💥 Would America's 20th Century postwar boom been stronger without, you know, the war?

Also: 5 Quick Questions for … Tony Mills on metascience

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” - Arthur C. Clarke

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The Essay

💥 Would America's 20th Century postwar boom been stronger without the war?

The famous William Faulkner line “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” often comes to mind when I think about various ongoing economic debates. One that’s relevant to this newsletter is what, exactly, explains the following chart:

The above image comes from The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon. It shows what Gordon calls the “Great Leap Forward,” the surge in total factor productivity growth — statistical shorthand for measuring advances in production technologies and processes — during the middle decades of the century, the 1920s through 1960s.

The specific debate I want to look at here is how World War II affected the postwar economy.