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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