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> "anglo cultures" already had quite a lead before WW2, hard to miss that the previous superpower was the British Empire.

I think you're trying too hard to muddy the waters by creating a definition for "anglo" that does not match reality or any use of the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Americans

Even within "European Americans", nearly half has an ethnic origin that is classified as German, not English.

Another important aspect is immigration and naturalization. The bulk of high-skilled R&D specialists who turned the US into the technological powerhouse that it is aren't exactly Mayflower descendants. It's immigrants and first- and second-generation. So it's very hard to argue about "Anglo" thins with the extreme reliance on immigration and descendent of immigrants to play the roles that made all this progress possible.






A few points:

- German and other NW European cultures share the family atomization characteristic of Anglo-Americans

- Anglo as a term stems from England. England is named for the Angles, a Scandinavian/Germanic tribe that invaded Britain a long time ago. The term Anglo-American reflects the seminal English influence on American culture.

- The English and their descendant culture, America, basically invented the modern economic world and it predates WWII by a long time.

The idea that WWII is why America is on top is a-historical.


>The idea that WWII is why America is on top is a-historical.

How so?


The word "anglo" is so fraught that I think it's probably less useful to try to argue about what it means than it would be to just leave it alone.

I'm actually here to point out that the U.S. had the world's largest GDP as early as 1890, or as late as 1913, depending on your source of data and how it's estimated. So, WWII isn't the origin of that. We can now argue about whether GDP is a good indicator, but before doing that I'd ask for a better one (with historical data) to be suggested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of_t...




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