Japan and Germany had to rebuild themselves from complete obliteration. Eastern Europe had to rebuild itself from decades of Soviet occupation and forced impoverishment: Czech took their GDP per capita from $2,800 in 1991, to $22,000 by 2008. Lithuania took its GDP per capita from $2,100 in 1995 to $15,000 by 2008; Estonia went from $3,000 to $18,000 over the same time frame.
I guess you can either whine about the wealth and power of other nations, or you can turn yourself into a successful nation like all of those examples have done.
Germans, Czech, etc. were obviously so much smarter and hard-working than us - that's exactly the reason why they created a successful nation.
I have no words.
I said, directly and indirectly, that developing nations benefit immensely more from developed nations than vice versa. It was similarly true for the US as well when it was a developing nation. It's factually true and very easily demonstrated: it's why the global median standard of living is at the highest it has ever been, famines are almost non-existent globally, the median life expectancy globally continues to expand, there is less extreme poverty today than at any other time in recorded history, global equality is at an all-time high and has continued to improve, food security is at an all-time high, infant mortality is at an all-time low, etc.
If you were right, none of that could be true, because all the wealthy & powerful nations would be busy oppressing all the poor nations, such that they could never climb the standard of living tiers.
Over five decades Vietnam suffered repeated occupation, genocide, famine, civil war, a brutal form of Communism, and overall had a large percentage of its population killed. Today they're on a booming express train toward a middle income economy. What excuse could you possibly present next to that? Countries like Vietnam (and China before it), or Czech, or Estonia, demonstrate very clearly what's possible and they deserve credit for their accomplishments.
Few bubble influences there as well, with your willingness to defend a viewpoint with extreme bias without even any context of what the OP is talking about. It seems like you would go to any length to prove to yourself that you deserve to go to Harvard and spend your vacation money on NYC or wherever while the kids mine cobalt in Africa and middle-easterners get neglected by their "own" governments cuz selling oil to first-world is more lucrative than educating a nation.
Or, see: China's several trillion dollar trade surplus with the US over the last 20 years.
25% of Vietnam's entire economy is currently made up of US imports from their nation, and it's almost all trade deficit for the US. Their economy is being constructed by US capital and US consumers, enabling them to dramatically lift their standard of living, exactly as China has.
Then we get to the free technology transfer, which enabled countries like China to rapidly leap forward without having to invent much of anything new. They get to focus on implementing things that are already known to work. The US invented nearly all the modern tech infrastructure, the list is hilariously long, here's the short version:
Internet, transistor, router, microprocessor, computer graphics, fiber optics, ram, most operating system tech, Unix, computer networking, the mobile phone, the smart phone, the hard drive, SSDs, the LCD, the LED, the laser, tcp/ip, hypertext, C/C++/Java/JavaScript/Basic/etc., the digital camera, qwerty keyboard, cable modem, the spreadsheet, the relational database, the fax machine, the GPU, 3D graphics cards, ethernet, hypertext, the mouse, streaming media, email, GPS, ecommerce.
Then we can go further back in time to all the older industrial technology invented by the US and Western Europe, which developing nations have been able to free ride over the last 50+ years.
And that's before we get to vaccines, medtech, biotech, pharma, genetech, aerospace, vast free research & data, process knowledge, and on and on.
Oh the exploitation, make it stop.