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Dan Richards is president of Strategic Imperatives. He is a faculty member in the MBA program at the Rotman School at the University of Toronto. He also hosts a weekly conference call called Monday Morning Jump Start, which is about strategies for financial advisors. Advisors can see it on GlobeAdvisor.com. He can be reached at richards@getkeepclients.com

Over a recent lunch with a veteran money manager, he said something that gave me pause for thought.

"When I get really nervous," he said, "is when there is absolute unanimity of thought on any subject ... because in my experience that's when the market comes back to bite you."

Today, there is almost universal agreement that there are much better places than the United States to invest - countries like China, India, Brazil, Germany, Australia and Canada would all seem to offer much better prospects.

This alone ought to make anyone betting against the U.S. nervous.

A long list of negatives

Let's start by recognizing that there's not a lot to love in the U.S. today.

You have a consumer devastated by the collapse of housing prices and the stock market implosion last fall. Quite simply, Americans' debt levels are way too high and their saving levels are way too low.

Many businesses are being denied access to credit, with many banks still afraid to lend, and some of the largest financial institutions are paralyzed by interference from Washington.

The United States has huge issues with a dysfunctional public education and health system and what seems to be a permanent underclass.

The auto industry is in shambles, unemployment is stubbornly high and there are massive government and trade deficits that will inevitably lead to higher taxes.

You have a sinking U.S. dollar that devalues the worth of shares in American companies, and concerns that the U.S. may inflate its way out of its debt problem.

Written off before

Remember, however, that the United States has been written off before - only to surprise doomsayers.

You only need to think back to the 1960s when Soviet science and military might was going to eat America's lunch.

Or consider the 1970s when OPEC was going to siphon off America's wealth.

Then there were the 1980s when Japan was going to show the U.S. how a co-ordinated government strategy could build a dominant manufacturing industry.

The drive to win

So what's the case for believing that the United States will once again rise from the mat?

Quite simply, compared with past empires such as Great Britain and the Soviet Union, American industry has shown a unique capacity to maintain an unceasing drive to win at all costs.

Time and time again, it has shown the ability to shake off the complacency that comes with success, deal decisively with bad news, learn from failure and make tough decisions to move on. Its culture of winning at all costs truly sets it apart.

In fact, a case can be made that the current recession, as grinding as it is on employees, will be the latest in a series of events in which the United States reinvents itself by deploying human and financial capital from old, dying industries to new, growing ones.

Some might accuse me of being biased, I did my MBA in the U.S. and have long admired the drive, ambition and spirit of generosity I saw there. But don't just take my word for it - no less an authority than Warren Buffett described his recent purchase of Burlington Northern railroads as "a bet on America."

A key reason for Mr. Buffett's bet is that no other society has shown America's adaptability.

Can we imagine anywhere else that a company like Google could have become a dominant force in a remarkably short space of time or from which a game changer like the Apple iPhone could have emerged? Or consider the way Wal-Mart has transformed the retailing industry in much of the world; it's hard to visualize Wal-Mart starting anywhere except the U.S.

Another example of America's entrepreneurial spirit: Last week I attended a talk by the large Swiss firm, Pictet Asset Management, a leader in managing money in the efficient-energy space. The U.S. was late to focus on clean energy, well behind Europe - despite that, five of the 10 top holdings in the Global Clean Energy Fund that Pictet runs are American firms.

A magnet for talent

A key reason for the success of the United States is that it continues to attract the best and brightest from around the world. No other country comes close to having the magnetic attraction that the U.S. does for those striving to succeed.

As a result, today the U.S. is the closest we see to a pure meritocracy, in which ability and desire prevails above all else.

And once those talented newcomers arrive, nowhere else do those with energy and ideas have the same access to capital. The U.S has a unique appetite for risk and cultural tolerance for failure - in America, you don't just get second chances, if your ideas are good enough, you get fourth, fifth and sixth chances to succeed.

Indeed, it's no accident that America's high-tech industry has captured such an overwhelmingly dominant share of the global market - fuelled in large measure by immigrants from India, China and Eastern Europe.

The bottom line?

Take a hard look at history and - like me and Warren Buffett - you might conclude that underestimating the Americans' capacity for renewal and reinvention is a grave miscalculation. After all, look back over time and you'll see few who have profited from betting against the U.S.