I'd highly recommend Fareed Zakaria's "Post American World". Give gives good insight into how America rose to power. WWII helped, but it wasn't the defining moment. It was the huge industrial advances at the end of the 19th century that shaped our economic leadership in the world. Before even WWI, we were the top producing nation in the world, with double digit growth rates year after year.
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You make some good points, but America didn't obtain any real power until after World War II. Our fortunes are actually quite recent.
I'd highly recommend Fareed Zakaria's "Post American World". Give gives good insight into how America rose to power. WWII helped, but it wasn't the defining moment. It was the huge industrial advances at the end of the 19th century that shaped our economic leadership in the world. Before even WWI, we were the top producing nation in the world, with double digit growth rates year after year.
Recent in terms of what? That's over 60 years ago. Unless the average human has started living to 100 or more, 60 years is a generation or more.
And I bet if you really looked at it, total GDP probably really took off during the industrial revolution, some 50 years before that.
How much of that is due to the safety we provided for European intellectuals?