Capitalism and culture interact. Before 1860, part of "capitalism" was also slavery. After that, it wasn't.

The causes for the US development are many, if I had to guess I would mainly bet on the extensive natural resources they had available.

The southern slave economy 1800-1860 performed very poorly, which is one of the underlying causes of the South wanting to secede from the Union. The industrial northern economy, based on free labor, completely overpowered the slave economy.

As for natural resources, Asia, Africa, and S. America are loaded with natural resources, yet the booms did not happen there.

> Asia, Africa, and S. America are loaded with natural resources, yet the booms did not happen there

They are also loaded with people. America was a free-for-all (except the American Indians, of course, who were overpowered by superior technology).

How is N. America different from S. America in the 1800s, in people and resources?

Oil? I'm unaware of any big (existing) land-based oil extraction in S. America. Maybe they had them in the past, though.

S. America had enormous silver mines. Venezuela is big on oil production.

I imagine the main resources that USA had are the huge plains to grow food in, in a relatively favorable climate. The industry comes later.

Maybe there was a lot of wealth in silver, I don't know about that. It seems that it had some land-based oil that they started extracting in the beginning of the 20th century, but I've no idea if they were as extensive as in the US (where there was Standard Oil, an immensely wealthy corporation).

Mind you, I'm not saying it was only the natural resources, there are other factors as well - different climate, geography, cultural background (English vs. Spanish/Portuguese), colonial history, ... I somewhere read that it's a curious phenomenon how so many countries in SA had so many dictatorships in sequence...

It's really hard to argue that S. America, Africa, Asia, etc., all don't have immense natural resources and favorable climates.

A small note. I read a Statfor report that North American Rivers were very important.

What about the systematic destruction and de-industrialization of places like India by the British tho?

Capitalism is unhalting in its slow shift toward efficiency. Every moment in a capitalist economic system there's someone racing one step ahead of someone else toward the bottom, screwing over a worker or consumer to make a penny more profit and beat his competitor. Women in the workforce was just one inevitable step, but a large one: families with two incomes obviously make more money than families with one, so it was inevitable under capitalism that eventually the more efficient double-income family would become required for survival. We're not there yet but we're barrelling full speed toward that goal, and after we reach it we'll find some other way to push even further toward the worst possible dystopia, peak efficiency.

edit: Also you're attributing success to capitalism where it should be attributed to slavery. It's easy to have a very strong economy when you have free slave labor and most economic gains are still limited by manual labor. If you want to conflate capitalism with slavery I think that's not unreasonable since slavery of some kind is essentially the end goal of capitalism but I'd assume that's a move you don't want to make, so don't try to claim success for your economic system off the backs of abused slaves.