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Comment by jonbarker | Hacker News Reader

A lot of economic growth also came out of World War II, but this isn't something we want to repeat.

I'd beg to differ with this; it made the US a superpower because it completely decimated everyone else. Broken window fallacy-- Europe would have continued being more of a world producer if not for the lost lives, scientists, and manufacturing which could have more quickly made more advances. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)

First time I have heard the broken window thing used like that, on that scale ... but it might work!

Yea, all we need to so is kill off tens of millions of the most able people in the developed worlds to spur economic growth.

It just doesn't work like that. WWII was value destruction at a massive scale. All that industry could have been building industry and we'd have had the 50's and 60's a decade earlier but not just for the US.

To be fair I read the broken-window comment so as so mean exactly what you said? A lot of broken windows in Europe, so people there were less keen on keeping things intact and more likely to litter and ... stuff.

I don't think the winner matters; if the US had lost, economic growth would have resulted anyway, just elsewhere.

The US became the largest economic power in the world around the 1880s or 1890s. At that time in Europe, Italy and Germany had just recently become unified countries (both in 1871, in fact), and the only major European conflicts since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 were the peripheral Crimean War and a series of short (less than a year), decisive wars related to the unifications of Germany and Italy.

While the US is conventionally excluded from great power analysis (the preceding form of superpower analysis) due to its noninvolvement in European affairs, it was unquestionably one of the major economic engines of the world in the era before WWI.

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