Farewell to GM, from a factory rat’s disloyal daughter

[ParkieDem]

33. I think this is a big part of it ...

... this idea that inertia would always keep America on top, that things would always be the way they are.

In the first 20+ years of the postwar era, most of the world's capacity for industrial production had been blown to shit. Europe was devastated, as was Russia and Japan. Places like China, India and Africa were nothing but subsistence agricultural backwaters. The United States, on the other hand, was supplying the Allies' insatiable appetite for industrial products while facing little direct threat of invasion or strife on its soil. As a result, the war enabled our factories to become the world's most productive and technologically advanced.

After the war, the rest of the world was desperate for all types of goods. Steel, cars, trains, buses, aircraft, engines, just to name a few. The United States was the only country that could provide these things in meaningful quantities. There was no competition. Some corporate executives, union leaders, and politicians believed it would "always" be this way.

Of course, it wasn't. The only constant is change. Did we just think Europe and Japan would lay idly by while we were the sole suppliers of industrial products? Of course not. It was only a matter of time before they started making their own stuff, and then started to export it.

To a degree, this is an oversimplification, no doubt. Policy blunders and poor decisions were made, and all sorts of external factors impacted the decline of American manufacturing. But I think the immediate postwar era, and the subsequent remobilization of industry abroad, has a lot to do with it.