>The path they chose is one that does not lead to prosperity. You're playing games here with 'chose', the US didn't choose to be a super power, they were an ir

>The path they chose is one that does not lead to prosperity. You're playing games here with 'chose', the US didn't choose to be a super power, they were an irrelevant sugar colony who lucked upon the stupidity and self-destructiveness of Europe (from Napoleon to Hitler) and a continent-worth of land whose inhabitants are easily devastated by old world diseases. I don't think you can attribute this to any choice or planning on part of anyone, at every single point in history the actions and incentives of people are fully explained by a simple distributed greedy algorithms, choosing to maximize things that turn out to be wildly wrong in retrospect and not what the children of the next generation want (which is also wildly wrong and not what the children of the next generation want, which....). Even in a perfect information game like chess a single mistake can doom you, even in perfectly mutable, free, abundant and error-correctible computers a single bad state can (and often does) cascade into a failure that requires nothing short of full restart. Life is orders of magnitude worse than those 2 (perfect!) systems. Life is multi-way chess where the descendents of the players continue the game for them. You don't choose paths, they choose you. People hundreds of years removed and thousands of kilometers apart doom and bless you into fates beyond your comprehension.