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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

I always figured that was because WW2 destroyed Europe, Russia and Japan, forcing the entire world to buy from us for 30 years. I don't think it's anything that can be replicated.

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History definitely played a factor in the US's ascendance, but the current state of the US economy isn't just something which happened by accident. We could have implemented an economic policy designed to optimize the benefit to the middle-class, and to protect strategic interests (like the capacity to produce PPE for example) but that's not what we did.

And China, and large parts of Africa. The Philippines. Probably a lot more than I can remember.

Your point stands tho.

Basically everywhere that wasn't the US and Canada (excluding Pearl Harbor).

Even Pearl Harbor caused minor damage, all things considered. I think many of the facilities were repaired and rebuilt within 1 year while many of the ships were actually recovered. The carriers weren't even there during the attack.

For the US it was a huge shock, for a country like Poland it was Tuesday.

Because I was curious, Friday might have been a better analogy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_1939#September_1,_19...

I think he was referring to the highly famous quite (/s) from Street Fighter the movie delivered by Raúl Juliá

Hey, a little respect for the quote! It's even up on TV Tropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButForMeItWasTue...

I'll be honest and say I didn't even know the origin of the quote :-))

It was also true at the time in Western European countries though, especially in the 1970s-1980s.

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