this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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yeah that is a good point, but not 100% accurate i guess, at least not if you consider "workers" like typical factory or service workers
there was a lot of maths being done the last 60 years, if you consider software development a type of applied maths (which it formally is), and that doesn't really fit into the categories of "farmer" or "worker", since it's non-routine task with no clear goal other than creativity, for which you might or might not get paid, depending on whether people will like it. that can't really be encompassed into the concept of a "worker" i guess
and that stuff really matters. the US' economy essentially grew since 1970 because of IT. real economy (production of stuff) stagnated since 1970 (in the US at least). you can see this clearly in diagrams such as this one where oil consumption (which is directly proportional to industrial output) stagnates since 1970. also note that IT companies are the highest-valued companies in the US stock market today, and that's because they have tremendous significance in the US economy.
I don't put software development in that category, just like I don't put bridge architects in that category
Even dancing in the infinite, us software developers are making things. Hopefully useful things
But the salesman? The investor? Point me to what they create
i agree with your point, but i still wonder why all of the IT was invented in america. very little software was written outside of it (at least in the early years)
That's easy, brain drain. When programming was coming into existence, the US was in the cold war - Russia did have a lot of IT stuff too early on, it just wasn't publicly facing
And during this period, the US was spending infinite money investing because we had an ungodly strong economy - Europe, China , and Japan were doing reconstruction from the war and paying back loans, the global South was being economically colonized... The US and Russia were the only players with the funds to advance tech at the time
But if you fast forward a couple decades, every developed nation was doing things in the computing space. But the US had a huge lead on chip manufacturing, manufacturers were signing deals with Microsoft, and everything just kind of converged around the base architecture.
But even then, arm was invented in the UK, Linux came from Sweden (?), things were happening all over
So long story short, the US was in a position to invest while no one else was. That gave us a huge head start, one which, combined with a loosening of anti monopoly enforcement over the same period, created huge barriers of entry around certain parts of the stack
i don't know whether this fully explains it. germany, even after 1960, never really invested much into IT. we have one company here, infineon, which produces processors, but afaik they're microprocessors for automobile, not PC-material. we do have strong open source software development here in germany though. (KDE, ...)
I think it does fully explain it. Germany has never made CPUs, but they have definitely been there on the software scene though
Germany has long been a powerhouse on software. It trends towards mission critical stuff rather than anything consumer facing, but it's been very much around for many decades now
ok good to know. you seem to be better informed than i am here