Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s

Robert Higgs

The Journal of Economic History, 1992, vol. 52, issue 1, 41-60

Abstract: 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 arsenal in which the well-being of consumers deteriorated. After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.

Date: 1992
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