this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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It's really remarkable how Americans have sleepwalked into stagnation without even noticing it. In 1979, the US was well ahead of East Germany in terms of living standards, human rights and quality of governance. Today, it is far behind in all of these aspects. What happened? Green line went down.
There is this myth that the relative prosperity in the US in the mid twentieth century is the norm, and not result of a geographically isolated US with ramped up production and distribution while so much of the rest of the world was recovering from WW2.
Well, the recovery from WW2 didn't take that long. A big factor that isn't often mentioned is the existence of a large domestic internal free trade zone with few legal and cultural barriers to trade, in addition to plentiful natural resources. There is still nothing that rivals the US in this regard (the EU might have internal free trade in theory, but in practice there are numerous barriers), but its substantial problems in governance and large income inequality (compared to top-tier economies) more than negate these advantages.
Well, I don't think that East Germany in particular is a good example of this, it has had some very harsh changes that are not comparable to almost any other place in the world. I suppose it also applies and is more comparable, with other European countries like France or Denmark, to say two at random.