Yeah, people seem to ignore this part of the argument and just focus on US equities. There was a time not long ago - but long enough that most 20/30-somethings

Yeah, people seem to ignore this part of the argument and just focus on US equities. There was a time not long ago - but long enough that most 20/30-somethings on this site don't study - that Japan was the obvious future steward of the technology age which even led to spikes in Asian-American hate crimes and lax policies of those events (Vincent Chin comes to mind), culminating in the clearly-better Japanese auto industry and their breakthrough JIT manufacturing methods. A few years later, their economy crashed (along with ours), but ours recovered through various means, mainly immense untapped natural resources, net inflow of immigrants (skilled and otherwise), the Internet, and well, Andy Grove, if we want to give credit to at least one individual here. Japan is now a funny country across the ocean we marvel for their cultural weirdness and spotless streets. It wasn't like that just 40 years ago, and the idea that the United States can't go down that road for some reason is... well, naively optimistic.