[Undertoad]

There's no more insulting phrase to Europeans!

I think I've got it though. Why did America become so powerful from 1935-2000?

Was it the rules, or was it the people?

It was the combination. A culture of fiercely independent, highly diverse, motivated dreamers combines with a market-oriented system to produce very high levels of productivity.

This in turn created a system wherein everyone was motivated to maximize human output

Now, many times I hear from my fellow Merkins that the country is somehow "broken" and will not return to its greatness

I think partly we are adjusting from a world where everyone is poor, to a world where everyone is middle class

It was nice having to only compete with 50 million office workers. I'm not sure how I will compete with 1 billion office workers

It seems like this is true of Japan as well. But what we are seeing is our cultures come to a pinnacle in an era when the rest of the world is coming online, with the advances of a century, combined with the marvelous advantage of general world wide peace.

How much we might achieve, when we do not have to stop every 20-30 years to destroy each other.