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Originally Posted by jester
Chuck I thought that once too, but and this is what was explained to me why our steel and auto industry took a backseat to those of Germany and Japan in the 60s.
We chugged along after WWII untouched by the war. I mean really, the only devestation was our Territories like Hawaii and that was localised mostly to Pearl, Hickam and Kaneohe, Guam, Wake and The Philipines.
But think about this. Japan and Germany were devestated, their industry destroyed.
And through recovery efforts like the Marshall Plan many of those countries were rebuilt with brand new equipment and tools of industry. Short term, it was also good for the United States as we were supplying these items. But long term bad, because we were using old technology and machinery etc, and supplied these rebuilt economies with much more modern tools of industry and thus, they were able to out produce us in those specific areas or at least become competition. Just something to think about.
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Actually the Marshall plan ( which the Soviets and many other eastern European nations applied for too
) was a scheme to enable the western European economies to create surplus and become markets for US products.This worked great for app. 20 years -longer in some fields such as armaments technology -as there was virtually zero competition. But in the end Europeans and eventually Asian nations developed capacity to compete with the US.As the markets shrank and competition stiffened the manufacturing jobs and heavy industry in the US ( steel, cars,agriculture) etc had to downsize or even shut down in many places.This coupled with the enormous growth of the Asian economies has given American economy a hard time from the 1980s or so .The hard times are also affecting Europe in similar ways -but as you say -we had a helping hand in the beginning and got a flying start ,as well as having had to pull it self up by its neck - an upward struggle that made the economies more efficient -for a while .