Im no expert but heres the highlights of what they teach us in school. A Lot of it had to do with resources and isolation. WW2 ends. Europe is litteraly a pile of rubble. Most former world powers are heavily crippled. Meanwhile the US homeland remains untouched. On top of which the US has massive industrial plants it built for the war effort just waiting to be refitted to build any number of products that the rest of the world needs to rebuild itself. The US, at the time, is also producing the bulk of the worlds oil. Basically it was just lucky that we happened to be sitting on a what was at the time a huge stockpile of easily attainable oil. As well as just having many other natural resources due to the sheer size of land the US covers. We also had and continue to have one of the most fertile regions in the world to grow crops. It was kind of the perfect storm of everyone else being decimated and us controlling the worlds number one resource, for America to shoot to the front of the pack.

Then the threat of communism and the race to outdo them really changed our culture into one that favored and encouraged technology development. Having a lot of money on hand from our good fortune and the willingness of the government to pump it into scientific research really helped drive this push to inovate and really pushed the US even further out in front as a technological leader, which of course equated to even further financial gains.

Quite fortunately, on the surface it seemed like the Soviet Union sort of goes through a similar situation which gives America an enemy to constantly be trying to outpace. Only later do we find out, things weren't going that well behind the iron curtain.

In more recent decades, with no major threat, this drive to innovate has steadily waned and we have seen the rest of the world began to catch up and in a lot of cases surpass us on the technology front.

Somewhere along the lines, mostly during the cold war, we decided it was our job to police the world and so now have a massive military ideology left over from that.