49 pointsby rbanffy7 hours ago13 comments
  • kevin_thibedeau5 hours ago
    In 1939 the US had an outdated navy, army, and air corps. European instability is the direct cause of the change in US military and economic dominance.
    • pjmlp4 hours ago
      It helped that US soil was barely touched during both WW.
    • jmyeet3 hours ago
      One of my favorite historical fun facts was that despite the Wright brothers flying the first place in 1903, at the start of WW1, the US was completely incapable of building an airplane and had to buy them from France and Great Britain. Why? Because of patent wars [1].

      The net effect of that was that Congress had to intervene and they created an avionics patent pool, a system that persists to this day.

      So whenever anyone says that patents foster innovation, just look at this or any number of historical counterexamples.

      As for WW2, the causes were historical. The US was still suffering from the aftereffects of the Great Depression and American isolationism. It's worth noting that there was a lot of sympathy towards Nazi Germany in the US with the American Bund Party who had a rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 [2].

      [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war

      [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...

  • smashini5 hours ago
    idk, maybe being on an isolated continent really helped
    • trollbridge4 hours ago
      I would consider Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean to certainly exist, and which formerly were British and Spanish colonies.
      • rbanffy3 hours ago
        The US has actively suppressed any development in countries that could become competitors or non-aligned regional powers. Think Chile, Argentina, and Brazil (at least twice).
    • redsocksfan454 hours ago
      [dead]
  • MSkill15 hours ago
    I don't think that the corporations and the government would allow a cell phone manufacturer or operating system to be developed that wasn't under their control.
  • fusslo4 hours ago
    Honestly, this is just a bad article.

    The history of engineering in the USA is actually SUPER important. The article touches on some restrictions the British imposed on their colonies, but it goes much further. The fight for 'Sovereignty' took a long time and was almost never certain.

    I HIGHLY recommend the Yale lecture series. They're not engineering-specific, unfortunately. But still really, really, good (I mean... it's Yale)

    The Revolution with Professor Freeman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shTBSGoYtK0&list=PLDA2BC5E78...

    America at 250 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TNcFQiqHGw&list=PLh9mgdi4rN...

    The Civil War and Reconstruction with David Blight - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXXp1bHd6gI&list=PL5DD220D6A...

  • snowpid5 hours ago
    Some nationalistic articles are just cringe.
    • yomismoaqui3 hours ago
      Remenber that nationalism if based on 2 things:

      - Hating people you don't know

      - Being proud of things you didn't do

  • hyko5 hours ago
    "In 1839 [...] the United States had already defeated Britain’s navy in two wars"

    This statement is wrong and trivially falsifiable. Perhaps the author meant that the U.S. had by that point won some naval battles against the British?

  • shapefrog5 hours ago
    Kinda glossed over the whole IP theft industrial espionage thing.

    Not at all ironic given the shrieking about China.

    • mc325 hours ago
      Back then there weren’t as many conventions and treaties governing IP, as one might imagine —which is why the British attempted export controls!
      • shapefrog5 hours ago
        I guess the same goes for why the Americans attempt export controls in 2026
        • pocksuppet5 hours ago
          Every successful country has done it. First they make liberal use of others' IP then when they are generating IP themselves they try hard to protect it.

          Not limited to IP, they also do this with real property when they can.

          Not limited to property, they do this with every single regulation. Think about Europe and chlorinated chicken.

    • 4 hours ago
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  • Kuyawa3 hours ago
    For 150 years after its independence the US was the land of progress by toil, sweat an innovation...

    ...then they invented the money printer and it all became lies, bribes and plunder

  • well_ackshually5 hours ago
    I know it's the 250th birthday and everything, but can the US stop deepthroating itself for a second ? It got handed absurd amounts of wealth, land, resources, investment, lessons from the old world and isolation & political stability.

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

    • al_borland5 hours ago
      Who handed the US all these things?
      • well_ackshually2 hours ago
        Europeans with the money and investments. Native americans who taught the first americans to survive off the land. The slave labor that americans were very happy to have that built their country. Europeans again with two consecutive world wars that led to the rise of the american industries and military complex.

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

      • exe344 hours ago
        The native Americans, geology, climate.
    • fusslo5 hours ago
      > "country that lived in easy mode succeeds", yay.

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

      • well_ackshually2 hours ago
        Mate, american history is so recent it can basically be covered in detail in a single middle school year. The US has had zero real external threats post revolution, so much land and resources it can afford to burn them for fun and was the recipient of the entire world's brain drain. Take a random south american country and it'll have a dramatically harder history. Including the part where the US probably attacked them or manipulated their elections.
    • mc325 hours ago
      We’re not the only ones with a wealth of natural resources. Canada, Russia, Argentina, Australia, Brazil all have per capita even more natural resources at their disposal.
      • canucktrash6695 hours ago
        With shitty climates. The surface area of optimal climate in the US is likely larger than that of all the countries you've named combined. What's optimal? For example in Canada most farmed areas yield only one harvest per year. And most of the land is barren wasteland. You have some of it as well, but it's not the majority of the territory.
        • amarant5 hours ago
          Brazil is pretty damn fertile, and nearly as large as the US though... If we're just talking about farmable land area, I'd be surprised if the US is larger than Brazil. Farmed land area is a different thing though. Not sure how what compares.
        • j05ev1f35 hours ago
          Geographic determinism is one of those theories that explains everything after the fact and predicts almost nothing
          • canucktrash6695 hours ago
            You could say that about any other determinism. Nevertheless, it's a huge factor in the wealth of nations and a pillar of geopolitics. It's also why we don't all speak german today... /s
        • wslh5 hours ago
          Argentina seems like a counterexample here: the Pampas are one of the world's major temperate agricultural regions.
          • canucktrash6695 hours ago
            Argentina's arable land is just 27% of what the USA has. Fact-checking myself... the USA has more arable land than Canada, Australia and Argentina combined. Russia has a lot, but the USA has the most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_arable_la...

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

            • wslh4 hours ago
              The thread was about climate. US is 3.5x greater than Argentina.
              • canucktrash6692 hours ago
                Not strictly about climate, also about surface area in optimal climate.
              • mc324 hours ago
                Not per capita. Look, Japan (and S Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, etc) have shit for natural resources yet they are not technologically retarded. They have a highly advanced economies and societies.
                • wslh4 hours ago
                  This is drifting from the point. The thread was about the share of territory with optimal farming climate, not per-capita anything, and not whether resource-poor countries can be advanced.
          • boelboel4 hours ago
            Honestly if other countries did the same stuff as Argentina they'd probably be way worse off than Argentina as the country is still relatively wealthy. They were arguably too rich (and not populated enough with 4 million people in 1900) for a while making industry, especially export oriented industry, less viable sort of like dutch disease.
    • cyanydeez5 hours ago
      it wasn't handed anything. America is basically a rape baby old enough to know better, but willing to do exactly as it's predecessors did.
  • homeonthemtn5 hours ago
    This article is cherry picked nonsense.
    • fusslo5 hours ago
      It's a 4 minute read.
  • jmyeet5 hours ago
    I guess it's time for some jingoistic rewriting of history. If you want to sum up America's rise to power it's the slave trade, war and a healthy dose of luck (eg the Louisiana Purchase).

    There is a concerted attempt to rewrite history on slavery. You will hear things like "slavery was an economic drain" or "slavery was inefficient" or even "it was technology like the cotton gin that created wealth, not slavery". All of it's nonsense [1].

    It's true that industrialization (particularly the railroad ans mass production of steel) was a huge driver in the mid-19th century but what really kicked the US into high gear was war [2].

    It's true that material conditions and real wages started stagnating in the 1970s but this piece writes that off as Wall Street shenanigans. This was a political goal to break organized labor. We had McKinsey producing reports to argue that executives were "underpaid" [3]. The post-war era went from a marginal tax rate of 91% and the CEO to median worker ratio went from 21:1 in 1965 to 351:1 in the 2020s [4]. But also the post-war economy shifted from housing being a utility to being a speculative asset. The median house price went from $18,000 to $26,000 between 1953 and 1973 (in nominal terms) [5] and decreased in real terms. And, well, we know what's happened since.

    But what's less well-known is the link between money going into housing and decline in manufacturing. That's not an accident. Why invest money and run a factory when sitting on a house produces a 7%+ real returns that are government-protected?

    As for the whole "right to repair" bit for tractors and the like, yeah, companies engage in rent-seeking behavior in a capitalist mode of production. Film at 11.

    [1]: https://equitablegrowth.org/new-research-shows-slaverys-cent...

    [2]: https://laraballard.substack.com/p/how-the-us-became-the-wor...

    [3]: https://observer.com/2013/08/the-godfather-of-ceo-megapay-mc...

    [4]: https://x.com/RBReich/status/1575516013009018880

    [5]: https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/

    • CMay3 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • boelboel3 hours ago
        While I do agree for the most part, some countries which innovated/used resources/used labor better or at the same level as the US didn't have the ability to just send their surplus labor westward to get some 'free' land. We'll never know how the Swiss would've done if they were able to get a population of 50 million.
        • CMay2 hours ago
          Well, many Swiss people came to the US and got land or started businesses, so it's not like Swiss people were left out of it. :)
      • stasomatic3 hours ago
        Russia - 1861. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia

        It's curious that serfdom rarely comes up. Not exactly slavery, but was, practically. Not conquered peoples, not POWs, "just local peasants".

        • jmyeet2 hours ago
          Follow-up question: who freed the serfs of 19th century Russia?

          Here's another (not so) fun fact: over a million serfs were freed in 1959. "Serf" is actually generous because these serfs could be traded like property. You know, like slaves. Where was this? Tibet [1].

          [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfs%27_Emancipation_Day

  • metalman4 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • brodouevencode4 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • acheron4 hours ago
      This is what HN is now, sadly.
      • well_ackshually2 hours ago
        I'm sorry, did you believe that HN is a US-only website? Ask dang to geoblock the rest of the world then.

        Or maybe, just maybe accept that the US is a highly divisive country and that pretty much nobody in the world really likes you.

    • FergusArgyll4 hours ago
      Humans get jealous, it's normal. The best you can do is just scroll past it and resolve not to be that kind of person yourself