In 1939 the US had an outdated navy, army, and air corps.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.
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].
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).
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.
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)
"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?
yeah, it's worded strangely; as if both conflicts were exclusively/divisively maritime.
Which is a shame because the role of the Colonial Navy and later the U.S. Navy in the war of independence and later in the War of 1812 is actually fascinating and often overlooked
We did flex quite a bit on lesser powers, though, even in the 1800s. The US Navy was infamously rebuilt after the revolution to fight a war against Tripoli.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We’re not the only ones with a wealth of natural resources. Canada, Russia, Argentina, Australia, Brazil all have per capita even more natural resources at their disposal.
With shitty climates. The surface area of optimal climate in the US is likely larger than that of all the countries you've named combined. What's optimal? For example in Canada most farmed areas yield only one harvest per year. And most of the land is barren wasteland. You have some of it as well, but it's not the majority of the territory.
Brazil is pretty damn fertile, and nearly as large as the US though... If we're just talking about farmable land area, I'd be surprised if the US is larger than Brazil. Farmed land area is a different thing though. Not sure how what compares.
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
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.
Not per capita. Look, Japan (and S Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, etc) have shit for natural resources yet they are not technologically retarded. They have a highly advanced economies and societies.
This is drifting from the point. The thread was about the share of territory with optimal farming climate, not per-capita anything, and not whether resource-poor countries can be advanced.
Honestly if other countries did the same stuff as Argentina they'd probably be way worse off than Argentina as the country is still relatively wealthy. They were arguably too rich (and not populated enough with 4 million people in 1900) for a while making industry, especially export oriented industry, less viable sort of like dutch disease.
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.
This fantasy that the US was atrociously and morally behind the curve on slavery seems to get repeated by Marxist types that love to promote slavery as a unique blemish on the US.
The US as a whole abolished slavery in 1865 (though some states abolished it decades earlier) and it isn't surprising that it might take a little longer in a country structured like the US as you either need to reach or force some kind of consensus which is easier to do in some countries than others.
Mexico - 1829
England - 1834
France - 1848
US - 1865
Brazil - 1888
Many other countries were still abolishing slavery well into the 1960s. Also important to note that, the years these laws were passed around the world doesn't mean slavery stopped instantly at that date. It was quite the norm that slavery continued after it was abolished, not only in the US, but globally. It may not have been realistic to truly end it abruptly for many reasons, so some transition period was necessary.
Also worth mentioning that the US had a relatively small per capita population of slaves compared to many other countries. During this same relevant time period the US was seeing huge amounts of immigration from Europe which dwarfed any sort of slave labor, an expanding rail network, the leveraging of deep water harbors for shipping thanks to wonderful geography and an energy boom. New York was an absolute powerhouse of shipping.
We did containerize some domestic shipping before the rest of the world, but transitioning to it fully took some time.
Many countries had innovators, but what did they do with their innovators? Many countries had labor (slave or not), but what did they do with their labor? You can keep asking a series of questions like this and tend to find that US adapted its use of resources better on average.
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.
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].
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.
It helped that US soil was barely touched during both WW.
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...
idk, maybe being on an isolated continent really helped
I would consider Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean to certainly exist, and which formerly were British and Spanish colonies.
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).
[dead]
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.
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...
Some nationalistic articles are just cringe.
Remenber that nationalism if based on 2 things:
- Hating people you don't know
- Being proud of things you didn't do
"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?
yeah, it's worded strangely; as if both conflicts were exclusively/divisively maritime.
Which is a shame because the role of the Colonial Navy and later the U.S. Navy in the war of independence and later in the War of 1812 is actually fascinating and often overlooked
John Paul Jones, for example had an amazing (as in interesting, not 'goodly') life ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Jones )
And the Battle of Lake Erie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Erie
I completely fail to recall that time we burned down Buckingham Palace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington
We did flex quite a bit on lesser powers, though, even in the 1800s. The US Navy was infamously rebuilt after the revolution to fight a war against Tripoli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tripoli
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_corsairs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars
Before the end of the century we'd fought a hundred or so largely forgotten wars. Who remembers that time we invaded Korea? No, the other one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_expedition_to_Ko...
Or Fiji? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Fiji_expedition
Or New Orleans? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811_German_Coast_uprising
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
Kinda glossed over the whole IP theft industrial espionage thing.
Not at all ironic given the shrieking about China.
Back then there weren’t as many conventions and treaties governing IP, as one might imagine —which is why the British attempted export controls!
I guess the same goes for why the Americans attempt export controls in 2026
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.
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.
Who handed the US all these things?
Europeans with the money and investments. Native americans who taught the first americans to survive off the land. The slave labor that americans were very happy to have that built their country. Europeans again with two consecutive world wars that led to the rise of the american industries and military complex.
Americans are not the self made men they made themselves believe to be. Played it well? Certainly. Starting with all the possible cards in your hand and geopolitical stability makes it very easy to do so.
The native Americans, geology, climate.
[dead]
> "country that lived in easy mode succeeds", yay.
or "How to say you know nothing about American history without saying you know nothing about American history"
Mate, american history is so recent it can basically be covered in detail in a single middle school year. The US has had zero real external threats post revolution, so much land and resources it can afford to burn them for fun and was the recipient of the entire world's brain drain. Take a random south american country and it'll have a dramatically harder history. Including the part where the US probably attacked them or manipulated their elections.
We’re not the only ones with a wealth of natural resources. Canada, Russia, Argentina, Australia, Brazil all have per capita even more natural resources at their disposal.
With shitty climates. The surface area of optimal climate in the US is likely larger than that of all the countries you've named combined. What's optimal? For example in Canada most farmed areas yield only one harvest per year. And most of the land is barren wasteland. You have some of it as well, but it's not the majority of the territory.
Brazil is pretty damn fertile, and nearly as large as the US though... If we're just talking about farmable land area, I'd be surprised if the US is larger than Brazil. Farmed land area is a different thing though. Not sure how what compares.
Geographic determinism is one of those theories that explains everything after the fact and predicts almost nothing
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
Argentina seems like a counterexample here: the Pampas are one of the world's major temperate agricultural regions.
Argentina's arable land is just 27% of what the USA has. Fact-checking myself... the USA has more arable land than Canada, Australia and Argentina combined. Russia has a lot, but the USA has the most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_arable_la...
Not sure where to find an aggregate growing days figure, but there's clearly less of them per arable surface area in Canada compared to the USA.
The thread was about climate. US is 3.5x greater than Argentina.
Not strictly about climate, also about surface area in optimal climate.
Not per capita. Look, Japan (and S Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, etc) have shit for natural resources yet they are not technologically retarded. They have a highly advanced economies and societies.
This is drifting from the point. The thread was about the share of territory with optimal farming climate, not per-capita anything, and not whether resource-poor countries can be advanced.
Honestly if other countries did the same stuff as Argentina they'd probably be way worse off than Argentina as the country is still relatively wealthy. They were arguably too rich (and not populated enough with 4 million people in 1900) for a while making industry, especially export oriented industry, less viable sort of like dutch disease.
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.
This article is cherry picked nonsense.
It's a 4 minute read.
is that meant as a response?
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/
This fantasy that the US was atrociously and morally behind the curve on slavery seems to get repeated by Marxist types that love to promote slavery as a unique blemish on the US.
The US as a whole abolished slavery in 1865 (though some states abolished it decades earlier) and it isn't surprising that it might take a little longer in a country structured like the US as you either need to reach or force some kind of consensus which is easier to do in some countries than others.
Mexico - 1829
England - 1834
France - 1848
US - 1865
Brazil - 1888
Many other countries were still abolishing slavery well into the 1960s. Also important to note that, the years these laws were passed around the world doesn't mean slavery stopped instantly at that date. It was quite the norm that slavery continued after it was abolished, not only in the US, but globally. It may not have been realistic to truly end it abruptly for many reasons, so some transition period was necessary.
Also worth mentioning that the US had a relatively small per capita population of slaves compared to many other countries. During this same relevant time period the US was seeing huge amounts of immigration from Europe which dwarfed any sort of slave labor, an expanding rail network, the leveraging of deep water harbors for shipping thanks to wonderful geography and an energy boom. New York was an absolute powerhouse of shipping.
We did containerize some domestic shipping before the rest of the world, but transitioning to it fully took some time.
Many countries had innovators, but what did they do with their innovators? Many countries had labor (slave or not), but what did they do with their labor? You can keep asking a series of questions like this and tend to find that US adapted its use of resources better on average.
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.
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. :)
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".
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
The amount of anti-US sentiment and dismissiveness in these comments are just...laughable.
This is what HN is now, sadly.
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.
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
lmao
my oh my, the hardware haters are smoking there hats. the real is all. try it, it's good.