Peter's post below reminds me of some parallel conversations I had on these points with James on my visit up in Calgary last week. Without wanting to go too far down this path without actually reading the book, there are two factors worth considering -- one, that when you factor in national size, most of the other countries above five or ten million with any kind of higher productivity are still Anglosphere (looking at the graphs in James's post.) This suggests that the Scandinavian-Dutch-Swiss model of strong civil society is good for productivity at a smaller scale but scales upward with difficulty. The second is wondering whether again the gap between the USA and the rest of the core Anglosphere isn't one of economies of national scale, as the USA's three hundred fifty is way bigger than any of the rest (or all of them combined.) That the second-highest is Canada (despite the fact that Canada is substantially smaller than the UK) suggests perhaps that the increased integration following NAFTA is helping Canada overcome its scale issues. Comparing Canadian productivity in the decade before NAFTA versus the decade following might be a useful indication of whether this is a factor. So perhaps the conclusions of what we are seeing here is that it helps to have a strong civil society, it helps to be Anglosphere, and it helps to be part of a large-scale economy. Perhaps the political conclusion is not that the other Anglosphere nations need to become clones of the USA, but merely that they need substantially closer economic integration with the USA. And if an Anglosphere nation of 350 million, organized on a federal basis to decentralize decison-making, gives such good results, maybe an Anglosphere economic area of 450 million, organizaed as a highly decentralized network commonwealth, might be even more effective.
Certainly productivity is an enormously underrated factor in looking at history. I had my nosed rubbed in this reading N.A.M. Rodger's Command of the Ocean last year -- time after time, you could see how England just couldn't afford to do some perfectly obvious thing in past centuries, just because social productivity was so low that they couldn't afford to do it.
UPDATE:
James McCormick adds these observations:
An excellent post. Economies of Scale plus Anglosphere Culture equals Something Altogether Unique.
FYI, some current population stats:
USA: 300m
UK: 61m
Cdn: 33m
Oz: 20m
NZ: 4m
Eire: 4m
As Jim notes, Canada is the only nation over 10m that comes close to US productivity (@ 78%!). Some of that no doubt comes from pre-NAFTA sharing of a multitude of industrial and technical standards ... there's a reason the Canucks share the "country code" of 01. And no doubt it's accelerated with the retailing/wholesaling restructuring in Canadian industry post-NAFTA. The question is whether the Anglosphere *already* gets a hidden boost from so much sharing of IP, education, and general know-how. Would the rest be even at 70-ish% without that bond of language and culture?
BTW, at this opportune time, don't miss reading "India: the Growth Imperative" (2001) by the McKinsey team that Lewis mentions. Available free here:
http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/india.asp
[Personally, I think the 300 million figure substantially undercounts the actual US population. -- JB]