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by yummyfajitas 5762 days ago
Well, the US is richer (PPP adjusted) than nearly every single one one of those countries (the sole exceptions being Norway and a couple of city states). In the one case where I've seen good data (US vs Sweden), the disparity gets even bigger if you compare Swedes to Swedish Americans.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-o...

So maybe the US is doing something right after all.
1 comments
nanairo 5762 days ago
... or maybe that you did something right in the past.

By that meter then Nokia is doing things right too.

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nir 5762 days ago
Interestingly, Nokia's downfall is caused in part by its failure to compete with Google & Apple's - two American companies - innovation.
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nanairo 5762 days ago
Nobody is arguing that American companies can't compete, or that America isn't a great country. But the UK was an innovator once, and so was Italy before it.

That said you could very well end up with a future with very powerful and very competitive american companies... in a country with no middle-class and a strong divide between managers and those with money, and the labour force with little privileges.

Edit: I think USA got to where it is for a certain pragmatism that it seems to have lost. Now ideologies (free market, socialism, God, etc...) seem to be all that matter, and society is suffering for it. GDP is not a good indicator of the society's wellbeing and even less is current GDP for tomorrow's society's. At the end of the day the richest man in the world is Mexican, but Mexico is hardly a first world country.

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nir 5761 days ago
I agree the problems you're referring to are real, but it seems to me Americans are more aware of them than you might think (BTW, I live in NYC but I'm not American).

They elected a president who's decidedly a pragmatist (I think McCain would have been one as well, though not his VP candidate..), and one of the most talked about issues here is the disappearing middle class. My view is that they ultimately do have a good system in place to discuss and hopefully improve on these problems.

Their core strength is flexibility. I still remember talk of Japan overtaking the US in the 80s, and Japanese companies are still strong in the markets they dominated at the time - but the Americans have moved on to lead in software/Internet industries. That's not coincidence, in my opinion.

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