Thanks Noah. I'm Big Bill Knudsen's great-grandson and it's terrific seeing the story put in front of a new audience. His choice to become a dollar a year man and work for FDR made him no friends at GM, but there was no way he could say no when asked by the president to serve. It's a tough legacy to live up to. I'd add that there was more than one time that he and Henry Ford got into a shouting match.
Good review Noah, I will have to add this book to my list. I might also recommend a very good book by Victor Davis Hanson called “The Second World Wars.”
One oft-overlooked aspect of WW2 was how the Allies worked in concert with each other. They shared technology and tactics in ways that the Axis never did. As a few examples:
(1) The US used navalized B-24s and escort carriers quite effectively with Commonwealth convoy methods and anti-submarine technology to win the Battle of the Atlantic. By late 1943, U-boat service was a death sentence to their crews.
(2) The US and Commonwealth forces timed the Normandy landings in coordination with the Soviets who near simultaneously launched Operation Bagration which caused a general collapse of Axis Europe in less than a year.
(3) The US and Commonwealth collaborated very closely on tanks, aircraft and naval technology as well as military training methods. Some good examples are the Americans’ use of Rolls Royce engines in P-51 mustangs. Or the US use of a British design for tank landing ships. The British use of American amphibious landing craft. The Manhattan Project, etc...Another example is the US training and equipping of Chinese Nationalist forces to fight the Japanese.
The Allies were very good at Combined/Allied operations.
A lot of that going on with NATO and many Asian allies (sadly not much with Taiwan; Taiwanese people say they want to remain free but they are not showing the requisite commitment to “Israelize” their country).
Thanks for highlighting this book! My father was part of the war effort. Out of engineering school with masters in civil engineering from MIT, he was working at Bethlehem Steel. In mid-1940 he moved to San Diego, joining Consolidated Aircraft as it was apparent that the US would be ramping up production and at some point entering the war. He worked on the PBY Catalina and later the B-24. Once the war broke out and production shifted to full speed ahead, companies were readily sharing technology to advance both production and design. My dad would fly to various companies sharing Consolidated's tech and picking up stuff from the other companies. He regularly flew to Dayton (Curtiss-Wright), Baltimore (Glenn-Martin), and Bethpage (Grumman) with shorter drives up to the Los Angeles area (Douglass and Lockheed). For whatever reason he never made it up to Seattle (Boeing).
When war was officially declared in December 1941, he went down to the Naval base in San Diego to see about joining what ultimately turned into the Seabees but was refused as his work at Consolidated was deemed to be more important.
Enjoyed the review and will put the book on my to-read list, but this gave me pause:
"And work it did — the U.S. managed to out-produce the rest of the Allies combined, while devoting a much smaller portion of its economy to the military than other nations, and even increasing civilian consumption by the war’s end."
...many of the other Allies at this time suffered a great deal more direct physical destruction in their industrial core from the war and/or were pulled into it much earlier on, and/or didn't have the same access to the same raw materials close at hand, and/or were reliant on global trade networks that were severely threatened by military action. So without further context this seems like quite a weak case for the superiority of the US military-industrial system.
I think context further bolsters the case rather than diminishing it. In 1939 the US military was objectively not a global power. It primarily oriented itself towards protecting US commercial interests abroad and in the Americas. Most US Allies entered WW2 with better militaries. The US scaled its forces remarkably quickly and effectively.
(1) WW2 was effectively two wars, one in the Pacific and one in the Atlantic. The US sustained a global Lend-Lease regimen whose supply chain stretched, at times from the USA to the interior of China-over 14,000 miles of shipping distance. At the tail end of these shipping routes the US either sustained offensive combat operations for its own troops or that of its Allies. There really is no comparison. With the possible exception of the British Empire, the USA was the only country in WW2 to sustain simultaneous, large scale offensive operations in both the Pacific and Atlantic.
(2) The US massively scaled its military to become the largest standing military force in human history (12.2M). It’s ground forces were almost all motorized and carried reasonably good equipment. They were also fairly well-trained. Aside from the first six months of 1942, the US spent most of the war waging offensive operations.
The industrial capacity required to wage wars against other industrial powers situated at a minimum, 7,000 miles away is remarkable. The more one ponders this the more amazing it is...really think about it for a second.
Yeah, it's an incredible achievement. But the US was operating in a context where it's industrial heartlands weren't being bombed every night, you know? And it was geographically in a beautifully defensive position. So naturally the majority of its forces spent most of (the part of the war the US was involved in) waging offensive operations - that comes from having a great big ocean slap bang between most of the country and most of the danger.
It also helped that the other Allies were desperate and were begging to enter into massive long-term loans to finance the incredible industrial support they needed from the US.
So my question is, how much of the US boom was due to those structural factors - sitting out the start of the war, being one of the few Allied countries with naturally secure borders and no real need to mobilise for defense, benefitting from the surge in demand caused by the destruction elsewhere in the world, being less impacted than most by the disruption to shipping/supply of raw materials - and how much of it came from the specific way the military worked with industry in the US? It feels like there's a risk of overstating the value of (to coin a phrase) the military-industrial complex if one ignores all the other factors strengthening the US government's hand on this one.
On your last point - I'm not finding that as remarkable as you are, I'm afraid. The British Empire had been waging wars across the globe against peer and near-peer powers for a century or so before WWII. During the Napoleonic wars France was too. During WWII the spectre of being unable to maintain a fleet in the Pacific was a terrible embarrassment to the British who were routinely used to operating both there, in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and simultaneously waging significant overland campaigns (eg North Africa).
I think your point about the industrial capacity of the US being shielded from the immediate effects of the war and that giving the US enormous advantages is very true. Despite that, comparing at any point what the British military was able to do in comparison with what the Americans did in WW2 is preposterous. The British Navy was the largest in the world in 1939 with over 1400 ships. The US Navy fleet grew almost a thousand ships in 1942, more than 1900 ships in in 1943, and over 2300 in 1944. Grew as in they had 7 fleet carriers in 1941, went down to 4 in 1942 due to losses and grew back to 19 in 1943 so were having to replace losses and then add on additional ships.
Yes, the US mainland wasn’t being bombed, but even if nobody was being bombed, the US at that point in time still had roughly half of the world’s industrial potential.
I think you are correct about how the US industrial base remained shielded during the war. It is a fair point and yet, it is still remarkable about how the entire US economy shifted to a wartime status. I believe in 1944/1945 the US expended nearly 40% of it’s GDP on the war.
I have to disagree with you on your final characterization. The Napoleonic Wars were primarily a European affair. There were battles in Egypt and elsewhere but the major campaigns were in Europe.
I would say the only truly global war prior to World War 2 was the Seven Years War in the 1760s. However, even that one did not involve the scale of simultaneous offensive operations which were characteristic of WW2. They were just qualitatively different wars.
For a different take of the relationship of government and business have you read
Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (American Business, Politics, and Society) Hardcover – August 3, 2016 by Mark R. Wilson
Let's see. Mr. Knudsen came to the US as a 21 year old immigrant with some schooling and skills/work-experience. He arrived and started looking for work the same day. He found employment, did his jobs well, and thanks to his hard work, his intellect, and perseverance, he rose through the ranks. (I read the biography written by his son-in-law.)
This immigrant did not have to walk for days through dangerous areas while at the end having to traverse a large stretch of desert/swim a wide river, to find razored barb wire fences in his way. He did not have to ask for asylum in order te be able to take a job several months later, starting years of insecurity. He did not have to buy a GreenCard from e.g. Aunty X in LA to work, fearing La Migra every day. He did not have to wait eight years - or more - to get the proper stamp in his passport finally allowing him to take a job. As said, he came and started a (successful) US life immediately.
So yes, let's wonder, why do we not have more Bill Knudsen immigrants nowadays ?
Take a look at all the immigrants who have started and/or lead tech companies. You may like or dislike Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Andy Grove (among many others) but none of them are native-born Americans.
I had an idea you would be going there. I was not talking about not-native born. I was talking about the way nowadays the majority of immigrants is being treated. Unless you come legally thanks to a family relationship, you will not be able to work in a real co. & rise thru the ranks, as you need papers like the I-9 and a real Soc. Sec. #. Some indeed manage to get in on a work-related visa (or win the lottery or being recognized refugees/asylum-seekers), which often equals a world of misery, especially if you are the "also" on said visa. This means an unproductive period, too often spanning many years, for these immigrants, diminishing the chance they will shine like Bill Knudsen.
Elon Musk's mother had Canadian citizenship, making it possible for him get a Can. passport. Also, he did not come from poor family. Sergei Brin arrived in the US because his parents immigrated here in 1979. Both his parents have university degrees. They came before the "anti-immigrant" act of 1996 was put in place. Andy Grove came to the US in 1956 as a Hungarian refugee. Again, way before the "anti-immigrant". See my point ? Keep them coming. Maybe you will hit upon a Knudsen.
I do not dislike Mr. Musk. I just wish he did things more useful to this Earth than building an oversized metal penis (same for Mr. Bezos).
You decry the author for being too one sided, but you do much the same at the end of this review, where you pretend that the loss of faith in government is something that just happened as opposed to a successful decades long attack by right wing groups on the new deal consensus that this book applauds.
"At the same time, the U.S. is just now beginning to emerge from its Second Gilded Age — a time when government and business no longer considered themselves natural partners, and when “private vs. public” thinking dominated many of our intellectual debates. As in WW2, we will have to learn — or re-learn — how those institutions can complement each other instead of thinking of themselves as competitors."
You know that there has been a massive, well funded, network of foundations and non profits that arose in the last 40 years dedicated to promoting the idea that tax cuts for the rich promote growth, that government is always inefficient, and that freedom means "no regulation".
You saw how this belief system ust messed up the UK.
This is the obstacle to good government in the US.
The successful decades long attempt by heritage foundation and people like Grover Norquist to destroy the public's faith in government actively undid the good work that this book is about. In countries like the Nordics, or Taiwan, or Singapore, or most of Europe, or Japan, they worked out a much more workable public private split on responsibility.
That you left even a cursory sentence about it out of the review is a glaring omission.
It's good, Noah, that lately you're looking at bigger pictures -- the social contexts. On this one, however, you left out a big factor in war-time manufacturing. For at least the second time since the early 1900s, women 'manned' the assembly lines -- think the Triangle Shirt Fire for openers. They sewed uniforms too. Encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, my mother at twenty drove from NY to Alabama on her own with her new baby to work in Mobile, AL building ships, and my immigrant grandmother dropped her upstate restaurant to work at the P.O. in NYC reading foreign mail for espionage. They were not the only ones. There's a reason American manufacturing forged ahead while men were at war -- and to be fair, maybe the book mentions that, but If you're going to delve into American capacity and economics, please mention the other 50% of the people occasionally.
I recently finished "Arsenal of Democracy", a similar book with a focus on Ford. The US war production machine hired women and blacks. According to the book, they closed whorehouses and took on the staff as assembly line workers. They had to deal with the push back with regards to hiring blacks. There were a lot of racists then as now.
Starlink is a strange example to use of the risk of private monopolization of a key technology considering it is pretty much brand new. I’d argue it’s actually an example of the success of private enterprise. SpaceX created a product that no one else had been able to deploy before and in the face of some criticism (including agencies like the FCC). It’s also so new that calling it a key military technology seems like a stretch at this point in time. And there are a few competitors (Amazon/Blue Origin among them) hoping to take a slice of the market.
Hmm. If only there were a word for a system in which a government pays for, and exercises fundamental control over, the production of a broad array of public goods.
And if only there were a school of economic thought that describes rather precisely how a monetarily sovereign government with a free-floating currency regime can pay for that sort of stuff.
"If only there were a word for a system in which a government pays for, and exercises fundamental control over, the production of a broad array of public goods."
Except the explicit context in the OP here is leaving property under private control and VCA doesn't mention state ownership of property, merely "exercis[ing] fundamental control over" it.
And “exercising fundamental control” in this case is the government paying private contractors to produce war machines. So I dunno, what do you call the government paying Boeing for bombers? I certainly wouldn’t call it “Communism” as the state certainly doesn’t own Boeing.
Nice verbal sleight of hand there, calling paying defense contractors for armaments “exercising fundamental control”.
Review spot on. Including criticism of the authors bias against the public sectors contributions. When most harken back on when America was great, they forget it was the public / private partnership that enabled it all. When American politicians thought big, seeking returns in the future, not tomorrow. The Manhattan Project. The Marshall Plan. NASA. The 1956 Highways and Bridges Act. Every one of these projects were planned, financed, and overseen by the government - yet executed by the private sector. Great book that should inspire all of us that it can be done again.
Good review. The effective combination of private enterprise and the public government has been responsible for much more than victory in WWII.
The internet was a government DARPA project that for better or worse, has changed the world. Starlink and SpaceX would not be possible without foundation laid by NASA. Public and private are different. People who think private is inherently more efficient than public have never worked in a large corporation. Well-managed government agencies can be more innovative than private industry because they can work under a longer timeline.
The most inefficient organization I ever worked for was a large corporation that lived for quarterly stock analyst buy-hold-sell reports. The most efficient was a public library system.
Without public-private cooperation, both stagnate.
In the last century, but not a century. "A century ago" still means the post World War One period, the start of the Roaring Twenties in America, with the next world war still far in the future, and the Great Depression yet to happen before that.
Thanks Noah. I like the figure on manufacturing output. It strongly suggests the winner of any confrontation will be the one able to get along with more partners. Not bullying your neighbours seems to be the superpower. It's amazing how understanding this seems out of reach for the minds of some world leaders...
That was a point in Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War and The Rise of Rome. The Romans weren't the absolute best at warfare. They got their asses handed to them often enough. Their strength was in managing allies. They provided a path from simple non-aggression pacts to alliance to becoming part of Rome. They defeated the Etruscans, but soon afterwards there were Etruscan senators. They allowed for internal autonomy but developed a common legal basis allowing citizens of Rome and its allies to own property, enter into contracts, intermarry and reside within the alliance.
A lot of people tend to confuse brutality with strength and mercy with weakness. A lot of people are fools.
A second comment if I may. Anyone who read the book I hope you saw the footnote in the very last chapter “Conclusion.” This footnote by Herman completely discredits his anti-union, anti New Deal slant.
“It had not come without a human cost. The number of workers, male and female, who were killed or injured in the U.S. industries in 1942–43 exceeded the number of Americans killed or wounded in uniform, by a factor of twenty to one. And not just workers. One hundred and eighty-nine senior GM officials died on the job during those five years of intense mobilization and activity. The obituary pages of American Machinist in those years show the names of one corporate executive after another who “died unexpectedly of a heart attack” or was cut down “after a brief illness.”
Thanks Noah. I'm Big Bill Knudsen's great-grandson and it's terrific seeing the story put in front of a new audience. His choice to become a dollar a year man and work for FDR made him no friends at GM, but there was no way he could say no when asked by the president to serve. It's a tough legacy to live up to. I'd add that there was more than one time that he and Henry Ford got into a shouting match.
Such a small world!
Good review Noah, I will have to add this book to my list. I might also recommend a very good book by Victor Davis Hanson called “The Second World Wars.”
One oft-overlooked aspect of WW2 was how the Allies worked in concert with each other. They shared technology and tactics in ways that the Axis never did. As a few examples:
(1) The US used navalized B-24s and escort carriers quite effectively with Commonwealth convoy methods and anti-submarine technology to win the Battle of the Atlantic. By late 1943, U-boat service was a death sentence to their crews.
(2) The US and Commonwealth forces timed the Normandy landings in coordination with the Soviets who near simultaneously launched Operation Bagration which caused a general collapse of Axis Europe in less than a year.
(3) The US and Commonwealth collaborated very closely on tanks, aircraft and naval technology as well as military training methods. Some good examples are the Americans’ use of Rolls Royce engines in P-51 mustangs. Or the US use of a British design for tank landing ships. The British use of American amphibious landing craft. The Manhattan Project, etc...Another example is the US training and equipping of Chinese Nationalist forces to fight the Japanese.
The Allies were very good at Combined/Allied operations.
A lot of that going on with NATO and many Asian allies (sadly not much with Taiwan; Taiwanese people say they want to remain free but they are not showing the requisite commitment to “Israelize” their country).
Thanks for highlighting this book! My father was part of the war effort. Out of engineering school with masters in civil engineering from MIT, he was working at Bethlehem Steel. In mid-1940 he moved to San Diego, joining Consolidated Aircraft as it was apparent that the US would be ramping up production and at some point entering the war. He worked on the PBY Catalina and later the B-24. Once the war broke out and production shifted to full speed ahead, companies were readily sharing technology to advance both production and design. My dad would fly to various companies sharing Consolidated's tech and picking up stuff from the other companies. He regularly flew to Dayton (Curtiss-Wright), Baltimore (Glenn-Martin), and Bethpage (Grumman) with shorter drives up to the Los Angeles area (Douglass and Lockheed). For whatever reason he never made it up to Seattle (Boeing).
When war was officially declared in December 1941, he went down to the Naval base in San Diego to see about joining what ultimately turned into the Seabees but was refused as his work at Consolidated was deemed to be more important.
Enjoyed the review and will put the book on my to-read list, but this gave me pause:
"And work it did — the U.S. managed to out-produce the rest of the Allies combined, while devoting a much smaller portion of its economy to the military than other nations, and even increasing civilian consumption by the war’s end."
...many of the other Allies at this time suffered a great deal more direct physical destruction in their industrial core from the war and/or were pulled into it much earlier on, and/or didn't have the same access to the same raw materials close at hand, and/or were reliant on global trade networks that were severely threatened by military action. So without further context this seems like quite a weak case for the superiority of the US military-industrial system.
I think context further bolsters the case rather than diminishing it. In 1939 the US military was objectively not a global power. It primarily oriented itself towards protecting US commercial interests abroad and in the Americas. Most US Allies entered WW2 with better militaries. The US scaled its forces remarkably quickly and effectively.
(1) WW2 was effectively two wars, one in the Pacific and one in the Atlantic. The US sustained a global Lend-Lease regimen whose supply chain stretched, at times from the USA to the interior of China-over 14,000 miles of shipping distance. At the tail end of these shipping routes the US either sustained offensive combat operations for its own troops or that of its Allies. There really is no comparison. With the possible exception of the British Empire, the USA was the only country in WW2 to sustain simultaneous, large scale offensive operations in both the Pacific and Atlantic.
(2) The US massively scaled its military to become the largest standing military force in human history (12.2M). It’s ground forces were almost all motorized and carried reasonably good equipment. They were also fairly well-trained. Aside from the first six months of 1942, the US spent most of the war waging offensive operations.
The industrial capacity required to wage wars against other industrial powers situated at a minimum, 7,000 miles away is remarkable. The more one ponders this the more amazing it is...really think about it for a second.
Yeah, it's an incredible achievement. But the US was operating in a context where it's industrial heartlands weren't being bombed every night, you know? And it was geographically in a beautifully defensive position. So naturally the majority of its forces spent most of (the part of the war the US was involved in) waging offensive operations - that comes from having a great big ocean slap bang between most of the country and most of the danger.
It also helped that the other Allies were desperate and were begging to enter into massive long-term loans to finance the incredible industrial support they needed from the US.
So my question is, how much of the US boom was due to those structural factors - sitting out the start of the war, being one of the few Allied countries with naturally secure borders and no real need to mobilise for defense, benefitting from the surge in demand caused by the destruction elsewhere in the world, being less impacted than most by the disruption to shipping/supply of raw materials - and how much of it came from the specific way the military worked with industry in the US? It feels like there's a risk of overstating the value of (to coin a phrase) the military-industrial complex if one ignores all the other factors strengthening the US government's hand on this one.
On your last point - I'm not finding that as remarkable as you are, I'm afraid. The British Empire had been waging wars across the globe against peer and near-peer powers for a century or so before WWII. During the Napoleonic wars France was too. During WWII the spectre of being unable to maintain a fleet in the Pacific was a terrible embarrassment to the British who were routinely used to operating both there, in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and simultaneously waging significant overland campaigns (eg North Africa).
I think your point about the industrial capacity of the US being shielded from the immediate effects of the war and that giving the US enormous advantages is very true. Despite that, comparing at any point what the British military was able to do in comparison with what the Americans did in WW2 is preposterous. The British Navy was the largest in the world in 1939 with over 1400 ships. The US Navy fleet grew almost a thousand ships in 1942, more than 1900 ships in in 1943, and over 2300 in 1944. Grew as in they had 7 fleet carriers in 1941, went down to 4 in 1942 due to losses and grew back to 19 in 1943 so were having to replace losses and then add on additional ships.
Yes, the US mainland wasn’t being bombed, but even if nobody was being bombed, the US at that point in time still had roughly half of the world’s industrial potential.
I think you are correct about how the US industrial base remained shielded during the war. It is a fair point and yet, it is still remarkable about how the entire US economy shifted to a wartime status. I believe in 1944/1945 the US expended nearly 40% of it’s GDP on the war.
I have to disagree with you on your final characterization. The Napoleonic Wars were primarily a European affair. There were battles in Egypt and elsewhere but the major campaigns were in Europe.
I would say the only truly global war prior to World War 2 was the Seven Years War in the 1760s. However, even that one did not involve the scale of simultaneous offensive operations which were characteristic of WW2. They were just qualitatively different wars.
For a different take of the relationship of government and business have you read
Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (American Business, Politics, and Society) Hardcover – August 3, 2016 by Mark R. Wilson
Let's see. Mr. Knudsen came to the US as a 21 year old immigrant with some schooling and skills/work-experience. He arrived and started looking for work the same day. He found employment, did his jobs well, and thanks to his hard work, his intellect, and perseverance, he rose through the ranks. (I read the biography written by his son-in-law.)
This immigrant did not have to walk for days through dangerous areas while at the end having to traverse a large stretch of desert/swim a wide river, to find razored barb wire fences in his way. He did not have to ask for asylum in order te be able to take a job several months later, starting years of insecurity. He did not have to buy a GreenCard from e.g. Aunty X in LA to work, fearing La Migra every day. He did not have to wait eight years - or more - to get the proper stamp in his passport finally allowing him to take a job. As said, he came and started a (successful) US life immediately.
So yes, let's wonder, why do we not have more Bill Knudsen immigrants nowadays ?
Uh, we do.
Enlighten me.
Take a look at all the immigrants who have started and/or lead tech companies. You may like or dislike Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Andy Grove (among many others) but none of them are native-born Americans.
I had an idea you would be going there. I was not talking about not-native born. I was talking about the way nowadays the majority of immigrants is being treated. Unless you come legally thanks to a family relationship, you will not be able to work in a real co. & rise thru the ranks, as you need papers like the I-9 and a real Soc. Sec. #. Some indeed manage to get in on a work-related visa (or win the lottery or being recognized refugees/asylum-seekers), which often equals a world of misery, especially if you are the "also" on said visa. This means an unproductive period, too often spanning many years, for these immigrants, diminishing the chance they will shine like Bill Knudsen.
Elon Musk's mother had Canadian citizenship, making it possible for him get a Can. passport. Also, he did not come from poor family. Sergei Brin arrived in the US because his parents immigrated here in 1979. Both his parents have university degrees. They came before the "anti-immigrant" act of 1996 was put in place. Andy Grove came to the US in 1956 as a Hungarian refugee. Again, way before the "anti-immigrant". See my point ? Keep them coming. Maybe you will hit upon a Knudsen.
I do not dislike Mr. Musk. I just wish he did things more useful to this Earth than building an oversized metal penis (same for Mr. Bezos).
You decry the author for being too one sided, but you do much the same at the end of this review, where you pretend that the loss of faith in government is something that just happened as opposed to a successful decades long attack by right wing groups on the new deal consensus that this book applauds.
"At the same time, the U.S. is just now beginning to emerge from its Second Gilded Age — a time when government and business no longer considered themselves natural partners, and when “private vs. public” thinking dominated many of our intellectual debates. As in WW2, we will have to learn — or re-learn — how those institutions can complement each other instead of thinking of themselves as competitors."
You know that there has been a massive, well funded, network of foundations and non profits that arose in the last 40 years dedicated to promoting the idea that tax cuts for the rich promote growth, that government is always inefficient, and that freedom means "no regulation".
You saw how this belief system ust messed up the UK.
This is the obstacle to good government in the US.
The successful decades long attempt by heritage foundation and people like Grover Norquist to destroy the public's faith in government actively undid the good work that this book is about. In countries like the Nordics, or Taiwan, or Singapore, or most of Europe, or Japan, they worked out a much more workable public private split on responsibility.
That you left even a cursory sentence about it out of the review is a glaring omission.
It's good, Noah, that lately you're looking at bigger pictures -- the social contexts. On this one, however, you left out a big factor in war-time manufacturing. For at least the second time since the early 1900s, women 'manned' the assembly lines -- think the Triangle Shirt Fire for openers. They sewed uniforms too. Encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, my mother at twenty drove from NY to Alabama on her own with her new baby to work in Mobile, AL building ships, and my immigrant grandmother dropped her upstate restaurant to work at the P.O. in NYC reading foreign mail for espionage. They were not the only ones. There's a reason American manufacturing forged ahead while men were at war -- and to be fair, maybe the book mentions that, but If you're going to delve into American capacity and economics, please mention the other 50% of the people occasionally.
I recently finished "Arsenal of Democracy", a similar book with a focus on Ford. The US war production machine hired women and blacks. According to the book, they closed whorehouses and took on the staff as assembly line workers. They had to deal with the push back with regards to hiring blacks. There were a lot of racists then as now.
Good to know — I’ll check it out. Wish Noah would be more ‘external’ and inclusive about economics — the division of labor matters.
Starlink is a strange example to use of the risk of private monopolization of a key technology considering it is pretty much brand new. I’d argue it’s actually an example of the success of private enterprise. SpaceX created a product that no one else had been able to deploy before and in the face of some criticism (including agencies like the FCC). It’s also so new that calling it a key military technology seems like a stretch at this point in time. And there are a few competitors (Amazon/Blue Origin among them) hoping to take a slice of the market.
Yes, I wondered about that myself -- just given how new it is, is there any military that actually is reliant on it to any meaningful degree?
Hmm. If only there were a word for a system in which a government pays for, and exercises fundamental control over, the production of a broad array of public goods.
And if only there were a school of economic thought that describes rather precisely how a monetarily sovereign government with a free-floating currency regime can pay for that sort of stuff.
Dirigisme? Social Democracy? New Deal Liberalism?...?...? Etc.??
"If only there were a word for a system in which a government pays for, and exercises fundamental control over, the production of a broad array of public goods."
Fascism?
I think he means "socialism".
Except the explicit context in the OP here is leaving property under private control and VCA doesn't mention state ownership of property, merely "exercis[ing] fundamental control over" it.
And “exercising fundamental control” in this case is the government paying private contractors to produce war machines. So I dunno, what do you call the government paying Boeing for bombers? I certainly wouldn’t call it “Communism” as the state certainly doesn’t own Boeing.
Nice verbal sleight of hand there, calling paying defense contractors for armaments “exercising fundamental control”.
It's what economists call a monopsony. They can only sell war machines to the US government or US government approved customers.
Ah, that's what it is. Guess VCA loves monopsony, then.
Review spot on. Including criticism of the authors bias against the public sectors contributions. When most harken back on when America was great, they forget it was the public / private partnership that enabled it all. When American politicians thought big, seeking returns in the future, not tomorrow. The Manhattan Project. The Marshall Plan. NASA. The 1956 Highways and Bridges Act. Every one of these projects were planned, financed, and overseen by the government - yet executed by the private sector. Great book that should inspire all of us that it can be done again.
Good review. The effective combination of private enterprise and the public government has been responsible for much more than victory in WWII.
The internet was a government DARPA project that for better or worse, has changed the world. Starlink and SpaceX would not be possible without foundation laid by NASA. Public and private are different. People who think private is inherently more efficient than public have never worked in a large corporation. Well-managed government agencies can be more innovative than private industry because they can work under a longer timeline.
The most inefficient organization I ever worked for was a large corporation that lived for quarterly stock analyst buy-hold-sell reports. The most efficient was a public library system.
Without public-private cooperation, both stagnate.
"How we handled the War Economy a century ago."
In the last century, but not a century. "A century ago" still means the post World War One period, the start of the Roaring Twenties in America, with the next world war still far in the future, and the Great Depression yet to happen before that.
Thanks Noah. I like the figure on manufacturing output. It strongly suggests the winner of any confrontation will be the one able to get along with more partners. Not bullying your neighbours seems to be the superpower. It's amazing how understanding this seems out of reach for the minds of some world leaders...
That was a point in Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War and The Rise of Rome. The Romans weren't the absolute best at warfare. They got their asses handed to them often enough. Their strength was in managing allies. They provided a path from simple non-aggression pacts to alliance to becoming part of Rome. They defeated the Etruscans, but soon afterwards there were Etruscan senators. They allowed for internal autonomy but developed a common legal basis allowing citizens of Rome and its allies to own property, enter into contracts, intermarry and reside within the alliance.
A lot of people tend to confuse brutality with strength and mercy with weakness. A lot of people are fools.
These articles are amazing and super interesiting.
A second comment if I may. Anyone who read the book I hope you saw the footnote in the very last chapter “Conclusion.” This footnote by Herman completely discredits his anti-union, anti New Deal slant.
“It had not come without a human cost. The number of workers, male and female, who were killed or injured in the U.S. industries in 1942–43 exceeded the number of Americans killed or wounded in uniform, by a factor of twenty to one. And not just workers. One hundred and eighty-nine senior GM officials died on the job during those five years of intense mobilization and activity. The obituary pages of American Machinist in those years show the names of one corporate executive after another who “died unexpectedly of a heart attack” or was cut down “after a brief illness.”