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My suggestion is precisely that Hard Times (the South's defeat) led to Strong Men (the US military prowess you mention). I don't think there's a straight line there - I agree with you that the US' technology and such is also very important - but...yes, the South's contributions to the US military have been associated with US military victory. If I had to guess, I suspect this has more to do with Southern martial culture than the economic situation, but if I had to guess, those are at least somewhat intertwined.
It is true that South was the better combatant, but all the stuff you've said about how the South lost its war suggests to me that you didn't really read my comment - their loss is precisely what you would expect to create Strong Men (in the Strong Man cycle theory) and thus them losing the war is evidence for the theory, not against it, as you seem to think.
Now, let me be the first person to say that I think the true picture of what is going on is much more complicated and that I don't exactly believe in the Strong Man cycle theory, at least not unless you interpret it as I suggest, in which case I would not consider it to be the only factor at play.
Really? Which ones do you have in mind? I think the Russians were impressive at Hostomel. I actually suspect this is an area where the Chinese severely lag. The UK and France, I think, have good trigger-pullers but not a lot of mass...who else?
The thing is that having the top-notch tech by itself actually isn't enough to have a top-notch SOF apparatus - the US SOF apparatus is as good as it is because of the combination of the beef-fed borderers, the top-tier tech, relentless training, and years of actual implementation. The hardest part of those sorts of ops is operating "jointly" as a bureaucratic apparatus and that's where I think the Chinese, specifically, are likely the lag. One might even posit that the US SOF guys are as good as they are specifically because of what one might term Hard Times.
Anyway, a rabbit trail, but my point here is that, yes, the fat tail and the tech matter, a lot, but the difference between the US and everyone else is practice. I think it's fine to argue, as you suggest, that wealth plays a role in enabling this.
Kipling identifies a few things in his poem that are connected with what he would term a lack of virtue (or a mistaken idea about reality), I think:
We can see how Europe and the US of A compare, with the massive caveat that we're doing a horribly broad generalization, particularly given how diverse Europe is. We can throw in Russia as a bonus.
I'd say on balance, with N=3, Kipling's little poem - which is very far from being a complete theory of Kipling's politics, to say nothing of mine - is doing pretty good. I wouldn't say it's a freestanding argument for how the world works. But I wouldn't say it has no descriptive power, either.
Now, the counter-argument here is to find some place where everything is terrible and religious belief or TFR or landmine manufacturing is really high and hold it up and say "why aren't they like the United States?" To which I say - the best way to find out if a theory has predictive power is to test it where other things are close to equal. Let's say for the sake of argument that Ethiopia decided to dedicate itself to Kipling's principles AND that Kipling's principles were the entire secret sauce for a society - that's still not going to make them a world-class power overnight, nor will it magically protect them from, e.g., nuclear weapons. But the US and Europe are interesting comparison points because despite their many differences they also have a great many similarities.
It is probably worth noting that, contra Kipling, the first modern welfare state was set up by notorious effeminate pacifist Otto von Bismarck with the explicit goal of creating an urban working class that were able and willing to fight industrial-age wars, and the British dramatically expanded our welfare state after WW1 when it became clear that too may men were unfit for military service due to preventable diseases of poverty.
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As you note, the South already had a strong martial culture. What exactly changed after their loss in the civil war to strengthen it? Is there evidence that they became more likely to sign up for military service on a per-capita basis? They weren't a bunch of pacifists who got beaten up and decided to enlist as a trauma reaction. It is very weak evidence at best, if used to support the Hard Times theory.
(I used an LLM to check, and it claims that 37% of white Americans come from Confederate States, but make up about 40-45% of active duty personnel who are white, and thats roughly a quarter of all active duty personnel considering all races. I haven't double checked the figures, since I've been awake for 36 hours now, so I'm open to evidence otherwise)
There are all kinds of martial cultures that are greatly divorced from hard times, especially when you compare how bad things were to what to they have now. The Gurkhas. The Sikhs. The latter fought (and often lost) a whole bunch of wars, but made a name for themselves, creating a self-identity that persisted. They were already "strong men" when times are hard, they are debatably still so, even if they mostly drive taxis in Canada. The standard is awfully wooly.
Israel. Their special forces punch way above their weight class, but then again the entire country does too. Korea (the southern one, though NK SF did pretty well in Ukraine).
I disagree with Kipling on many things, but I find this mildly funny. I suspect that an increased reliance on "reason" is responsible for a lot of the loss of (religious) faith. Intelligence and education negatively correlate with religiosity.
I agree that Europe stagnated because of poor economic choices, including excessive redistribution and deindustrialization. I do not see how that is strong evidence for the argument in question. One would assume that going through WW2 would put them in prime position to become stronger men, while the Americans, having had it easy for centuries, would be the ones in decline.
Yes - I think the strong martial culture => strong martial culture is a better predictor than hard times => strong martial culture (in this case); however, in the specific context of the United States, I suspect the combination of strong martial culture + hard times cooperated (since military service is a reliable route out of poverty, though of course not just for Southern Americans.)
I've heard anecdotes that the opposite was actually true for some time, as signing up in the services was viewed as going over to the enemy. I haven't seen that addressed statistically one way or the other, though.
Yeah, agree with this for sure.
Not true, at least in the United States, where graduate education is correlated with religiosity (although people with graduate degrees are slightly more likely to be atheists as well).
Perhaps you would even say they are less reasonable than Americans?
You're wandering back around again to the version of the meme you described instead of what I am suggesting has some descriptive power: that a lack of virtue (for a certain value of virtue) creates (let's say) bad times.
It seems to me that you agree with me and Kipling that robbing the collective Peter to pay the collective Paul has put them in danger of being sold and delivered bound to their foe. You're going to object here that the insight is trivial: doing dumb stuff leads to bad results. Well, Kipling called them the Gods of the Copybook Headings for a reason - they seem like pretty basic stuff, and people fumble them anyway.
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