Comment by Xelbair
>The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon.
That advantage was: being the only country that wasn't ravaged by war, and that profited for a while by trading with every faction.
Some of countries were also severly kneecapped by US betrayal of promises, made by allies - to restore pre-war borders, and handover of them to USSR - that means less competition.
That also lead to US dollar becoming world's reserve currency, which may have affected the measured drop afterwards.
There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.
> There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.
Your comment sounds like you didn't quite understood the point I made.
The whole point was that US benefited greatly from WW2 to reach the position of world's hegemon. But that happened nearly a century ago, and reaching the position vs maintaining the position are two entirely different sets of challenges.
My point was that WW2 gave the US a running start, but it still required work to preserve that advantage. The US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D was the key competitive advantage that allowed the US to preserve it's dominance until the present day.
To put it another way, WW2 helped attract the world's finest research talent, but the technological and scientific achievements that followed were the result of the investment in domestic talent that followed. You cannot have the likes of silicon valley without the US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D.