It’s fairly common for travelers to remark about the relative youth of the United States, especially compared to Old World countries like France, Italy, German and the United Kingdom. Knoxville has four buildings that are more than 200-years-old. London (England) has more than ten thousand, with portions of some structures more than 1,800 years old. Italy’s recorded history can be traced back to at least 500 B.C.

Europe certainly has much older buildings, and countries whose names have endured more than a thousand years. But as an institutional construct, the United States is actually a much more seasoned and stable country than many of Europe’s venerable blueblood sovereignties.

For almost 250 years, the United States has operated under a single, foundational Constitution, which has been amended 27 times. Our Presidents come and go. And members of Congress come and … well … often stay. But there have been no revolutions or wholesale replacements of our governing framework, although the Union survived one true existential test in the Civil War.

That’s an institutional stability that many old countries in Europe could envy.

In the past 250 years, Italy has had four different governing structures, including a monarchy, a fascist regime and more recently, a high-turnover republic. France has lived under five separate and distinct republics, with the most current one only 68 years old. Following World War II, the British Empire began to unravel. Beginning with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, the United Kingdom embarked on a multi-decade process of decolonization, with the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China considered the symbolic end of the empire.

It’s probably no coincidence that the U.S. has also enjoyed enviable economic success over this period, with a rapid expansion beginning just after the end of the Civil War. The U.S. overtook the England as the world’s largest economy in the early 1890s, and by 1913 accounted for about one-third of the world’s GDP – exceeding the combined output of France, Britain and Germany.

The past 250 years tell us at least two things. First, no matter how ancient a nation’s lineage may be, no government is immune from institutional upheaval. But it also tells us that—whether by exceptional design or extraordinary luck—our particular form of national governance has been uniquely and enviably stable. That has remained true even though we regularly seemed determined to elect idiots, crooks, and embarrassingly unqualified people to public office.

I am not naively unconcerned about my country. But neither do I believe that we are always on the verge of total collapse. The United States certainly isn’t perfect, but you can gauge its attractiveness by watching people vote with their feet. There are about 4,500 people who renounce their U.S. citizenship each year. By comparison, about 800,000 people become new naturalized U.S. citizens annually.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.