Also, even after the marshall plan, Germany kept its existing advantages in industry in large part simply by actually encouraging them to exist. The UK has no industrial policy and actively shed most industries in the 1980s, relying instead on direct investment and deliberately not growing domestic companies.
The observation is depressingly simple - competent economic management leads to great results. Typically that involves investing a bunch into developing industrial capability. Listen to people like Ed Deming. Let people build things. The US isn't doing that, we haven't seen any new industrial capability out of them in decades. Silicon Valley is the closest thing they have in the modern era and it is mostly services.
If you ask where the wealth is supposed to come from in the Chinese economy there are a lot of obvious answers - it could be energy innovations from the nuclear or renewable sectors. It could be manufacturing innovation as they work on improving their factories. Maybe they're going to come up with hot new products out of Shenzhen. They're big players in the AI revolution and working to build up domestic semiconductor capabilities. Maybe they're just going to wait for other people to come up with good ideas and copy them with speed and scale on their side.
The US has a much less obvious story. Biotech could be an amazing path, but they've left the ring for a lot of the more promising industrial options. And holding the health industry up as being the way to a bright future seems a bit weird. Maybe they succeed in building a services economy that impresses people; that'd be a cool first.
If you want to explain MAGA you have to understand it's a convenient alignment of the upper class and the lower class for different reasons.
Trump is currently causing an earthquake on behalf of the middle-lower class. Maybe blue tinted glasses prevent them from seeing it, but right now he is definitely doing the opposite of "entrenching the power of billionaires and the elite".
Unfortunately, I believe that this is a severe miscalculation on Trumps part, as the "kill the billionaires" class seems to be much more fueled by anger than by rational understanding.
So much of the US government has been focused on maintaining the global hegemony, US citizens wellbeing was sacrificed.
Trump was elected in reaction to rising global hegemony, or at least the effort put to maintain it, not the end of it.
To say US hegemony is numbered doesn’t make much sense. The US economy has only pulled headed further from any Western rival, and China’s economy is stumbling to the point it’s questionable if it can grow enough before it’s population starts shrinking. Russia has been stagnant since the 1990’s.
If anything, US ability to project power is greater now than any time in the past.
Absolutely not. It caved to Russia in the first place, it is weak against Russia. It WANTS to project power, but while doing so, it is showing itself crumbling into itself.
The sword remains unchanged.
> He represents what large part of Americans are - for internal reasons that have nothing to do with geopolitics.
No, it's all about geopolitics. Perhaps the most thorough analysis of the 2024 election concluded that Trump won 18-25 year old men (white + non-white). Trump did better among younger men than men 75+. Trump also won young white women. (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...)
Whatever preconception you have about what motivates Trump voters, you're incorrect. MAGA is about the impending loss of America's stature due to immigration and free trade. It's all about geopolitics.
Impending cause of loss of stature.
> Whatever preconception you have about what motivates Trump voters
By a large, based on what they themselves say and write, they wanted to cause harm to their perceived enemies and have fun watching it. That is primary reason for why conservative and republican voters vote.
Thats dumb to be polite but not surprising when considering where it comes from. Republicans simply can't admit their candidate is incompetent pos, superior ego thing or something. The incompetent part is what matters in this specific discussion, way worse than first term which was tampered by more reasonable people delegating actual tasks.
There does seem to be some sort of cycle in play: first a slave-driver-type economy creates a whole lot of wealth, then people get human rights, then they stop being driven like slaves and coast off the accumulated power, but forget the basic principles of wealth creation in the process (see also "good times create weak men" etc) and just spend all their resources arguing about who gets the wealth that is there instead of creating more. And I'm not saying that in an individualist framework - the reason individuals can't do it is a problem with the whole society, not with those individuals.
Can you explain this a little more? Why does having a trade deficit make your currency more valuable? My naive assumption is it would put more dollars in other countries, so they don't need them as much, making dollars less valuable.
Having a huge trade deficit is another way of saying you've sent a lot of your currency to other countries and haven't received it back yet.
I'm sure you can see how those are the same thing.
Almost nobody is spending resources in the US. And that's half of the problem. It's spent elsewhere, therefore labor stagnates or falls, only leaving low tier jobs to work. No factories locks out advancement reducing morale and draining the best that could have their kids advance.
In the US, you had skyrocketing prices on basics like healthcare and housing too, way more than elsewhere. UK has a lot of this problem too.
That together ultimately causes a reduction in teaching and educational standard, which further shrinks the high end advantage.
Short version: economy and people hollowed out in the middle is unsustainable.
And you can't make work sustainable and level the playing field when you have free trade with developing countries.
People cite Ricardo like gospel, but the math of free trade treats every safety net, worker safety protection, etc., as a loss of "comparative advantage." You know how Texas takes jobs from California by having lower standards, lower wages, etc.? That's what happens when you have free trade with third world countries. It's a race to the bottom.
I strongly suspect the US cannot maintain its outsized per capita wealth, on the back of the reserve dollar, in a world where China has an economy twice the size. Just as the UK couldn’t when the US economy overtook the British empire and the dollar replaced the pound as the reserve currency.
The question, instead, is how we’ll be able to adapt to that new reality. And I suspect we’d rather be Germany in that future than the UK.