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Comment by iancmceachern | Hacker News Reader

I used to work for a guy who did.

He got his start because he had a security clearance and knew how to install and repair ccd camera systems do he did so for rocky flats and Cheyenne mountain. Then they asked him to build a box that had a film video camera that would take images of a crt display for record keeping. This was before it was possible digitally. So he did, he made 2. Then they needed a lift to bring down the Hughes projectors they used in Cheyenne mountain, the old kind with 3 color crt projectors. It needed to drop down the projector so they could change it out in less time than it took a nuke to come from Russia, so he did. He founded a company to keep making them, they still make them to this day.

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> He founded a company to keep making them

So many companies were set up on the back of this cutting edge stuff, as well as Mercury and Apollo, satellites, nuclear reactors, submarines, jet liners, the SR-71, the Heavy Presses, it just goes on and on. Everything from one guy in a barn up to huge corporate labs. Obviously the war already boosted a lot of stuff, but the Atomic Age atmosphere must have felt like an unstoppable industrial whirlwind.

Even though the recent AI hype has been pretty feverish, it doesn't seem like we have had the same kind of top-to-bottom hopeful dynamism.

It's the economy stupid!

The US before WW2 was a regional power. After WW2 it was the only country still standing. This led to decades of unprecedented GDP growth.

I try to warn people about what it means when Asian countries have 30 years of GDP growth of 7% year on year but it barely registers.

In the 50s the industrial might was used to build and improve the country (mostly). Where was the inflection point? Reagan? When we sensed that the USSR was weakening, did the floor elite throw the big lever from "build" to "extract?"

>In the 50s the industrial might was used to build and improve the country (mostly). Where was the inflection point? Reagan?

Reagan was the reaction IMO. We really screwed ourselves in the 70s. Reagananomics, the 1980s (and beyond) financialization of everything, selling the bottom layers of the economic pyramid overseas piecemeal so that stonks could go up and consumers could buy cheaper junk, I see those that more of a reaction. The money and effort poured into those endeavors because it could no longer make a return on industrial endeavors.

What happened in the 70s to invoke such a reaction? I’m aware of vague issues that plagued the Carter admin, but not a good overall picture.

A whole bunch of things that reduced reinvestment in the country hit all at once during mostly the first half of that decade.

Vietnam cultural problems came home to roost as did divisive civil rights era race baiting, 1st generation welfare systems (which I know it sounds hard to believe, but were way worse than today in terms of cliffs and disincentivizing productiviety) proliferated, oil crisis, stagflation, a whole bunch of the industrial economy which had been built out around/during WW2 was nearing "reinvest or shut it down" age right at the same time that stuff got regulated to high heaven and the oil crisis hit. As much as people complain about Gen Z being lazy/unmotivated, the hippie boomers were even worse as a workforce (and even more dominant due to the birth rate lull and spike of the depression and ww2).

By the 1970s Japan and Western Europe came back online.

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