2024-10-21
8 分钟The Economist Hi, this is John Pridot,
host of Checks and Balance, our US politics podcast.
Welcome to Editors' Picks.
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Few sites have better captured America's world-beating ingenuity.
On October 13,
a giant booster rocket built by SpaceX hurtled to the edge of the atmosphere before plunging back to Earth and being neatly caught by the gantry tower from which only minutes earlier it had taken off.
Thanks to this marvel of engineering,
big rockets could become reusable and space exploration cheaper and bolder.
Yet just as the launch was a testimony to American Enterprise, So Elon Musk,
SpaceX's founder, captures all that is going wrong with its politics.
In his support for Donald Trump,
Mr Musk has spread misinformation about voter fraud and hurricane relief and derided his opponents as ill-intentioned idiots.
America too continues to rack up a stellar economic performance even as its politics gets more poisonous.
As they prepare to go to the polls in fewer than 20 days' time,
Republicans and Democrats have never mistrusted or disagreed with each other more.
Against that gloomy backdrop, can America's breathtaking economy possibly stay aloft?
Over the past three decades, America has left the rest of the rich world in the dust.
In 1990 it accounted for about two-fifths of the GDP of the G7, today it makes up half.