Serious crash kills test pilot and sets back B-29. Knudsen called in to rescue the program. Wings prone to catching fire.
Conversation
Such a lovely plane. Gotta remember though — only plane yo actually drop nuclear bombs in war.
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I will admit I got sucked into watching a bunch of bomber videos on YouTube today. Well back to the book.
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Knudsen working through endless B-29 production troubles. Manhattan project starting up. Apparently the B-24 and B-17 couldn’t handle the nuke. So if the B-29 hadn’t made it in time, it would have been British Lancasters that did the job.
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“This nation seems to be able to do more by accident than any other country can do on purpose” — Bechtel-Cone B29 modification employee.
Shades of British empire described as created in a fit of absent-mindedness.
Imma call it imperial serendipity. Or serendipitous imperialism.
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The Marianas campaign in the Pacific war was fought just to create a staging base for B-29 missions. I didn’t know that. Must resist WW2 bunny trail. This read is for industrial production story.
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B-29 missions going very poorly until they start using incendiary bombs based on magnesium “goop” developed as a byproduct of Kaiser’s magnesium plant. Hence firebombing of Tokyo. Worst attack of the war after the nuclear bombs. Damn. War is ugly.
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Curtis LeMay, architect of the low-altitude firebombing strategy that brought Japan to its knees. Makes me really question whether Hiroshima was even necessary. Even this was rightly considered over the line. Ender Wiggin level total war.
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83k civilians killed in the firebombing of Tokyo. Dresden was 25k. That’s about the US Covid deaths so far. WW2 was one bloody war.
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Into the epilogue now. Another wall-of-statistics view. The US produced more than all other combatants combined AND did so with smaller fraction of economy AND kept consumer economy growing AND wages rising.
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Replying to
47% of economy as opposed to 60% for Britain and more for Germany and USSR
YOY consumer goods also grew through war. Americans ate more meat, used more gas, electricity etc than before Hitler invaded France
Guns AND butter. All mostly free market.
Germany used 17m serfs
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Total economy of production doubled, wages rose by 70%,
Americans 2x more productive than Germans and 4x Japan (true even before war started).
Underlined just how qualitatively next-level the US economy was with true mass production tech. Old world was still half artisanal.
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A huge theme of this book has been how artisan production methods got properly mechanized, with British designs being ported being the best illustration. The brits were great at design but sucked at radical industrial scale. This was true since mid 1850s. They never did learn.
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Though this book is almost embarrassingly pro-capitalist and paints a cartoon straw man view of unions, the picture rings true to me (admittedly a proud neoliberal shill). The unions failure was ultimately one of imagination. They never quite navigated the huge 100-year leap leap
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Though the unions evolved from guild/trade union based to general mass organizing, like the British, they never quite mentally came to terms with the vast gap between 1830s artisan tech and 1930s mass tech. No wonder in 2020, dregs of unions are a humanities/liberal arts cause.
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Book says post-war everybody was scared of depression/slump and big demob unemployment. To believe aggregate demand boom would persist into consumer economy was to be contrarian in 1946. Alfred Sloan was one. He turned out to be right.
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Small blip in 1946 with 20% inflation and 3.9% unemployment then of course it’s all history as we know now. 30y of uninterrupted growth as the production engine of a bombed out world.
Private capital investment tripled from 10.6B in 1945 to 30.6B in 1946. Stocks up 92% by 1947.
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3 jobs waiting for every returning soldier. Women went back to homes and feminine mystique era.
2 decades of 4% growth. The China of mid-century
Ofc Cold War superpowernomics and military industrial complex and stuff. Not all rosy. But war machine go brrr in peacetime basically
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1948, Knudsen dies of brain hemorrhage. Health destroyed by the war years.
Book argues that in postwar years the labor/new deal left tried to push a revisionist narrative of this being primarily a labor and government spending success, indication of new deal economics.
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The book’s counter narrative is that the success was entirely due to Knudsen &co shielding the free market dynamics from command economy approach successfully enough to avoid killing golden goose.
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So ideological argument of book is:
- New deal failed
- Business won the war AND the peace despite New Dealer interference
- This was by Knudsen etc protecting it
- Post-war New Dealers rewrote narrative and took credit AND control
- They eventually killed golden goose in 30y
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Needless to say I’m basically sympathetic to this narrative and hostile to the labor-sympathetic narrative, but I’m not inclined to buy the fully hagiographic version of either story, valorizing either capital or labor. The world is messy. Heroes and villains on both sides.
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William Whyte Organization Man is a perfect natural sequel to this, both in terms of narrative continuity and ideological harmony. This is your basic business conservative/social liberal posture that eventually turned into neoliberalism in the 80s.
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Aside: for Econ 101 in 1993, I had a Keynesian prof who used Samuelson text but the other section was taught by a Friedmanite prof. Pure chance that I landed in one section rather than the other (we couldn’t choose). Took me a decade after to discover supply side Econ in my 20s.
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Ah, now for Kaiser’s story. He called the postwar boom correctly, and expanded ambitiously. Bought Willow Run and Willys the Jeep company. All failures. Lost his entrepreneurial cred. Still recovered financially with global success in construction. Plus aluminum go brr.
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Kaiser dies in 1967 at 85. Outlived Knudsen by 19y. Much of his industrial legacy in heavy industry got outsourced or unionized away. That’s why today we know the name primarily as an employee healthcare firm. His legacy was decent non-union employee treatment I guess.
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Okay done. This book was fun and honest on economic and engineering side, but a bit lightweight and hagiographic/demonizing on the human side. Despite my strong sympathies I’d give it only a qualified “good enough for topic, not great; needs ideological caveats” recommendation.
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Thanks for the recommendation. Scratched my itch to apply WW2 industrial mobilization story lessons to Covid reboot and climate action.
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My takeaway in that front is... not optimistic. The US lacks the kind of economic guts that allowed this story to happen. Outside of parts of Silicon Valkey tech economy this spirit is basically missing. And SV does not dominate the YS as strongly as Detroit etc did in 1940s.
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Also an equally worrisome trio of red, blue, and green new-deal crowds is at work today, pushing the exact same sorts of bad thinking as in the 1930s, requiring the same kind of protection/interference to allow a recovery.
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Green New Deal: bad climate thinking inside huge big tent sjw bullshit and MMT package
Red New Deal: Profiteering gangsterism under maga pretending 1950s rewind is possible.
Blue New Deal: keep protecting financialization and unproductive predatory Wall Street denture elites
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A Freedom’s New Forge pretty much *has* to come out of Silicon Valley since there are no other candidate golden geese. But trends there are not promising either except for isolated pockets.
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Okay gonna let this simmer.
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