Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s
@article{Higgs1992WartimePA,
title={Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s},
author={R. Higgs},
journal={The Journal of Economic History},
year={1992},
volume={52},
pages={41-60}
}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… CONTINUE READING
