<story><title>Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record</title><url>https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/04/13/the-lessons-from-americas-astonishing-economic-record</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PostOnce</author><text>My 2 cents, some of the reasons America succeeds:&lt;p&gt;(fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entities, and languages, and shipping costs more.&lt;p&gt;(fact) America is geographically isolated from war, can&amp;#x27;t be invaded, isn&amp;#x27;t saddled with war or reconstruction debts.&lt;p&gt;(fact) Also by virtue of geography, America can produce everything: it has plenty of space to create anything it needs, from mines to farms to factories.&lt;p&gt;(fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault. I am an American living overseas, and possibly one of the most offensive things anyone has said to me here is &amp;quot;you should lower your expectations&amp;quot;. I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations. I don&amp;#x27;t give a shit if I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying; 9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.&lt;p&gt;(opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower; in some other countries, you&amp;#x27;re forbidden from starting a new company and they will revoke your passport for some time. People don&amp;#x27;t try because there&amp;#x27;s no &amp;quot;try again&amp;quot;. They also have no access to capital, essentially.&lt;p&gt;(opinion) America also siphons wealth from every other nation; for example, it seems like people are more likely to invest in public markets in America than in their own countries a lot of the time. That means access to capital on the stock market is more accessible for American companies than others. It also seems like as soon as someone gets rich overseas, they move to America.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it&amp;#x27;s not all doom and gloom overseas, here in NZ all I have to do to start a business is walk outside and start selling shit. To file taxes for that all I have to do is fill in my Net Income on a 1 page web form and click Submit. There&amp;#x27;s no medical debt, car insurance costs $100 a year, and nothing has a barrier to entry; I can talk to the person in charge at just about any company or organization in NZ.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quicklime</author><text>I do agree with many of your points here, but just to nitpick...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault...9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.&lt;p&gt;So you state this as a fact about Americans in general, but then use yourself as the only proof. Isn’t 9 to 5 in the suburbs basically the end goal that most Americans dream of?&lt;p&gt;I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; (opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower&lt;p&gt;The idea of losing access to health care, going bankrupt and still being unable to rid oneself of crippling student loan debt sounds terrifying to me, and if I were living in the US I’d think twice about taking the sort of risks that I’d be ok with taking in a “welfare state”.</text></comment>
<story><title>Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record</title><url>https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/04/13/the-lessons-from-americas-astonishing-economic-record</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PostOnce</author><text>My 2 cents, some of the reasons America succeeds:&lt;p&gt;(fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entities, and languages, and shipping costs more.&lt;p&gt;(fact) America is geographically isolated from war, can&amp;#x27;t be invaded, isn&amp;#x27;t saddled with war or reconstruction debts.&lt;p&gt;(fact) Also by virtue of geography, America can produce everything: it has plenty of space to create anything it needs, from mines to farms to factories.&lt;p&gt;(fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault. I am an American living overseas, and possibly one of the most offensive things anyone has said to me here is &amp;quot;you should lower your expectations&amp;quot;. I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations. I don&amp;#x27;t give a shit if I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying; 9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.&lt;p&gt;(opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower; in some other countries, you&amp;#x27;re forbidden from starting a new company and they will revoke your passport for some time. People don&amp;#x27;t try because there&amp;#x27;s no &amp;quot;try again&amp;quot;. They also have no access to capital, essentially.&lt;p&gt;(opinion) America also siphons wealth from every other nation; for example, it seems like people are more likely to invest in public markets in America than in their own countries a lot of the time. That means access to capital on the stock market is more accessible for American companies than others. It also seems like as soon as someone gets rich overseas, they move to America.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it&amp;#x27;s not all doom and gloom overseas, here in NZ all I have to do to start a business is walk outside and start selling shit. To file taxes for that all I have to do is fill in my Net Income on a 1 page web form and click Submit. There&amp;#x27;s no medical debt, car insurance costs $100 a year, and nothing has a barrier to entry; I can talk to the person in charge at just about any company or organization in NZ.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tiktaalik</author><text>I think your point about USA benefiting from a single big market is a strong one.&lt;p&gt;Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographically isolated, and sharing many of the inherent benefits of NA that America has. Canada though, not often considered a real economic dynamo in the same way as the USA.&lt;p&gt;Well one big difference is that Canada is a relatively small population spread thin over an enormously large area.&lt;p&gt;In Canada there&amp;#x27;s a natural and easy North&amp;#x2F;South transportation and trade links, but East&amp;#x2F;West nature of the country breaks that. I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.&lt;p&gt;It would be remarkably simpler for a Vancouver company to expand into Seattle and Portland for example, but keeping within the Canadian borders the next natural expansion point is all the way over in Calgary, dramatically far away and a (surprisingly) remarkably different politicial and cultural environment.&lt;p&gt;Some of these problems for Canada mitigated after NAFTA in the 1980s, but still one can see here how the USA is in a better position with its huge and spread out population.</text></comment>