Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s
- 3 March 1992
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in The Journal of Economic History
- Vol. 52 (1) , 41-60
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022050700010251
Abstract
Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is that during the war the economy was a huge arsenal in which the well-being of consumers deteriorated. After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.Keywords
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