On misunderstanding the postwar boom

All too often, I fear, the argument that we got rich because we had no competitors is an attempt to avoid admitting that an economy could prosper with high taxes on the rich and unions that gave workers a lot of bargaining power. Oh, and did I mention low overall income inequality?

What went right? Nobody really knows, but the best guess is that in the relative stability of the postwar environment businesses were able to fully exploit already existing technologies like electrification and the internal combustion engine. The key point is that the pro-labor, redistributive policies of the post-New-Deal era don’t appear to have gotten in the way of that success.