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by 35208654 1159 days ago
Well, being the only country left with any manufacturing after a catastrophic world war is one major reason.

Also, navigable waterways. Transporting goods by water costs 1/100th what it costs to transport over land. After the US established a corp of engineers to dredge our waterways to make them passable, the ability to transport goods increased substantially, making internal trade extremely cheap.
2 comments
crop_rotation 1159 days ago
> Well, being the only country left with any manufacturing after a catastrophic world war is one major reason.

This is not the reason. Post WW II Europe was able to rebuild and for a long time they had some of the biggest companies and for a long time EU as a whole was a bigger economy than the US. It's only in the last 2 decades where the US is significantly outpacing the EU. And there are no signs of slow down.

WW II can not be the reason EU has few big tech companies. (relatively compared to the US, few exceptions always exist)

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smnrchrds 1159 days ago
> for a long time EU as a whole was a bigger economy than the US. It's only in the last 2 decades where the US is significantly outpacing the EU.

Interesting. I couldn't find a good graph showing this. Do you by any chance have a graph or a source?

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revelio 1158 days ago
I don't know when it was larger. However in the 1960s it was of equal size.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-domestic-product?ta...

Starting in the 1980s US GDP inflected and EU did not. The gap appeared then and has got wider ever since. What happened in the 80s? Probably tech?

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35208654 1158 days ago
They were able to rebuild… because the US funded it.

The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. It was enacted in 1948 and provided more than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent.

That’s about $187B in 2022 dollars. In addition to technology and trade.

… followed shortly after Breton Woods, which secured trade for the rest of the world in exchange for not joining up with the Soviets.

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fkcgnad 1159 days ago
I think it's just luck. In terms of big tech most of the US is like Europe. It's only silicon valley that has this type of innovation.

But the innovation has been around a singular avenue of software. It is a mistake to think that software is the most important driver of economic growth.

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Paul-Craft 1159 days ago
> navigable waterways.

Not for much longer. But, hey, we created a lot of shareholder value along the way, right?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/bodies-water-north-america-drying-...

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