| Cerebralbore101 said: You are right that the US was helped a lot by the fact that the rest of the world was hurt badly by WWII. Other things also helped a lot though such as... 2. Interstate highway system (authorized in 1956) made transportation of goods, and building materials easier. 3. Regulation of markets to help protect against things like pollution, low pay, and a ton of other things that can slow down an economy. 5. More people going to college thanks to the government subsidizing education. (G.I. Bill and the like) I'm not going to pretend to know exactly how much of it was a result of the rest of the world being bombed out, and exactly how much of it was a result of the above 5 things. But to just say it was all just a result of the rest of the world being bombed out is not the whole picture. |
1 and 2 had an effect but not so much for 3, 4, and 5 ...
Environmental regulations are just a slog for economic growth and depending how employees are paid less, it can actually increase productivity. You need to stop pretending that the so called scandinavian 'dream' of getting tons of state aids and strong employee unions are somehow viable when corporations in those countries like Ericsson and Nokia are falling victim to Chinese competitors like Huawei ...
Most of the America's golden age was due to a world in turmoil but now with strong competition from China, America can't afford to slip up anymore because the moment it does is the moment that China will seek to monopolize all high-end technology ...
Can you imagine a world one day where America and it's allies buys all of it's defense equipment from China ?! Do you not somehow see the conflict of interest this poses ?
| Cerebralbore101 said:
We were the current market leader in computer technology when ARPANET was being built, and that research eventually gave fruition to the internet as we know it. When we landed on the moon, we didn't just catch up to Russia in space tech, we blew right by them. Same goes for when we developed nuclear bombs. Government research didn't merely allow us to catch up. We passed current market leaders. Russia didn't have the bomb until 1949. |
The US was nearly ALWAYS the market leader regardless because the rest of the world was too busy recreating their own physical infrastructure ...
ARPANET was nothing more than a concept. The internet as we know it today is largely thanks to the contributions of many private investments and work from large corporations such as Bell Laboratories and Cisco but many of them had very few state subsidies work with as well. The internet wasn't created mostly by some government funding like you seem to believe but it was created in collaboration with many corporations all over the world ...
Yeah, I'm not sure if making a comparison between military technology like nuclear bombs to consumer technology is a great idea when the former has to face no market competition ...
| Cerebralbore101 said:
In 1989 there were 13.54 million people attending college in the US. In 2018 there were 19.83 million people attending college in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollment-and-projections-in-public-and-private-institutions/ The population of the United States was 246.8 million in 1989. So that makes the college enrollment rate about 5.4% in 1989. Using the same math the enrollment rate was almost exactly 6% in 2018. That's an 11% increase in almost 30 years. Now look at the following graph. And, yes that graph is adjusted for inflation. It's all in 2018 dollars. Why has the cost of public four year schools nearly tripled, while enrollment hasn't grown all that much? Why has price exploded, but demand has not? |
Sorry, but it doesn't work that way in the real world ...
increased enrollments =/= proportionally increased prices
And not to mention, post-secondary schools were far less advanced back then but they also had fewer facilities as well ...
| Cerebralbore101 said:
Yes, all those things out listed about China suck. Slave level working hours, no ability to move in country, income inequality, anti-union laws, etc. But that doesn't make them not a mixed economy. Mixed economy simply means the government, and businesses work together to sustain or grow the country's economy. You can be a mixed economy, and still be anti-freedom, high poverty, no workers rights etc. P.S. Trump's overall policies are extremely damaging to the U.S. economy as a whole. Even if he managed to reel in China, we'd still be going down the toilet fast thanks to his other policies. But let's not make this thread about that. That would be a whole other thread topic. |
They're a "mixed economy" for the right reasons, you have the wrong reasons to implicate why America should model it's mixed economy like China's for totally different reasons. China's system is optimized for growth and self sufficiency. Trump realizes a weakness with America's system is that it's not optimized for holding on to global monopolies and he's trying to fix this but it's proving to be very hard to prevent the transfer of power to China ...
Trump NEEDS to reel in China otherwise silicon valley as we know it may deindustrialize like the rust belt did and we won't see American brands like Apple, Google, Facebook or the others out there anymore in the future if they get ousted by Chinese competitors ...
Silicon valley performing well is good for America's interests but performing badly threatens American interests and to a lesser extent their allies interests as well ...
