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The miracle in France is called the Trente Glorieuses, "a thirty-year period of economic growth in France between 1945 and 1975, following the end of the Second World War": <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses> Germany and Japan both benefitted by the fact that their extant infrastructure and owners were demolished, removed, and/or financially wiped out by the war and/or the ensuing occupation and denazification / deimperilisation (in Germany and Japan respectively), which removed ownership-based objections to new development and investment --- think NIMBYism, but on steroids. There's an article I've mentioned and submitted to HN numerous times, Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937). I'd first heard of it through Isaac Asimov who was a research assistant for Stern whilst a student at Columbia. <https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...> As markdown: <https://rentry.co/szi3g> The piece looks at the innate opposition to technological (and economic) innovations and advance largely from extant established interests, in the areas of transportation, communication, power, metals, textiles, agriculture, and construction. Something I've noticed in looking at development is that greenfield projects* in which there is no extant political, social, and economic power structure to present an opposition move far faster than those with a well-developed set of independent agents. This is highly pronounced in transportation, where initial route deployment occurs through undeveloped lands. As the transportation itself induces further development, commerce, residences, industry, etc., those interests themselves impose high frictions and costs on further development. To put it another way, simply following financial amounts hugely distorts understanding of the impact of assistance. Money spent in Germany and Japan (both physically, politically, and financially devastated by World War II) went far further than equivalent sums in either occupied but victorious regions (e.g., France) or unoccupied victors (e.g., UK). It's interesting to note that high-speed rail (HSR) development has proceeded most rapidly in regions either strongly disrupted by WWII, or in which industrialisation is now occurring for the first time to any significant degree: Japan, France, Germany, and China most notably. HSR's failure-to-launch in the US is attributable in large part to resistance from regional airlines (SouthWest most notably for the proposed "Texas Triangle" routes), and high land costs and dense extant development (both East and West coast projects). Single-factor explanations are of course limited. Italy (defeated and occupied) did not see the same post-war rebound as its Axis allies Germany and Japan did, though it did of course grow. The Eastern Bloc similarly lagged, likely for other reasons (though it also often saw a far more rapid initial response, see notably North and South Korea's respective development following the 1953 armistice, with the North greatly outpacing the South). |