Yeah, there's some correlation/causation problems for any economic growth analysis that takes as t=0 the immediate aftermath of World War II. You could talk about a Dutch economic miracle, which took it from widespread famine in 1944 to enormous prosperity by 1960.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @crispy_bart
This is highly controversial in econ IIRC but Keynes was big on the idea of a "production possibility frontier" (PPF) that's this quasi-objective graph of how productive your country *should* be based on population, natural resources, available technology, etc
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And an economy might be depressed below this level for extended periods of time due to false constraints (Keynes' big thing being how the money supply and deflation can do this) but when those are lifted we run back up to that frontier very quickly
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And this is very different from actually expanding the frontier itself, which requires actually inventing new things, discovering new resources, etc Like moving into unoccupied houses rather than building new ones
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Hence WWII "created" enormous prosperity for America after the Depression *because of the Depression*, it was just breaking a vicious feedback loop of deflation and stinginess ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" etc)
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The insane and monstrous idea some military-industrial complex guys had that if we just had regular massive world wars America's economy could grow by those leaps and bounds over and over again was completely wrong
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Anyway it's a shaky framework to talk about confidently re: any country's history but this is why imo you have to take the "Gotta hand it to them" arguments about Russia and China with a grain of salt
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These are two very large countries with a lot of people and a lot of stuff Their poverty and political weakness was notable because it was *paradoxical*, these were countries that had in the past been very powerful empires that in the 19th century devolved into "basket cases"
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Not due to some "national character" that made Russians and Chinese just suck, the popular theory at the time, but due to some pretty obviously perverse behaviors and incentives among their autocratic rulers, which the people who overthrew them were specifically trying to stop
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A lot of the rapid post-revolution gains in the USSR and PRC aren't fairly attributable to the genius of Lenin or Mao but just not being the Romanovs or the later Qing Emperors
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China, in particular, is notable because of how relatively quickly China bounced back from incredibly obvious and massively destructive self-inflicted wounds like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
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Even before you get to how fast the economy skyrocketed when Deng just stopped the central planning in favor of market based reforms
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