Re:Work Hard You'll Get There Eventually (hint: no you won't)
by anigbrowl on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:21PM
(#7578642)
US federal debt was largely domestically held. Also 'most European countries had almost fully recovered by the mid-50s' seems quite wrong to me as a European. Certainly, they had functional economies again and cleaned up the mess of the war, but that's hardly a full recovery. European countries were paying off war debt far longer than that too. The US had a huge economic advantage for several decades.
Things like price controls and the GI bill and the Cold War all helped in their way, but I'm not sure that that's a formula you can deploy going forward.
Re:Work Hard You'll Get There Eventually (hint: no you won't)
by pcrh on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:32PM
(#7578682)
After WWII, the US was pretty much the only functioning manufacturing nation for a decade. In addition, new markets opened up to US manufacturing due to the dropping of trade barriers with, and competition from, the markets of the British and French Empires as well as Japan. This advantage also lead to faster technological development in the US compared to other markets for a while.
These advantages slowly eroded as other economies were rebuilt. They nevertheless lasted well into the 1970's.
Re:Work Hard You'll Get There Eventually (hint: no you won't)
by Amezarak on Saturday April 12, 2014 @03:42PM
(#7578908)
While that might have helped the domestic manufacturing market, international trade was not a substantial part of the US economy for a long time - in 1950-1960, imports and exports were 4-5% of GDP (with exports usually just barely north of imports.) They're triple that today. The pre-World War II import/export statistics aren't much different from the post-World War II import/export statistics, but the economy was much different. I don't see how any argument about international trade can apply, based on the data.
After all, it's not just competitors that are gone, it's customers too.
If anything I'd have thought the wage and price controls from WWII were a bigger factor, since in the absence of higher pay, companies had to offer more benefits and cultivate better relationships with their employees to keep them around - and there seems to have been a lot of inertia from those policies.