> Lucky for a start that he was born in the US not, say, the Congo.
The US was created by its citizens. Any country can do that.
As for Steve Jobs, I worked for a company in the 70's that had everything Jobs had - and much more. It could have easily become what Apple became. But what was missing was the company didn't have a Steve Jobs that had the vision to create what Apple created.
I'm sure there were many, many contemporary companies in the same boat - unable (in retrospect) to see their hand in front of their face.
I had many opportunities to become a billionaire. I didn't not because I was unlucky, but because I was stupid and unwilling to take the risk necessary.
> The US was created by its citizens. Any country can do that.
Every country is, in aggregate, created by some portion of its citizens, but I don't think that necessarily implies every country has an equally plausible path to the positive social conditions of the US (in fact, it's an open question if the US has a plausible path to keeping its positive social conditions). There was a very narrow window of conditions that applied where enough enlightenment thinking, reflection on classical thinking, local colonial strength, and enough self-interest for a broad number of colonial Americans met a concept of the public good, and we still got a union that needs a hell of a lot of perfecting. If you take the culture of the early 19th century US and backport it to the late 18th, I'm not even sure you'd get anything half as enlightened.
The point isn't that people shouldn't try, of course. The point is that even the state of a given functioning industrialized democracy is partly a matter of lots of factors that no one has control over, which makes it reasonable to describe them in terms of luck.
> I had many opportunities to become a billionaire. I didn't not because I was unlucky, but because I was stupid and unwilling to take the risk necessary.
It is wise to realize when one has lost a roll of the dice because of a passed opportunity to cast them. It's also wise to realize that luck would have played a role if you'd taken the opportunity.
Why is it wise to have a negative view of opportunities that present themselves?
> that needs a hell of a lot of perfecting
It still works better than any other system. It wasn't that many years ago where what to write on bathroom doors bubbled up to get the attention of the US President. Or the fake crisis that there are many very rich people in the US. Or the drama over who is bending the knee and who isn't. The fact is that many of our headline problems are trivial when put in historical context.
> Why is it wise to have a negative view of opportunities that present themselves?
Recognizing that luck plays a role in the outcome of opportunity isn't a negative view, only an acknowledgment of what can't be controlled alongside what can, much like the one that you made tacitly when you used the term "risk."
> It still works better than any other system.
If we're speaking in general terms about market democracies, I sure know I like living in one, and yes, people living in most of those (including the US) could stand to appreciate how some things are actually working relatively especially by historical standards.
On the other hand if we're speaking in specific terms about countries, there are others which get notably better metrics than the US on things like the economic freedom index, high net worth individuals per capita, life expectancy per health care dollar spent, or bankruptcies per capita, which indicates some pause about how strictly to regard "better than any other system" and further room for optimization that clearly has substantial positive impacts on quality & length of life elsewhere.
The US was also created by its geography. Lots of space, lots of natural resources, etc... Even the best people can't make gold out of nothing, so to speak.
Everyone can be the US sounds a lot like the Mitt Romney "I couldn't pay for college, so I sold some of my stocks to pay for it" [0].
It's quite out of touch to be born in the richest country and then be surprised why other countries can't make it. It "takes money to make money". Thats not the only criteria, but it helps quite a lot.
> > Lucky for a start that he was born in the US not, say, the Congo.
> The US was created by its citizens. Any country can do that.
That's a very strong claim. Are you saying that Congo just doesn't want to be prosperous? That every country that isn't currently the richest in the world just... didn't decide to be become the richest in the world?
The path they chose is one that does not lead to prosperity. There's nothing inherently wrong with Congo or the Congo people.
What I find most sad is how few people want to emulate the United States, and how many want to emulate disasters like the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.
>The path they chose is one that does not lead to prosperity.
You're playing games here with 'chose', the US didn't choose to be a super power, they were an irrelevant sugar colony who lucked upon the stupidity and self-destructiveness of Europe (from Napoleon to Hitler) and a continent-worth of land whose inhabitants are easily devastated by old world diseases. I don't think you can attribute this to any choice or planning on part of anyone, at every single point in history the actions and incentives of people are fully explained by a simple distributed greedy algorithms, choosing to maximize things that turn out to be wildly wrong in retrospect and not what the children of the next generation want (which is also wildly wrong and not what the children of the next generation want, which....).
Even in a perfect information game like chess a single mistake can doom you, even in perfectly mutable, free, abundant and error-correctible computers a single bad state can (and often does) cascade into a failure that requires nothing short of full restart. Life is orders of magnitude worse than those 2 (perfect!) systems. Life is multi-way chess where the descendents of the players continue the game for them. You don't choose paths, they choose you. People hundreds of years removed and thousands of kilometers apart doom and bless you into fates beyond your comprehension.
What happened in South America? Compare the US to South America over the last 400 years in the light of your statements.
Also compare with Japan and Germany, both of which turned to free markets after WW2 and became quite wealthy. Japan in particular has no natural resources to speak of.
I see a borderline failed state. The fact people are rushing there from other failed states is no signifier of confidence as far as I’m concerned.
Generally I see it as a warning sign for western ideals, and a great tragedy waiting to unfold if the shit hits the fan.
When pressed, I’ll express my concern that a population of people who have had it so good for so long have done so little to agree about what it means to be human and autonomous and as a result have completely failed their founding fathers.
"The path they chose", i.e. they deserved it? Also the Democratic Republic of the Congo (in comparison to "Republic of the Congo") was fiercely anti-communist [0] and backed by the US, so I guess that didn't help them with their prosperity either.
The US was created by its citizens. Any country can do that.
As for Steve Jobs, I worked for a company in the 70's that had everything Jobs had - and much more. It could have easily become what Apple became. But what was missing was the company didn't have a Steve Jobs that had the vision to create what Apple created.
I'm sure there were many, many contemporary companies in the same boat - unable (in retrospect) to see their hand in front of their face.
I had many opportunities to become a billionaire. I didn't not because I was unlucky, but because I was stupid and unwilling to take the risk necessary.