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Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

It's more like WTF happened between 1945 and 1971. I think that was an ahistorical period of low income inequality, and now we're back to "normal" such as it is.

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> I think that was an ahistorical period of low income equality

You mean low income inequality, right?

That post WWII era in which the US was pretty much the only developed nation with it's manufacturing capability still intact. That and the GI Bill explain how that era was exceptional - a large number of folks who returned from WWII got free college educations.

Do you have a source for this claim? Canada , Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, Spain , Australia , New Zealand and arguably undeveloped India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and other parts of Latin America were "intact".

By population the US dominates the entire list of first world countries you have there, and as you note, the remainder were underdeveloped at the time.

The US benefits a lot from simply being big. On some level success is simply about biomass - you need the largest number of brains you can, sitting around thinking about stuff.

>> pretty much the only developed nation with it's manufacturing capability still intact > [some minor developed nations were intact] > [some undeveloped nations were intact]

Minor thoughts:

a) trivial quibble: Spain was not intact in 1940, I doubt they'd recovered that much by 1945? b) I was gonna say something bout Argentina not being a developed country, but I looked it up, and TIL that Argentina used to be super developed. TIL! c) most of those undeveloped countries had virtually no manufacturing, which is why UncleOxidant excluded them in a comment about manufacturing power

But more importantly...

The numbers I've seen bandied about (I don't have credible sources) say that the US was 50% of world GDP, and held 80% of hard currency reserves, in 1945. Supposing that's correct, even though you're technically right that the US wasn't "the only developed nation ... still intact", it's still almost-correct-in-spirit. US manufacturing capability in 1945 was way way way ahead of every other country. The point being that if the US economy experiences unusual behaviour in the period 1945 to 1971, one obvious factor is its overwhelming global supremacy in manufacturing in the immediate post-war period.

>> You mean low income inequality, right?

Fixed, thank you.

Beyond the obvious, the Fairness Doctrine was enacted at that time. It put regulations on news reporting which allowed US citizens to be informed voters. The Fairness Doctrine was removed, and since then .. well, you can see what has happened to the country. Fighting between groups. Definitions for terminology that differs depending on what political groups understand creating misinformation. Citizens getting only half of the reporting, even if that half is truthful. People being outright lied to by the "news". And the list goes on. It's back to how it once was.

When we're unformed voters, then who we vote for and what policies end up getting enacted to not serve our best interests.

While this at first may not seem like much, it's a key butterfly effect for many of the other problems we have today. It's not the whole picture, but the root of a larger picture.

Here's a better question - how do we replicate the 1945-1971 period without a world shattering war and tens of millions of deaths?

That's also a great point. The 70s have a lot of divergence vs the prior 20 years, but what if we run the clock back to, say, 1875?

(I don't know. But it has to be asked)

Piketty goes into some detail on that: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/8/5592198/the-short-guide-to-capi...

The answer is that 1875-1920 looks an awful lot like 1975-2020.

Yeah, A Farewell to Alms makes a pretty convincing argument that 1945 to 1971 was an anomaly. Ever since the advent of agriculture, income inequality has been on the rise. The Belle Epoch in France was the peak of that - then revolutions, World Wars, and Socialism happened. Once that civil unrest stopped, the trend continued back up.

(We might have recently passed Belle Epoch-levels of inequality - not sure this is an accomplishment we should brag about)

> Yeah, A Farewell to Alms makes a pretty convincing argument that 1945 to 1971 was an anomaly. Ever since the advent of agriculture, income inequality has been on the rise. The Belle Epoch in France was the peak of that - then revolutions, World Wars, and Socialism happened. Once that civil unrest stopped, the trend continued back up.

Its worth noting that large scale disasters (of all sorts) were always great equalizers, a countervailing force to rising inequality. In general, the more you had to lose, the more you lost.

We've been getting better at preventing or coping with a lot of these things like plagues, famines, and so on, but we've become even better at insulating accumulated wealth from being destroyed by them (including by financial crises), by privatizing gains and socializing losses.

I have a feeling that we've entered a new period of larger scale social unrest and natural disasters which may or may not significantly destroy and/or redistribute wealth to level the playing field again somewhat.

Obligatory Paul Graham article about that period, since we are on HN: http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html

it's more like what didn't happen. Between '45-71 Europe and Asia were still rebuilding from WWII, by the seventies they were finally able to compete again.

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