Good point. In the 1950s Europe, Russia and Asia were ruined, in ashes from WWII, Africa was a mud-pit, S. America was recovering from numerous dictatorships. The US was the only real industrial state around.
As the W. Europeans and Japanese caught up in the 60s and 70s, we kept moving, but they moved faster (as they were starting from nothing and perversely, because they were destroyed, they had no legacy architecture)
Then in the 80s, the Asian tigers and then the Celtic tigers came up.
But then in the 90s, a completely game change -- the two sleeping giants: India and China awoke, communism collapsed. in the Naughties we see Eastern Europe, India, China removing the shackles of socialism slowly and building
As Myrddin pointed out, the standards and regulations and unions that we put in place in the 50s have put us at a severe disadvantage today.
You may be interested to know: more than twenty years ago, James Dale Davidson and William Lord Rees-Mogg said that Communism benefitted the West by acting as a global set-aside program. Just as agricultural set-aside programs kept crop profits up by restricting supply, Communism kept manufacturing profits up by ruining the industrial base of Communist countries. There was no way in Hades that Communist manufactured goods could ever outcompete those of the States in the global marketplace.
It wasn't just the U.S. that benefitted from that set-aside; Western Europe and the rest of the free world did too...once their industrial base was no longer flattened. Communism ruined potential competitors, which lowered the competitive pressure on free-world manufacturers.
They used that argument to predict another Great Depression for the 1990s, which we've avoided.
As an aside, the nation that "war benefits the economy" is a conceit only holdable by residents of countries that were not turned into battlefields.