naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Your typical globalist-hater doesn't understand that America's wealth comes from being the only global superpower.
Many caveats apply, but this table and other similar sources suggest that the United States was plausibly the richest country in the world by 1913 when it wasn't remotely hegemonic. I don't doubt that Americans reap benefits from worldwide hegemonic status, but the Monroe Doctrine seemed to suffice for generating quite a lot of wealth. The combination of land, resources, culture, and institutions was paying off while Americans were highly skeptical of foreign adventurism.
As Voxel says, the US was already globally the most powerful nation, had dominion in practice over the entire western hemisphere, had embarked on a colonial adventure in Asia and had participated in the Boxer rebellion conflict in China by 1913. It was obviously already an internationalist power. One of the great tragedies of the Mearsheimer-Walt-Buchanan matrix of bullshit is that a lot of people actually believe that the US was ‘isolationist’ before 1941 or something. In reality, the US was always a participant in the general European colonial project and was always an imperial, internationalist nation, it just manifested in a moderately different way.
By 1913, there was a certain degree of obvious US hegemony, even if other powers (the British) still looked preeminent: American ships had forcibly opened Japanese markets to the West, the US had recently defeated Spain and claimed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico (and for a brief time, occupied Cuba). The Great White Fleet had circumnavigated the globe making its presence known.
Certainly not the height of American power (which we don't even know if we've seen yet, I suppose), but anyone watching would not have written them off at the time either.
My personal intuition is that any inferences from an 'agricultural and manufacturing' era of the world are moot in the present. PPP is hard enough to quantify in 2023. PPP becomes completely irrelevant when you're comparing across centuries. It is the most vibes-based number you can possibly find.
More directly, Every SNP 500 company relies on having a global consumer base. In every mental simulation, if the US stops being the global superpower, it will get a lot poorer, even if other nations become similarly poor alongside it.
That being said, in a fully isolationist world, the USA would easily be the richest big country by virtue of having a large consumer base and being self-sufficient in practically every resource known to man. However, I expect it to be a much poorer and more miserable world to live in on average than what we have today.
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Notes -
Many caveats apply, but this table and other similar sources suggest that the United States was plausibly the richest country in the world by 1913 when it wasn't remotely hegemonic. I don't doubt that Americans reap benefits from worldwide hegemonic status, but the Monroe Doctrine seemed to suffice for generating quite a lot of wealth. The combination of land, resources, culture, and institutions was paying off while Americans were highly skeptical of foreign adventurism.
As Voxel says, the US was already globally the most powerful nation, had dominion in practice over the entire western hemisphere, had embarked on a colonial adventure in Asia and had participated in the Boxer rebellion conflict in China by 1913. It was obviously already an internationalist power. One of the great tragedies of the Mearsheimer-Walt-Buchanan matrix of bullshit is that a lot of people actually believe that the US was ‘isolationist’ before 1941 or something. In reality, the US was always a participant in the general European colonial project and was always an imperial, internationalist nation, it just manifested in a moderately different way.
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By 1913, there was a certain degree of obvious US hegemony, even if other powers (the British) still looked preeminent: American ships had forcibly opened Japanese markets to the West, the US had recently defeated Spain and claimed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico (and for a brief time, occupied Cuba). The Great White Fleet had circumnavigated the globe making its presence known.
Certainly not the height of American power (which we don't even know if we've seen yet, I suppose), but anyone watching would not have written them off at the time either.
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My personal intuition is that any inferences from an 'agricultural and manufacturing' era of the world are moot in the present. PPP is hard enough to quantify in 2023. PPP becomes completely irrelevant when you're comparing across centuries. It is the most vibes-based number you can possibly find.
More directly, Every SNP 500 company relies on having a global consumer base. In every mental simulation, if the US stops being the global superpower, it will get a lot poorer, even if other nations become similarly poor alongside it.
That being said, in a fully isolationist world, the USA would easily be the richest big country by virtue of having a large consumer base and being self-sufficient in practically every resource known to man. However, I expect it to be a much poorer and more miserable world to live in on average than what we have today.
Yeah, I would agree with all of that.
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