German engineering etc was famously rather good before the war too. The Ruhr valley is part of the reason for this: energy sources (coal) and minerals (iron, copper, etc) very close together. It was the ideal setting for an industrial awakening.

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.

It wasn't a criticism of Germany at all, just that I think alot happened there that was special politically with the east and west, support for reunified Germany was massive, it's just therefore a bit hard to say what would of happened if after the war it was lumped with huge debt and ignored.

Not being allowed a real military, protected by US resources instead, means a huge amount of investment freed up for the civilian sector (similar to Japan/Italy to some extent)

The special case was that big chunks of Germany ended up under the control of capitalists. The pattern in Germany, Japan and even Korea is that in the post-war era the US understood how to build up a country's economy and their policy formula was effective.

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.