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Pretty interesting that 4.2% of the world's population generates 25% of the world's GDP. Looking only at the numbers, it's pretty cool, but when you look at the reality of it, it becomes a lot more messy.
Part of it is that America just has an insane amount of resource richness even compared to historical empires of it's comparative influence.
Let me try to explain it in agricultural terms. America is a nation of immigrants, and yet a common phenomenon is an observed disconnect between what Americans consider local cuisine from a given country and what people from that country today consider average cuisine of their culture.
This is because those immigrants were the tired, the poor, the hungry masses yearning to be free. The cuisine they brought was the stuff people would make to subsist as peasants, notice how many different varieties of "take this basic grain as a filler then layer on bitsins and fixins to give it flavor and nutrition." Meanwhile in the home country, cuisine culture continued to be defined by the elites who had already been defining it. What's really interesting is that the cuisine brought by the poor, did not stay pauper meals.
This is because America as a country is so packed to the gills with farmable land that ingredients considered a rarity for sheer cost in "the old country" were abundant to the point of being cheap. American serving sizes are so big because they were pioneered by people who were thanking god that they could be that big. Chop Sui literally was just "whatever you can throw in the pot, serve it up!", tacos and sandwiches were invented basically to maximize the flavor and nutrition of expensive fresh ingredients on limited supply, Pizza has roots as the equivalent of a street pretzel in NYC.
Imagine if someone took the NYC pretzel, moved to a land of unheard-of plenty unseen by human eyes thus far, and decided to spice that pittily ass bread and salt with choice of topping by loading that shit with the most unimaginably luxurious ingredients they could conceive of because that shit is all cheap there. That's the story of Pizza. That's what happened to basically every peasant food culture that made contact with the US and its because American resource richness is just that unprecedented for anyone who isn't from America already to conceive of.
Stalin once stated that WWII was won with, "British Intelligence, American Steel, and Soviet Blood.", but America wasn't just a factory for the world, the American kitchen put into that war just as hard as the American foundry, arguably more, America's first casualties of the war were the merchant marines who faced U-Boats head on to run food aid to the British public and anywhere else they could slip past the Nazis.
We got so much shit we will literally give it to you for free sometimes
That is how 4% of the world population ends up sitting on 25% of its GDP
I remember hearing that American service members are by far the best fed of all countries since WWII.
Along with resource richness, I think it's important to note how USA's geography also makes it extraordinarily safe from invasion. It is flanked by two oceans with die hard allies as neighbors to the North and South. Anyone that wants to invade USA would have to make an impossible amphibious landing or super-blitz through Canada or Mexico. Both of those options are nearly impossible. The entire world vs North America might not even he able to pull that off. Then, once the invaders get to the continental USA, they would have to deal the most possibly armed insurgency due to the culture's obsession with firearms. So, the only way the USA could be militarily taken over is by near complete destruction of its population via long-range missiles. This disregards the USA's vastly superior military power. The USA has more aircraft carriers than the next 7 countries combined and each one is technologically superior as well.
With that in mind, the USA didn't have to direct considerable economic efforts to protecting its homeland, while knowing that it's economic production would go mostly unharmed. In contrast, the Soviet's were scorching their own production centers just so the enemy wouldn't acquire them.
Additionally, the USA has the most expansive freight rail system and the Mississippi River allows for easy and efficient shipping of resources, especially from the food production area (eg the Bread Basket). So not only can the USA produce lots of food without having to worry much about protecting that, but it can also easily transport the food to other locations efficiently. When it comes to food and defense, the USA is overpowered af.
That's an interesting read, but I think it misses a point of where that 25% GDP is really coming from. The US makes 25% of the GDP because they outsource. To use other country's labor, other countries people, other other people's brains, and they take a huge chunk of profit from it. They then claim that's their GDP.
America is a very efficient country, with a lot of skilled workers creating a lot of cool products and stuff, but it's not 5x other countries. The only way to get those numbers is by leveraging the work of other people and claiming it for yourself.
That's not how GDP works
Edit to elaborate, GDP is calculated based on final goods and services, outsourced work exclusively counts towards the GDP of the country that work is done in, and only affects the GDP of another country when they buy what the first country made, but the outsourced work still happens in country A, so country A gets all the GDP created by selling finished goods, and all the GDP of the work done on unfinished products within their borders.
Basically, the US isn't sitting on everyone else's money, it just genuinely makes and sells that much shit
I‘m not sure how GDP is measured for an international company such as Google. Does the entire Revenue count cos the HQ sits in the US? Or is the license fees that it pays to Bahama‘s (in order to avoid taxes) is substracted from the US GDP? Does somebody know how that is measured?
Unless it's the sale of a product or service or the wage earnings or someone who worked on a product or service, it doesn't contribute to GDP, if country A made product X, it being sold in country B contributes to A's GDP