Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by subjectHarold 2649 days ago
The economic effect of the Autobahn is massively overstated (I would actually look to Wages of Destruction by Tooze here). Public works were important but it is as important to look at how this was all facilitated.

The reason it only shows 26-39 is that Nazis came to power in 1932. The worst year in the GD was 1931-32, other countries were not moving out by 1933, most didn't move out decisively until WW2. The UK isn't a good comparison (the UK was still way ahead of most other nations at this point, Germany wasn't particularly similar).

It is definitely possible that without Schacht, the boom wouldn't have occurred. The constraints on resources were massive and required the invention of a range of complex economic devices to manage. Even at the time, there was the same backwards thinking about this: Germany must have managed to do this because they had the resources. No, they had no resources. What they did was very unusual. The only comparison that occurs is the international monetary co-operation in the 1960s to maintain the $ peg to gold...and even then, the level of sophistication required was nowhere near and the results achieved far less significant.