[com2kid]

> So in your mind, slaves picked cotton in the south,

Slaves built the irrigation systems that made rice farming possible in the south. (People forget that the other huge slavery cash crop was rice).

Without the engineering and agricultural knowledge of slaves, many of the farms would have failed (and many did fail early on until the knowledge was spread around to plantation owners).

The image of slaves being from nomadic hunter gatherer tribes is a false narrative put into place by racists centuries ago.

> Surely you can conceive of a more complex world than that?

The US's short history is absurdly violent, but it also includes the US getting some of the best minds from basically all over the world to move here and build up a century's worth of IP.

[FredPret]

Your points about skilled slaves leave me puzzled. If they were agricultural and engineering geniuses, surely we should find thriving civilizations in Central Africa from around the time when they were abducted into slavery?

To ascribe America's economic and technological success to the slaves is not an argument that will convince anyone, or win your side any votes.

> The US's short history is absurdly violent,

Are you sure? Have you read much history from the formative years in other countries?

> but it also includes the US getting some of the best minds from basically all over the world to move here and build up a century's worth of IP.

They moved to the US for a reason. It is a shining beacon for nerds who would like to be rich.

[com2kid]

> Your points about skilled slaves leave me puzzled. If they were agricultural and engineering geniuses, surely we should find thriving civilizations in Central Africa from around the time when they were abducted into slavery?

This isn't some topic of debate. There is well documented historical proof of slaves designing and then building the rice field levees!

> To ascribe America's economic and technological success to the slaves is not an argument that will convince anyone, or win your side any votes.

The early economic success of the country was built off of slavery. That isn't something that seemingly needs discussion. The southern part of the US was a large economic power, even by European standards of the time.

> Are you sure? Have you read much history from the formative years in other countries?

I have, and in general other countries had a lot longer to perfect being assholes. The British empire did many horrible, horrible, things, but they took awhile to work up to it, it wasn't part of their initial founding.

Leopold II was in charge of an existing kingdom when he went on a quest to be one of the biggest assholes in history.

France is complicated, because their revolutions were so frequent for awhile, and a lot of the blood shed was French.

Meanwhile in America we got:

1. Mass murder of the natives 2. Inventing an entire new, more horrific type of slavery 3. Manifest destiny, with more genocide 4. Building the Transcontinental Railroad, with Not-Technically-Slavery 5. Massive racism against the people who built the Transcontinental Railroad

> They moved to the US for a reason. It is a shining beacon for nerds who would like to be rich.

Correct, the late 1800s and then the 20th century were a major turning point. Loosely enforced IP laws allowed Hollywood to thrive (super interesting history!), and poor environmental laws and a well educated workforce allowed the initial version of silicon valley to come about (look up why it is called silicon valley, and why it is also a superfund cleanup site!).

The US being slightly-less-racist against some people helped, and the less racist we were, and the more people we invited in from around the world, the better things got.

IMHO the best move the US Government could make for the economy is to offer the top 1% of graduates from the top universities in each major country an automatic VISA and a guaranteed path to citizenship.

The 2nd best thing the US Government could do for the economy is enforce Japanese style zoning laws on all major cities so people can actually afford to live in major metros again.

[FredPret]

I actually agree with many of the points you made here, especially your two policy proposals.

But I don't think you can mention the US in the same breath as imperial Belgium. Leopold was surely one of the low points of our species. But the Brits, for all the bad things they did - including in my native country - were the least bad empire up to that point, and forcibly ended slavery.

My broader point is that certain cultural values lend themselves massively to economic and technological development. European nations got these values by random chance, and then used this economic edge to then colonize the world. How else could tiny Belgium utterly subjugate the Congo?

[nradov]

The US's short history since 1776 is actually peaceful by relative standards. Despite the genocide of indigenous people, a revolution, slavery, a civil war, and some crime we have had a lower percentage of people killed through violence (including forced starvation) than China or Europe in the same period. Have you heard of WW1 and WW2? I make no excuses for the terrible things that Americans have done at times but the notion that Americans are somehow "absurdly violent" is simply ahistorical and unsupported by any hard data.

For all of its faults, it's great that the USA continues to be the country where the best minds from all over the world still want to move. It gives me hope for the future. Those immigrants are typically glad to be here and prefer to focus on building a better life instead of navel gazing recriminations over historical events.

[antisthenes]

> The US's short history is absurdly violent, but it also includes the US getting some of the best minds from basically all over the world to move here and build up a century's worth of IP.

Don't forget that US has some of the most prime agricultural land in the world, which they only got for the small price of genociding vastly less developed Native American tribes (with disease doing a large chunk of the work)

Given the violent European history several centuries prior, it would be absolutely unfathomable to just come across so much land with so little competition as the US colonies did.

This resource richness (and isolation via Atlantic) is very much responsible for US wealth today, perhaps as much as the brain drain of the 20th century, if not more.

[dingnuts]

> The image of slaves being from nomadic hunter gatherer tribes is a false narrative put into place by racists centuries ago.

This argument is a straw man and irrelevant. Everyone knows Africa is a huge continent and the civilizations on the coast that sold slaves captured them from a variety of other cultures more inland. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of their levels of development starting in 1500 until the 19th century. You aren't implying that before the Atlantic slave trade, Africa was a monolithic culture, would you? No, that would be absurdly ignorant

> US's short history is absurdly violent,

Compared to what? The Great Leap Forward? The reign of Alexander the Great? The last twenty years of Costa Rican history?

Bud I think you just don't like the US and maybe that's a personal problem.

[com2kid]

> Bud I think you just don't like the US and maybe that's a personal problem.

You'd be wrong. What I have done is read my history books, and visited historical sites all around the US and abroad.

Saying "shit was violent" isn't saying I hate this country. Saying "we fucked up and we shouldn't do that crap again" is how we improve as a people.

> This argument is a straw man and irrelevant. Everyone knows Africa is a huge continent and the civilizations on the coast that sold slaves captured them from a variety of other cultures more inland.

Go visit some southern plantations. Learn how the plantations were built.

Farming isn't just physical labor. There is engineering involved. Designing flood levees to water crops was a technology that the US plantation owners acquired from slaves who in many cases designed and built the levees used on plantations.

> Compared to what? The Great Leap Forward? The reign of Alexander the Great? The last twenty years of Costa Rican history?

Those countries do not have a short history. The US has a very short history and it has involved a lot of violence in rapid succession.

Trying to say that our success as a nation is purely because of Hard Work, Brains, and Grit, is a false narrative that will lead to our downfall if we do not actually understand why we succeeded.

Our economic success from the transcontinental railroad is because we imported near slave labor to built it, at a high cost of human lives, and then we attempted to kick many of the surviving immigrants out. That is the simple truth about the largest successful rail project in US history, and understanding how labor costs impact nationwide infrastructure build-outs is, IMHO, rather important.

The success of Hollywood is because patent laws were widely ignored on the west coast, which allowed technology to progress faster. Our failure to understand how too strict of IP enforcement stifles growth is why a lot of iterative improvements come out of China now, they can iterate faster w/o waiting for patents to expire.

Our success in science and technology is because we have been willing to allow the best minds in from all around the world by ensuring a higher quality of life in the US compared to other places. But we've taken that for granted for too long, and allowed that qualify of life to slip while other countries have caught up.

Jumping up and down shouting "we're the best!" is inane, especially while the rest of the world isn't just standing still.