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Notes -
Maddison gives US gdp/cap in 1700 as below world average (which seems a little low, I admit), only catching up to the UK around 200 years later. French peasants, who according to those numbers were richer than americans, were always one bad harvest away from starving during the 18th century.
This is yet another condemnation of GDP as a metric for prosperity, then. Whatever the numbers say, starvation was dramatically less common in the New World colonies than the old world. If an economist wants to quote numbers to me, that tells you what an economist is worth.
Because I'm a retarded autist with only one special interest I have to weigh in with relevant evidence. When daguerrreotypes became popular in the 1840s they were vastly more accessible in the USA than in any other country on Earth including their home of France. In the USA you routinely see occupational portraits of people of every social class and profession, carpenters, lamplighters, sailors, farriers, mill-girls, coopers, teamsters etc. In France and the UK (with every other country being negligible) you only see the upper classes, military officers and the like, you never see occupationals of random working class people. It is clear to me that already by 1840 the USA was VASTLY wealthier than every other country on Earth, at least when it came to the wealth of average people and even the lowest like night watchmen or lamplighters in the USA had more real purchasing power than most lawyers or doctors in France or Germany. Note, this only applies to the North in the USA, the South basically had daguerreotype production patterns that were closer to Continental Europe.
The Civil War did complicate things for a time but certainly by the late 1870s that was largely true, sure.
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What are you basing this on?
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