this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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American Economics Professor: "We pulled ourselves out of the Great Depression by entering WW2"
American Economics Student: "I can't afford my car payment and my rent just doubled. When can we re-invade the South Pacific?"
And nothing to do with those pesky socialist reforms of the new deal. No this social reforms ruined everything! Must kill for equity!
In fairness, if you get under the hood of the New Deal benefits, they relieved a lot of immediate suffering and mobilized a workforce that had been functionally abandoned by the private sector.
But they didn't "grow the economy" in the same way as the enormous investment in the Military Industrial Complex achieved. The Citizens Conservation Corps and the Social Security Administration didn't create the kind of high paying engineering and manufacturing jobs that state demand for thousands of new tanks and ships achieved.
WW2 full mobilization of the economy wasn't just taking in the slack of a depressed market. It was a command economy in all but name, dictating every aspect of the industrial chain, from extraction to expenditure to recovery and recycling.
The tragedy of WW2 is that we could only permit this kind of logistical achievement for the purpose of joining a bloodbath in Europe, North Africa, and East Asia. As soon as Roosevelt passed, Truman began reprivatizing the economy as quickly as possible.
Yeah that's fair. But the works and practice in mobilizing the workforce in the new deal played a big part in the US having industrial capability prior to WWII. Not mentioning other logistics, the power grid improvement alone may have made the difference in the war effort even being possible for the US. After the war private industry continued to benefit from cheap energy coming from those same projects. Hell if there's a miuntain range in your state you're almost certainly getting some of your power from a hydro plant made in the 30's.
Hard to power the 1940s industrial economy without coal. And hard to generate coal without an electrification of the Tennessee Valley. Without a doubt.
Given his attitude towards public works, it's very funny that Hoover has the nation's largest dam named after him.
There's also the west coast. The damming of the Columbia, while a natural disaster, made the region viable for manufacture and ship building. In some ways it lead to the possibility for the tech industry as well for better or worse.