I mean, I would not switch to the U.S. society of 1776, or 1860, or even 1920. It is better today in 2026 than it was before vaccines, etc. It is very hard to decide whether I would prefer a counterfactual Native American country/empire that could have developed after western contact and exist in 2026, because the outcome is highly uncertain. Various levels of western colonization happened to non-western societies; several low-colonized countries are doing great in 2026. Mostly what makes countries great today is wide availability of technology, natural resources, education, human rights, and medicine.
That said, would I switch to super-America that conquered the world in the 1800s as a (somewhat unintuitively) democratic republic and invented antibiotics and vaccines in the same century and paused global warming in the mid century or early 1900s because of no conveniently hidden externalities of a world government? Maybe?
I mean, I would not switch to the U.S. society of 1776, or 1860, or even 1920. It is better today in 2026 than it was before vaccines, etc. It is very hard to decide whether I would prefer a counterfactual Native American country/empire that could have developed after western contact and exist in 2026, because the outcome is highly uncertain. Various levels of western colonization happened to non-western societies; several low-colonized countries are doing great in 2026. Mostly what makes countries great today is wide availability of technology, natural resources, education, human rights, and medicine.
That said, would I switch to super-America that conquered the world in the 1800s as a (somewhat unintuitively) democratic republic and invented antibiotics and vaccines in the same century and paused global warming in the mid century or early 1900s because of no conveniently hidden externalities of a world government? Maybe?