Brink Lindsey tries to criticize Paul Krugman. Lindsey says the aggressive expansion of government spending on infrastructure and the incentives to push forward technology and organization under the forced-blast of the government's redirection of spending during World War II set the stage for very rapid post-WWII Growth:
Nostalgianomics: Economic performance is a function of both economic policies and the underlying conditions for growth. When conditions are highly favorable (as, in China’s case, when relative backwardness creates the possibility for rapid catch-up growth), even fairly bad policies (like China’s) can produce good results. And it turns out that the conditions in the United States during the early post-WWII decades were highly favorable indeed…. [S]everal factors were especially conducive to strong performance at that time. There was a pent-up demand for goods and services after the privations of the Great Depression and the mobilization of World War II. There was also a pent-up supply of new products that couldn’t be brought to market during the depression and war years. That pent-up supply was augmented by technological and organizational breakthroughs accelerated by the imperatives of total war.
Sounds to me like Lindsey is saying that the policies of the New Deal and of Franklin Roosevelt's war were a solid home run, and did much more good for America's economic growth than any drag from post-World War II social democracy did harm.
I think Paul Krugman could live with that...
