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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

The rebuilding phase was over by 1990. And so was the cold war, more or less, and that strongly involved the US too.

Did you misread the time period they suggested?

Look at the huge cost of German reunification from 1990 onwards, for example - "rebuilding" Eastern Europe was a big effort.

I count German reunification as something quite different from rebuilding from WWII.

By the mid-90s we were 50 years after the end of the war. It didn't take three generations to put the cities and infrastructure back together.

It took about 2 trillion and maybe a couple of decades from 1990 onwards.

Okay, but it wasn't the thing we were talking about...

Sorry, I just tried to add that post cold war there was substantial rebuilding (again).

That's fair but I don't think it would have stopped a "Silicon Valley" effort, especially not across all of Europe.

Maybe not. As always, I think it's more complex: It certainly used a lot of funding, not just from and for Germany that wasn't available then for other things; at the same time there was not much defense spending (to go back to the origins of SV) either, there was also a lot of socio-politcal change binding change capacity, and in parts there has been a certain distrust/dislike of information technology in countries like Germany.

The rebuilding phase only really got started in the 90s! Integrating the post-communist states was a huge effort that is still arguably going on.

A continent of people didn't sit in bombed out cities and countryside for fifty years before getting major repairs going, what are you talking about.

The damage from WW2 to Europe was not limited to bombing and killing, it includes the economic harm inflicted on Eastern Europe in the decades afterwards by the Soviets.

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