> The US just has better DNA for commerce. Other countries can win battles, but never the war.

As concise and positive a statement of religious faith as any I've ever seen.

Not even. Religious faith is usually disconnected from reality, and in a way can't be proven false. Here a simple check backwards and outward will tell anyone that, if "DNA for commerce" makes any sense at all for a country, it applies very well to China.

We're all riding on the shoulders of giants. The men who designed the postwar world were remarkably prescient in their engineering of affairs to benefit the United States.

The US has another decade or two of riding that wave until things get hairy.

Have you read "The Accidental Superpower"? Highly recommended.

It covers the demography, geology and geography that guarantees the USA will continue to be the predominant power for the next 25 years, if not longer.

Not sure I buy all his arguments, but definitely worth a read.

The problem is the can-do, hardcore engineering types (particularly those without college training) are gone and supplanted by layers of bureaucrats and bean counters.

There's always a certain amount of faith involved in future-predicting. Show me a sure-fire way to predict the future in any better way, and I'll take that and make billions with it.

If seeing what you want to see qualifies as prediction, I'd say you have it down pat. Congratulations in advance on your Thielesque attainment.

When I was younger a common thing people said about China was that they were culturally incapable of innovation, and in my parents youth the same was said about Japan. Several years ago I found an article about olde-timey racism that said the Germans too couldn't innovate.

Where I'm going with this is you need to be extremely careful about these kind of blanket statements because you almost certainly have historic blinders on.

> His genetics are simply better.

> The US simply has better DNA for commerce

I'm sure the price will drop in the US for manufacturing devices (because the alternative is going out of business -- very few businesses are so sentimental about nationalistic supply chains that they'd eat a multi-hundred-percent markup).

But I'm interested in a more fact-oriented discussion (you probably don't think those are specific, detailed facts). The US, for instance, is relatively open for free flow of capital into and out of the country -- China doesn't allow that, and that helps commerce here. But if China changes their policies (which is not totally impossible), and, for instance, capital transfer out of the US is restricted as a result of a negotiation with Mexico (which a presidential candidate seems to be willing to do) then that advantage disappears. The Could also disappear if another major party's candidate for president gets their wish as regards offshore profits. Plenty of protectionism in all major parties these days, enough to sink this advantage, at least.

The US has a relatively high-trust business culture, which is more durable. But it's also changing in China, moving (perhaps not as quickly as some would like) away from a guangxi-based business system.

So a lot of these theoretically defensible advantages are actually pretty weak, and (while defensible) ill-defended.

> But I'm interested in a more fact-oriented discussion (you probably don't think those are specific, detailed facts).

I like facts as much at the next guy, but good, actionable, agenda-free facts are actually pretty hard to come by. So many times I've read a convincing article painting things a certain way, and then later seeing one convincingly saying that the previous article was full of misinformation.

You don't get out of the need for good, experience-based intuitive analysis just by looking at facts. And facts won't prevent you from being horribly wrong.

> Plenty of protectionism in all major parties these days, enough to sink this advantage, at least.

Protectionism is fighting a tide, it doesn't actually possess the capability to reverse decades of progress on globalization. Only to accelerate or decelerate it. It's now market forces that make the biggest difference, not political ones. Politics was never bigger than the market anyway, which is why market-friendly policies are better for people in the long run.

The US was the world's leading commerce nation from the 1950's (after the WW2 and the collapse of the British Empire). Based on sums of imports and exports it exceeded very other country comfortably.

Until 2014, when China overtook it.

While your argument about the cost of production isn't too far fetched, it is unclear what this magical "DNA for commerce" you speak of is? I've heard of this thing called "American Exceptionalism" - is this an example?

I don't see any mention of race. Is the belief that phenotype expresses genotype racist?

It's not literal. It's a comment about culture, not actual DNA.

nationomics ?