alt Hacker NewsThe U.S. will always dominate because they consume everything and make really nothing. The second people in U.S. stop consuming everyone else pays the price.
The U.S. will always dominate because they consume everything and make really nothing. The second people in U.S. stop consuming everyone else pays the price.
The U.S. is 4% of the world population. Back when the world population was 2B people and the developed world population was about 400M and the U.S. was 130M of that and the only market whose capital stock hadn't been totally destroyed by WW2, we were crucial to the world economy. But now the world population is 8B, the developed world population is 6B, and the U.S. is 330M of that. In terms of raw size of consumer markets, the world can ignore the U.S. The tricky part is the dependence on U.S. software and financial companies for significant parts of the global information infrastructure, but there's already a strong movement to that.