>>It’s important to note that from an economic standpoint, the post-WW2 period was an exception, not the norm.
There really isn’t a “norm” established because there isn’t enough data. The Industrial Age lasted less than a century and that was disrupted by two world wars. The Information Age is less than 50 years old and technology changes that game every decade.
We work with economic theories and business practices that are based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore, and some of those theories and practices are for worlds that only existed for brief period of time.
We need to search for a new paradigm, but our old 20th century political divisons prevent that. In the battle between Collectivism vs Free Market, where both are a failure if taken to the extreme, there can be no winner except for a few at the top—if we only seek to “win”.
In an Information Age where the most valued possession of a generation is their smart phone, there could be something (”Cooperatism”???) that eradicates the old C vs FM paradigm.
The way I see it, there's one basic dilemma that throws a lot of the conventional wisdom, economic theories, and business practices out the window:
1. As the world gets more complex, the cost of building and operating the industrial infrastructure to support it grows exponentially.
2. As technology advances, the expensive industrial infrastructure becomes functionally obsolete more rapidly.
The massive growth of government is the direct result of this -- because we've reached the point where the power of a totalitarian government are the only means of getting an adequate return on a costly investment in almost any major industry.