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Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Robert Higgs
Robert Higgs
Affiliation:
Director of the Center for the Study of Social Dyanmics, Seattle University, Seattle, WA 98122
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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.

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Articles
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The Journal of Economic History , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 1992 , pp. 41 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1992

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