Americans are terrible at building transit infrastructure. They struggle to build basic metro extensions for the New York subway. California is still struggling to build high speed rail. Any infrastructure project is always extraordinarily expensive and slow.
Americans are terrible at urbanism. Their road design is a disaster.
American struggle at manufacturing. Their cars simply aren’t reliable. They are a joke. They struggle to make computer chips. Intel is failing. Both Biden and Trump asked TSMC to come to the US
Yet americans are exceptionally good at software
Why?
The problem with all your other examples is capitalism controlling politics for decades.
And for software the companies are headquartered here, and we had an early leg up with computers.
Back in the 90s there was a big push towards computers, even underfunded public schools got big computer labs and kids were taught how they actually worked and just given time to mess around.
That early advantaged disappeared tho, and tech jobs are becoming like pro sports. There’s just a shit ton of people competing for a small amount of jobs.