WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

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.

The amount of nuance can be overwhelming. CPI doesn't account for the ability of consumers to substitute inferior goods, but GDP doesn't account for the sacrifice involved in doing so. CPI focuses on consumers, while GDP focuses on all sectors. CPI includes the price of imports while GDP does not. The list goes on. Making all of these choices and keeping in mind the consequences for doing so is exhausting, but you shouldn't just pick someone who looks like the most credible person in the room and trust them because the very nuance that you were hoping to avoid allows people to torture the numbers to say anything they want, and the most credible person in the room might not want the same thing you do. GP argued that OP was torturing the numbers and I argue that GP is torturing the numbers. Who do you believe?

Here's a test to avoid getting lost in the wilderness of nuance: "What would Elysium look like in this model?"

I am referring of course to the movie where a small number of rich people live in luxury on a space station while Earth and its population have devolved into a gigantic poverty-ridden slum. In this case, CPI might show that a basic basket of food, clean water, shelter, and education have become prohibitively expensive for most humans, while the GDP measure would argue that most members of the slum can't afford clean water or proper shelter so those things shouldn't be included in the index. Instead, people live in tents and drink barely-filtered water, which are both still affordable, so what's the problem? More generally, any figure expressed in terms of dollars (GDP, value creation, etc) runs the risk of placing low weight on what happens in the slums and high weight on what happens on the space station. The average (unstated subtext: dollar-weighted) person can afford luxurious accommodation in all facets of life and sees nothing but perpetual economic improvement, so again, what's the problem?

Which metric is the right one? That depends entirely on the point you want to make, but the "Elysium test" is a very basic honesty check that catches the more egregious errors.

For physical goods, most of it. Raw materials in particular aren't expensive except in terms of the energy required to extract them and process them (modulo supply and demand).

For labor it's more complex, but in general falling energy costs drive capital investment in automation (displacing and lowering demand for less-skilled labor) to lower price and capture greater market share (in order to get a return on the investment of capital), lowering labor's share of the final price, and the Jevons paradox drives increased consumption of the lower priced goods (as well as the lower priced energy). Software has been driving the same sort of dynamic for a while, though the way it affects industries seems to be more contingent, 'lumpier', and less predictable (eg. in hindsight, the disappearance of the travel agent as a result of online booking was somewhat obvious, but AirBnB effectively adding a lot more inventory to the market wasn't).

Not sure what happens when software and energy both more directly affect each others' supply and consumption, but the effect on the rest of the economy is going to be... interesting. Smarter energy grids that shift the economics of energy plants and sources at different scales; vehicles, homes, factories, & data centers that can all adjust their energy use/storage to take advantage of spot pricing, energy costs driving the ROI of training machine learning models etc. and thus changing the return on investment in compute capacity (and in software efficiency), and so on. There are a lot of feedback loops, and as "software eats the world", more (unanticipated) feedback loops will be created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_Reorganization_Act...

...and the re-emergence of corporate consolidation and the rise of the conglomerate in the 1960s, which reduced the power of labor to negotiate for a fair share of the gains.