Yea, all we need to so is kill off tens of millions of the most able people in the developed worlds to spur economic growth.

It just doesn't work like that. WWII was value destruction at a massive scale. All that industry could have been building industry and we'd have had the 50's and 60's a decade earlier but not just for the US.

To be fair I read the broken-window comment so as so mean exactly what you said? A lot of broken windows in Europe, so people there were less keen on keeping things intact and more likely to litter and ... stuff.