The U.S. was a developing country for *maybe* only 100-150 years. After that, the U.S. became arguably the largest economic, military, academic, manufacturing powerhouse the world has ever seen.
Yet, countries that have been around since ancient times are still struggling to even feed or house their population.
How is that possible?
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Something I don’t see in the comments here is that the 1000 year old civs have already boomed in their time. Ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq: first of their kind), ancient Egypt: medicine, language, sea navigation, mathematics and architecture, ancient Persia: literal near global domination, Greece, Rome, ottoman, Mongols. Messing with any of those civs in their time was a guaranteed loss.
When you’re around that long it becomes exceptionally hard to stay. The USA is younger than all of these places, so they had the advantage of applying learnings, newer government models, hiring proficient engineers from abroad, etc.
Think if you were to suddenly receive a new plot of farmable land and had near infinite resources to develop it, you’d probably be able to do a lot of research on the best way to set up. Ancient civs never had that, they had to learn and fail by trial.
But to put it into some perspective: this is why countries that suddenly came into real money (gulf, Qatar, etc) are building things like underwater taxi highways, fully air conditioned stadiums, solar cities they power themselves… They’re not starting from scratch, they’re standing on the shoulders of giants.
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