Item — HN Reader

> There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.

Your comment sounds like you didn't quite understood the point I made.

The whole point was that US benefited greatly from WW2 to reach the position of world's hegemon. But that happened nearly a century ago, and reaching the position vs maintaining the position are two entirely different sets of challenges.

My point was that WW2 gave the US a running start, but it still required work to preserve that advantage. The US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D was the key competitive advantage that allowed the US to preserve it's dominance until the present day.

To put it another way, WW2 helped attract the world's finest research talent, but the technological and scientific achievements that followed were the result of the investment in domestic talent that followed. You cannot have the likes of silicon valley without the US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D.

2 comments

now how much of it was good investment, and how much of it was just plain advantage due to that?

It is hard to separate those two to verify either - that is my point.

> maintaining the position are two entirely different sets of challenges.

I will give full credit to the golden generation of Americans and the generation before that. They built America on true merit and efforts. However, maintaining the position was easy for the boomer and subsequent generations - break the Bretton-Woods agreement and shatter the gold standard after the USD obtained the throne of the world's reserve currency. This enabled the US to print infinite amounts of money and pile up unlimited debt and use the cash to sponsor any investment, any amount of social-security, buy anything and have the largest defense budget - so they can stomp anyone they want, heavily sponsor "regime change" - and still have relatively low inflation. The rest of the world just needs to grin and bear it.

As a non-American, I am really hoping for de-dollarization and fully independent payment networks completely separated from the West. The Russia-Ukraine war and Trump sanctions has gotten us around 10% of the way there. Only then shall one see the real effect of that $33 trillion debt.