What America gets right

According to Axios editor Jim VandeHei, the United States has substantive reasons for optimism. American GDP accounts for twenty-six percent of global economic output, despite the country being home to just four point two percent of the world's population. The U.S. stock market alone represents sixty-five percent of all global equity value. On entrepreneurship: America deploys fifty-seven percent of the world's venture capital, and new business applications have averaged five point five million annually since the pandemic—up from three point five million before COVID. Solo founders now make up thirty-six point three percent of startups, a jump from twenty-three point seven percent in twenty nineteen. VandeHei attributes this partly to AI tools that enable individual creators to scale rapidly. His broader argument: the country's material reality—longer lives, greater freedom, durable democracy—is historically extraordinary. Yet widespread pessimism persists. Nearly half of Fortune five hundred companies were founded by immigrants or their descendants. The gap between objective conditions and public sentiment, he argues, is itself the problem.

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