Full employment ensued because to win a War at this time required outproducing your enemy. As a result, an unprecedented factory production machine suddenly appeared.

• 69,000 airplanes (aluminum industry) (55 planes per day)
• 5,000 naval battleships (4 ships per day per day!)
• 7 million aircraft bombs (5,500 bombs per day)
• 31 million artillery shells (24,000 shells per day)

Bonneville Dam was the number one target for a Japanese Mainland air strike because it supplied electricity to the Boeing War Machine

Important Quotes from this period:

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off (FDR 1933 Inagaural Speech).

The question that I will ask you to consider today is this: When the war is over, are we likely, and do we want to keep this attitude to work and the results of work? Or are we preparing and do we want to back to our old habits of thought? Because I believe that on our answer to this question the whole economic future of society will depend. Sooner or later the moment will come when we have to make a decision about this. At the moment, we are not making it - it is being made for us (by the machine). (Dorothy Sayers 1942 College Lecture) ( i.e. do we intentionally turn the war production machine off and go back to our former means of production )

Only if we have large demands can we expect large production. Therefore, it is important that in planning for the postwar period, we give adequate consideration to the need for ever-increasing consumption on the part of our people as one of the prime requisites for prosperity. (Robert Nathan 1944 - an economist).

From the 1948 Pamphlet "The Miracle of America"

• The mainspring of the American standard of living is High and Increasing Productivity!

• We take abundance for granted as we consume more than half of the world's coffee and rubber, almost half of the steel, a quarter of the coal and nearly two-thirds of the crude oil ( At this time the US had only 1/15th the population of the world ).

The 1946 Employment Act named "purchasing power" as one of the things government was meant to promote.

Thus prompted, Americans of the late 1940s got down to the business of buying things. In the first five years of peace, consumer spending increased by 60 percent. People bought cars and boats and clothing. They bought furniture and appliances. They bought Tupperware.

Most of all, they bought houses. Housing starts went from 142,000 in 1944 to 2 million in 1950. Let me say that again: 142,000 to 2 million in just 6 years!

The Ad Council cheered them on, casting consumption as what distinguished happy capitalists from those poor benighted souls living under the communist boot.

American in the 1950s: The Decade that Changed Everything:

The Atomic Age; Prosperity for All; Interstates; Suburbia; Television; Rock N Roll; The Age of Advertising; The Happy Homemaker

And so set the stage for every increasing production and consumption. American prosperity required dominating the world in trade and products and for a long time we did and in the short term, it certainly did pay off. Life the 1950s and 1960s was a lot better than life in the 1920's and 1930's - personal prosperity and personal productivity were very high and the free market society was borne without boundaries. But what will life be like in 2030 compared to 2010?

Proxy Waveforms for Global Consumerism

Guess what product this is - you all have one:

Who Franchises the World?

There is just one problem with all this growth:

The Finite Earth