civilization, but you start at 1700-AD-level technology, with only tribal natives as a threat, on a massive landmass with oceans on two sides rich in natural resources and you have no immediately threatening enemies.
Hey can someone explain this position? You see it a lot on the internet - we all know it's just short for the mouthful of "The United States of America", right?
Is it just garden variety anti-Americanism, or is it based on something else? You also see the form "American means anyone from both continents," which is off in exactly the same way.
No one from Canada or Mexico would say “I am an American”. You only here that from someone from the USA. So whatever the official title is the popular usage is that is some says they are “American” it means they are a citizen of the United States Of America.
The US became the world's biggest economy in the late 1890s. So how did we become the largest economy? Stealing a large landmass blessed with abundant resources and fertile arable land. Growing the population immensely via high birth rates and immigration. Industrious population and business friendly laws helped. But it was mostly OIL. The US was the saudi arabia of oil for nearly 100 years from mid 1800s to ww2. Standard Oil became the largest company in the world for a reason. We had a ridiculous amount of oil and we exploited it. Oil was discovered in the 1850s and it helped the american economy become the largest in the world.
Oil was but one strong American industry. And oil itself didn't turn out to be in such high demand until the mass production of the automobile, which was another American thing.
No mention of an incredibly wealthy continent, both in mineral and agricultural terms (and a temperate climate), that was largely seized by killing the people who owned it and taking their stuff. No mention of the Louisiana Purchase. without which 'Manifest Destiny' would never have occurred, nor the Mexican-American war which added Texas and California, two of the engine-rooms of American wealth today. No mention of the point that once 'manifest destiny' was complete, the US was safe on all sides - much weaker countries to the north and south, and giant ocean-sized moats to the east and west; rather than deploy military in defense, it could be used to project power in support of the economy.
All of these things are pretty major additions to why the US is such an economic powerhouse today.
Edit: wow, I've really touched a nerve with this one. Enough to get some revenge downmodding on past comments of mine. Wow.
The fact that the US is separated from a huge chunk of the world by the oceans is tremendously important.
But pretty much all nations and cultures have spread by one group dominating other groups and taking their land. That's a given. What happens after the land is taken and the nation established is more important, which is what this book seems to address.
The US has huge material advantages over other nations, but it has also fostered a powerful innovative culture that is just as important to it's success.
Yes, but this is why I said the things I mentioned were 'pretty major additions', not 'the only reasons'. The Louisiana Purchase is routinely ignored in things like this, for example - with no Purchase, there's no Mexican-American war, no Texas or California, no Great Plains, no Mississippi trade, and France as a (friendly) neighbour.
No mention of an incredibly wealthy continent, both in mineral and agricultural terms
How is North America unusually "wealthy" in minerals? Per unit land area, probably only Australia is less gifted in initial (total value of deposits before human extraction) mineral wealth, even if you count commodities that are not presently allowed to be extracted. I would guess that South America or Africa is greatest.
You're hand-waving away both ease of extraction and also the minerals that were worthwhile in the industrial and pre-industrial ages. North America had plenty of iron and coal, and it was easy to get them around, and also easy to extract and use them for most of the year (the temperate climate). Minerals you can't reach or can't use are not useful - there was not a lot of call for Tantalum in the 1800s.
Compare to Brazil, which is a tropical country choked with rainforest. There's a reason why industrial powerhouses develop in temperate zones, and not in tropical ones. Or look along the Andes, where there are a lot of minerals, but there's pretty hostile geography.
The dominance of the Spanish was based off of extracting natural wealth from SA, it's just they squandered that wealth instead of building up industry. From 1500-1800ish there was far more easily taken natural wealth in SA, only a myopic view of history isn't aware of that.
Apart from gold, which was only really useful in the advanced economy of Europe (a hammer made of gold isn't very good), what was the mineral wealth extracted from South America in this period? What minerals could be easily used to supplement agriculture and build industry in the local area?
What mineral industries do you see as being far easier in SA than NA in your period? What are the mineral industries that you see SA as squandering?
Don't forget either that west-coast minerals were a very long way away from advanced markets (also going via the hostile Straits of Magellan), and additionally could never benefit from the tradewinds that assisted the 'triangle trade'. Any commerce-based society there would have massive limitations.
Yes, the EU, or otherwise known as that giant land mass consisting of 28 different countries with unique economies.
Ironically, trying to treat each member state as some homogeneous member is what is leading to the fracturing and growing nationalism. UK won't be the last to try and break off.
The EU in many ways acts like one big economy due to its customs union, freedom of movement of workers, capital, goods and services, extensive harmonised regulations, partially harmonised taxation, wealth transfers between members, a common currency to a substantial part of it, etc. It is a lot more tightly integrated than some mere 28 member free trade area would be, although still not as tightly integrated as say the 50 states of the US are. (And the 50 US states all have distinct economies from each other, with sectors that are big in one state being small or even non-existent in another.)
And still the obvious fact remains: 1 country versus 28 separate countries.
The UK voted to break off. France came dangerously close to heading down that path with Le Pen. Greece's government might not want to, but the people would be on board for the same. Potentially Germany when they get tired of carrying the rest of the EU (especially after UK) on it's back can all leave whenever they want -- they just need to vote on it.
However, If California, for example, tries to succeed, it would be illegal.
America's states and the EU its countries are very comparable, speaking in terms of economic size. Why do Americans always feel so attacked and start to bring contorted justifications when they aren't #1 in something..?
While everything you said is true, I think the gap in homogeny of economies between the EU and the states of the US is much much larger than you make it sound.
States can't leave the USA countries can leave the EU, which is a massive difference. NAFTA and EU are not countries they are an agreement between countries.
States can leave the US with the consent of Congress. Congress has never given its consent, and it is hard to predict how it would behave if such a request was seriously made today. Congress did reject the demand of the Confederate states to secede, but there was a strong moral argument against allowing their secession–their primary reason for secession were to continue to evil practice of slavery. If a state wanted to secede today, I doubt there would be such a strong argument against allowing them to do so.
EU member states have only been able to unilaterally leave the EU since the Treaty of Lisbon came into force in December 2009. Prior to that, there was no legal provision for a member state to leave without a treaty amendment. So the situations between the EU and the US are not as dissimilar as you suggest.
Well, it is definitely possible by constitutional amendment, which normally means a two-thirds majority of Congress and 75% of the state legislatures. (Or the convention process...)
But, I don't think we can definitely say that a constitutional amendment is necessary. Suppose that a state requested to secede, and the request for secession was approved by both popular vote and by the state legislature; and that Congress then passed ordinary legislation approving the secession. Would the Supreme Court rule that legislation unconstitutional? I don't think anyone can really predict how the Supreme Court would act, but I don't think it is certain that they would rule it unconstitutional. But if it is possible that they might not rule it unconstitutional, it is possible that secession with Congressional consent is constitutional. Certainly it would be easy for the Supreme Court to distinguish this scenario from the Civil War scenario of attempted secession against the will of Congress, if a majority on the Supreme Court felt so inclined. If the majority of Congress, and the President, was in favour of permitting the attempt at secession, the Supreme Court might not be inclined to overrule them.
What counts is not what the document literally says, what counts is how it is interpreted in practice. And when dealing with hypotheticals, no one can really know how it will be interpreted in practice unless and until that hypothetical becomes an actuality.
> States can leave the US with the consent of Congress.
No, they can't. The Constitution only provides for rules on forming new states and forming states from parts of other states. There is no text on what happen should a state decide it wants to live. In the Civil War, some states argued that the Constitution was a voluntary compact of sovereign states, such that a state could unilaterally leave if it so desired (no need to get consent of Congress). SCOTUS later held that these declarations of secession never held validity.
The US has the biggest national economy in the world. It has a central government than can wield that economic power for its own purposes.
The EU as a singular entity can do relatively little with its members' wealth, which is why measures of that wealth aren't very meaningful.
It's like saying that Asia has the biggest economy in the world. Well yeah, but large chunks of that economy are segregated from one another along national boundaries.
Without your last para, you make a valid point. The EU is not a nation, but we all know that it can wield united power in lots of areas and you cannot compare the EU with the continent that is Asia.
I guess the distinction is that the US is a single country?
Also, it seems there is a notable body of work out detailing the shortcomings of the US economy. At least in the US, it is thoroughly documented.
Maybe, because the general consensus is that the US is doing so poorly, this piece meant as a simple reminder to Americans that we are not completely doomed.
A bit of googling and it's really unsatisfying to try to get a clear answer to this question. I think you're right the US "wins," just... that may not mean anything.
One might argue the country distinction is a bit arbitrary and look for regions with the highest per capita GDP.
It looks like Washington, D.C., USA dominates that list. Then the Eastern Province in Saudi Arabia, then the Canton of Zurich.[0]
That top 20 contains 7 US regions ("political subdivisions"). Also in the top 20: Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, and France for the EU. Schengen members Norway and Switzerland would bring it up to seven. I don't know if we're comparing "Europe" or pretending that Norway and Switzerland are radically distinct from the rest of Europe by historical accident. Yet if we go that far then maybe Canada earns a point to the US.
Another odd thing, DC's incredibly high per capita GDP is odd, the area doesn't feel particularly rich. Home prices reflect it, I guess. But many places in California seem nicer. Hell, many places in Ohio seem nicer. I have a sneaking suspicion the numbers are skewed by lobbyists or businesses supporting government that don't impact the local area as directly. Or commuters who really live (and spend) in other areas. It's like saying Delaware is full of companies. Well, on paper, yeah... but it's not some bustling Trantor where corporate skyscrapers block out the sun.
Maybe we should be comparing median regions? Or judge governments by how well off their worst regions are? Would you rather visit the rural south or in the Balkans? Where would you rather live for a year or two?
I'm skeptical about comparing such sprawling areas, I'm not sure it tells us much about the world.
On the other hand I'm not going to be offended if someone refers to a region as the wealthiest in the world as a rhetorical device, they were just endorsing an economic history about the US, they're going to say it's important, which seems at the very least worth granting for the sake of argument.
so you are comparing a country to a union of countries to demonstrate that one country is not equal to 28... Here is the funny thing: depending on how you look at it, the US is still bigger than all those 28 combined. So no it's not a myth, it's just you conflating two different things!
I guess this too would be an example of the 'banality of evil'.
(btw to get around the paywall just clink on 'web' to find it through google; it'll let you read it if google is the referrer)