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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Welp, it's been a good run. Seems like becoming the next Argentina is nearly a fait accompli at this point.

The notion that America is exceptional for some intangible or irrevocable reason has always been absurd. Our power and wealth came from our stable institutions, extensive use of soft power, and from the two industries where we had a massive structural advantages that were hard for any other country to overcome: [b]academia and Hollywood[/b]. Stable government institutions are already starting to fail, soft power is gone, and the American cultural brand that supported Hollywood is on the outs. If we allow our best researchers to leave, then there's really nothing left to prevent us from becoming a middle-income country.[/quote]

Academia and Hollywood were not the two industries that made America dominant in the 20th Century.  It was the fact that Europe was destroyed in the wake of WWII, China hadn't risen as a world power, Russia couldn't match American industrial and manufacturing prowess, etc....[/quote]

Maybe immediately post-WWII, but the last several decades of growth have been driven by America's particular ability to generate new ideas and then start businesses to capitalize on them. We dominated the early Internet because our we invented it with Federal researchers and academic grants, we dominate the tech sector because we import top talent from around the world and make it easier and more profitable for them to develop new ideas here than in their home countries, etc. We are competitive in many other sectors, despite our high labor costs, because of the cultural cachet that America has historically held in most of the world. An image marketed, among other things, by a multibillion dollar film industry that sells people on America's (traditional) ideals. All of those advantages are being dismantled, and we will be much poorer for it.

Btw, I picked Argentina specifically because it was as wealthy as Western Europe after WWII, but declined after an era of populism and instability. It's not an unlikely outcome for us at all.[/quote]

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