Arnold Kling

Growth and Power

Arnold Kling, Great Questions of Economics
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The United States economy has grown more than that of other industrialized economies, and Paul Kennedy traces out the implications of this for military power.

by the late 1980s [the U.S.] may have possessed only about 22 per cent of global gross domestic product...right now, it contains about 30 per cent of to tal world product [sic. gross domestic product is something you produce annually--it is not something you possess or contain]

...By 1998, defence spending's share of GDP was down to 3.2 per cent, and today it is not much greater. Being Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world's single superpower on the cheap is astonishing...

A full 45 per cent of all internet traffic takes place in this one country. About 75 per cent of the Nobel laureates in the sciences, economics and medicine in recent decades do their research and reside in America. A group of 12 to 15 US research universities have, through vast financing, moved into a new superleague of world universities that is leaving everyone else - the Sorbonne, Toyko, Munich, Oxford, Cambridge - in the dust, especially in the experimental sciences.

Discussion Question. This vast increase in U.S. wealth and power came during a period of rapid immigration. Does this affect your view of the debate (post 74) over the pros and cons of immigration?

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