No. The Depression didn’t really end until Ike started deregulating, undoing all the chains and ropes with which FDR had bound up American Enterprise and Industry. What the war brought us was not recovery but a depression with full employment. Wartime wage controls kept wages so low that the people as a whole were not better off than they were before the war. They just all had jobs. “Patch it! Wear it out! Use it up!” Same slogans.
What the war did do, despite the strangling regulation, was to create an acceptance of new ideas and innovation. Competent entrepreneurs like Kaiser were enabled to come to the fore against entrenched oligarchies. The technology adopted and deployed to win the war spun off afterward into an economic surge that grew under Eisenhower until in the 1950’s, as we say in the first piece the economy reached the level from which it had crashed.
An example came from Eisenhower himself. He saw the autobahn and decided that we had to have something akin to it. For what he saw as a strategic imperative he adopted the federal interstate highway system. While he saw it as a strategic imperative, it clearly had a very strong economic effect.
Our pieces do not say that the economic surge came during the war but rather that they were impelled by it. Reagan realized, as we say, that in order to win without a hot war we had to win economically and so he led us to that win.
Since 1973, as we say, except for the period from 1973 to 1981 when the Saudis pulled the plug, at which point the rated of innovation in oil had risen to 300 %, innovation in oil has basically died except for incremental changes. We have published about this on WND and pointed out some of the answers right in front of us on which our leadership has completely dropped the ball. The DOE ought to be basically scrapped; it has been almost a complete failure; it has subsidized the problem and completely failed to solve it. The biggest example is the ethanol boondoggle.