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WWII started a sustained era of economic prosperity that persisted until the oil crisis of the early 70s. The economy boomed, wages rose for lower and middle class families which put millions out of poverty and into the middle class. Housing and spending boomed which only helped the economy. Everything was great. Then came the oil crisis and outsourcing of jobs and everything came to a screeching halt. I've seen statistics that real wages peaked in 1973 and almost all of the growth since then has been concentrated among the wealthy.
The last recession was on the foothills of the Depression and ten years later the economy is sluggish and limp. The economy recovery that occurred between the 1930s and 1950s miraculous. We went from the pits of the Depression to the biggest economic boom only 20 years later.
Imagine it being 2036 and we're in the midst of the biggest economic boom ever. Is it possible?
WWII started a sustained era of economic prosperity that persisted until the oil crisis of the early 70s.
In the US, it started in 1932, not when WW2 began (or ended).
In answer to your question, an economic boom like there was from 1932-1975 will not occur again because consumer-capitalism is being phased out. There will never be a large increase in consumer wages, which have been flat since 1975.
GDP/capita has been doing quite well though. Scarcity of energy and other resources will tend to put downward pressure on that in the future. On the other hand AI holds a lot of promise for increasing productivity. If we ever managed to develop a reasonably cheap energy source (like fusion?) GDP would take off.
Between 1933 and 1937 real GNP in the United States grew at an average rate of over 8% per year. Between 1938 and, 1941 it grew over 10% per year. This is huge and unprecedented growth. WWII started at the very end of 1941 so the boom started before WWII. An in-depth, scholarly study of the boom found that the main cause of the boom was the growth in the money supply. As expected, such a study doesn't just point to a general cause like "WWII" or "The New Deal" but instead examines the minutia of the process. However it does say "The main way that the money supply might grow endogenously is through demand-induced changes in the money multiplier."
In other words, increased demand prior to WWII was largely responsible as the cause, and that demand was created by economic policy, specifically the massive programs of The New Deal that put unemployed people to work.
Can it happen again? Probably. If we were to undertake a similar approach by creating huge infrastructure projects and many large alternative energy production sites, etc., it would put millions of people to work earning decent incomes to be spent and create increased demand. And that could get us going again.
Make no mistake: big employers worth billions have abandoned the U.S. and moved overseas for cheap labor, thus abandoning the workers who made them what they are today. Those corporations cannot be counted on to ever return, so we are on our own. We cannot appeal to them to change what they did to us. We have to pick ourselves up by the proverbial bootstraps and make a new economy from the ground up if we are to "be great again". And we could start by creating millions of jobs as Roosevelt did in the 1930s.
There will never again be a boom, because we're achieved all the technical innovation that will ever occur, and the worldwide population will be stable going forward.
Yes, there will be another boom. It may start tomorrow, or it may start 100 years from now after the world population shrinks back to 2 billion, and we start the process over again - who knows. There may be a dark swan event, like unlocking fusion power, or creating AI that propels us into a state of hyper-productive capabilities (whether there is demand for it or not).
I doubt it. If you look at history, once the capitalists leave a country, it is devasted at first, then gradually recovers back to mediocrity. The Dutch used to be a world empire. The bankers left the Netherlands and moved to England, where they founded the City of London, and for a hundred years, England was a world empire. Then they moved their money out of the industrial towns of England to the New World, and America became the leaders of the world empire.
In the 1990s, hundreds of billions of dollars left the US to move to Asia. In the mid 80s, most of the stocks on Wall Street were owned by big commercial banks and investors. The long-term capital gains tax was slashed to 5% in the 90s, and as those huge capitalists sold their stocks to pension funds, mutual funds and other small investors, the profit-taking they did was so immense that even with the long-term capital gains tax at only 5%, the US had a balanced budget for the first time in many years.
Of course, once the big global financial institutions were out of the market, the tax rate went back up again, and Asia had that money invested in their industry.
Jobs follow investments. Asian money in the US is not building new productive capacity, as the globalists' money did in Asia, it is buying up productive and existing assets. Sometimes they are buying up US factories, to shut donw their competitors, and other times they are buying up assets like real estate and profitable companies as a way of leveraging their positive balance of trade.
Jobs follow investments. The money never did belong to the American workers. The workers did not bring the money, and were not able to stop it from leaving.
I've not been following the Asian financial press for quite a while, but I doubt the same level of disinvestment in the US is taking place now as was taking place in the 90s.
In the 90s, the Asian financial press was reporting hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in China, India, and South Korea, mostly - EVERY DAY! Of course, it was a complete blackout here in the US.
Once those factories are shut down, the demand for training disappears, and within a generation, it's gone.
Look at Singapore, Mexico, Italy - that's the future of the US work force. In most of the world, for most of history, there was no way average workers like nurses, school teachers, trucker, letter carriers, could own real estate, send their kids to college, drive new cars, take vacations.
Average workers started identifying with the middle class, instead of the working class, and got their values and goals completely turned around. And as I look around, it appears most people still don't get it.
Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, published a book this year on this very topic. In "The Rise and Fall of American Growth", he is very skeptical about prospects for explosive economic growth anytime soon.
His basic thesis is that technological innovation that is truly revolutionary is exceedingly rare in human history. He points out that there was essentially no economic growth in the 8 centuries from the fall of the Roman empire and the Middle Ages. He argues that the technological advancements between 1870 and World War II were far more revolutionary than anything in our present times or anything on the horizon.
Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, published a book this year on this very topic. In "The Rise and Fall of American Growth", he is very skeptical about prospects for explosive economic growth anytime soon.
His basic thesis is that technological innovation that is truly revolutionary is exceedingly rare in human history. He points out that there was essentially no economic growth in the 8 centuries from the fall of the Roman empire and the Middle Ages. He argues that the technological advancements between 1870 and World War II were far more revolutionary than anything in our present times or anything on the horizon.
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