It's very easy to argue that the United States is wealthier than it was in the past and wealthier than China is today, because these things are unambiguously true.
American wealth and prosperity is higher than it's ever been.
If the vast majority of Americans are not benefiting from it, it's because of the concentration of wealth within US driven by domestic American policies, more than anything else.
The U.S. is far wealthier than any nation ever, including the U.S. of the 1930s and 40s (it's not even comparable). Whether or not it's funded has is not due to affordability.
I’ll contest that! By what metric do we have access to a vast quantity of high quality consumer goods? Medicine, housing, and food are some consumer goods that many Americans have trouble affording. Plus, the number of Americans with replicators is 0; we’re an extremely, extremely underdeveloped nation in that regard, and have lots of room to move up.
No, I wouldn’t rather live in China/russia/medieval Europe/on a desert island/whatever, to cut off any confusion there. I’m just saying “we’re rich comparatively” isn’t very useful in this case
Yes? The postwar economy of the 1950s was one of the most prosperous the US has ever seen.
This is simply false. US GDP per capita in the 50s was less than a third than what it is right now. Growth in the 50s was sluggish compared to the 60s, 80s or 90s. US is by any means more prosperous today than it was in the 50s, both on individual level and also as a whole.
Yup. I don't think most people today realize what a one-time event American wealth was after world war 2.
After WW2, the rest of the developed world was destroyed and the under-developed world was colonies. Today, they all have woke citizens working hard to reach a developed lifestyle. Which means America has to compete, hard!
> Americans own around half of all global financial wealth.
Americans also had the privileged position of being located on a continent that has friendly neighbours, has extensive natural resources at its disposal, and half the continent did not get leveled during two world wars.
Not to mention, most of the financial wealth is bound up in dollars (mainly because of the aforementioned historical reasons), which in terms leads to it being stored in the US.
It is massively unfair to make comparisons to the 1950's. Basically, the USA was the only developed country with infrastructure that had not been bombed to rubble in WWII. In addition, China and India were undeveloped and just recovering from foreign occupation / colonialism. There was basically no competition for American manufacturing.
Also, if you look at inequality, you have to differentiate domestic vs global inequality. The domestic inequality is higher now, but global inequality was much higher in the 1950s.
Allianz's 2015 report indicates North America holds 45% of all global financial assets. Unless you're pretending that Canada and Mexico hold 20% of all global assets, your figures are wildly off the mark (Canada is less rich than the US per capita on average, and Mexico is far less so); at a minimum the US holds 40% to 42% of all global wealth.
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