[jaqalopes]

A friend and I were at the WW2 museum in New Orleans a couple years ago and he said something that really stuck with me. Amazed at an exhibit on wartime manufacturing, he turned to me and said, "This is so unbelievable to me. To think what we accomplished when everyone in the country was pulling in the same direction. There's no way that could happen anymore." I hardly want to glorify warfare, but he has a point. As a young person in our chaotic and ambiguous present day looking back into the haze of the past, there really is something incredibly romantic about the era of war mobilization. Ordinary people had a purpose simply assigned to them, and if nothing else I think it's still the case that people in all eras crave purpose.

[roenxi]

The attitude is a dangerously rose-tinted view of war, the US was operating internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent you know. In a war, dissent is quashed. That doesn't mean that it isn't there, just that there is a high tolerance for sub-optimal decisions because there isn't time to ruminate.

The US isn't getting poor outcomes from their manufacturing sector because people are divided, but because the US has policies tending towards deindustrialisation and there is a broad political consensus to keep them. Ban the smokestacks, ban the smokestack economy and enjoy the clean air.

[rayiner]

> the US was operating internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent you know

That is non-responsive to the point raised by OP. That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese. The point OP raised is much more salient. If we end up in another World War, what lessons do you want to have from the past? “Don’t put racial minorities in internment camps” is well and good, but it won’t help you build a giant navy and win a war.

I learned con law from a social studies PhD who had little interest in the constitution, and focused the entire class on this or that minoritized or oppressed group. It’s a terrible way to learn constitutional law—or anything else—because you over-focus on the 20% of the story while missing the big picture about how the country was actually designed to work.

[eesmith]

> That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese.

Or the people killed in the Port Chicago disaster, and when enlisted men later refused to work due to unsafe conditions, they were court-martialed. ("Widespread publicity surrounding the case turned it into a cause célèbre among Americans opposing discrimination targeting African Americans; it and other race-related Navy protests of 1944–45 led the Navy to change its practices and initiate the desegregation of its forces beginning in February 1946.", quoting Wikipedia.)

Or the infamous Zoot Suit riots, where newly arrived white American servicemen thought Hispanic culture, including wearing zoot suits, was anti-American and unpatriotic - L.A. was one of several cities during the war with race riots (eg, the Beaumont race riot of 1943 caused by relocated white defense workers who attacked local black residents).

[wat10000]

Not putting thousands workers into camps for no good reason will help you build a giant navy and win a war. It’s small compared to the whole country but it does help.

But the main lesson I'd want to take is to shut down strong aggressors early, then you don’t need to run a massive war production program in the first place.

Judging by Ukraine, we seem to have learned this lesson but not very well.

[rayiner]

Preemptively getting involved in wars that don’t concern us isn’t a takeaway from world war ii. The circumstances that caused that were the result of 300 years of the Westphalian system, and are quite unique.

[wat10000]

It might not be your takeaway but it sure is mine. All that stuff with Austria and Czechoslovakia didn’t concern us, until it did. Putting a stop to those shenanigans would have been a million times easier if done early.

[roenxi]

You'd be involved in a million times more war. There are too many conflicts for that sort of thinking to work.

The lessons from WW1/2 were (1) don't be involved in the first few years of a World War, they are empire wreckers and (2) after a war, winners should invest in the economic success of the losers and (3) more Bismarck. Being even more aggressive would hardly have helped, the Europeans were all aggressive. Turns out aggression as a strategy led to ... more and bigger wars. Who'd a thunk it.

[bcrosby95]

I think you missed their point. Everyone was pulling in the same direction because not doing so could land you in prison. During a war (a real declared one) you have little to no right to free speech. More than one person was jailed due to dissent.

[rayiner]

That’s a good lesson. What the U.S. did in war time isn’t dissimilar to what China and Singapore did in peacetime to lift themselves out of poverty in a generation.

[hollerith]

But Beijing doesn't suppresses dissent for economic reasons. Beijing suppresses dissent because social harmony is a core tenet of Chinese culture.

Also, the kind of centralized control the US imposed during WWII is not particularly useful for encouraging economic growth. China's economic growth was caused by Nixon's decision to bring China into the US-led maritime trading system plus Mao's dying and eventually being replaced by someone who was not completely incompetent at economic policy.

The reason China or Russia or Bangladesh cannot afford to adopt a British- or American-style culture that emphasizes liberty or heroic levels of individualism is that they have too many militarily-powerful neighbors: the combination of a culture that encourages free expression and experimentation with technologies that cause profound social changes with the geography of a China, Bangladesh or Russia will tend to lead to deadly civil wars, rebellions and invasions. If their geographical situation were like the US or the UK (i.e., secure in their respective islands, i.e., not in danger of invasion by land) then they would have the option of switching to a culture that emphasizes freedom of expression and free economic activity, and if they did that they would tend to reap considerable economic benefits over the decades.

[roenxi]

The quashing of dissent isn't what is propelling them forward though - it is probably holding them back more than anything else. Allowing dissent and maybe even adjusting to it generally leads to better results in the long term.

I was mulling on my commute today as I dodged several homeless people. I can't speak to the US experience, but in Australia if I'd offered those people jobs at the wages and conditions of Chinese workers in the 90s, with the expectation of achieving the same civilisation progress as China ... I would expect to be fined and told off. If I persisted in running a business that way, eventually I'd probably be arrested.

Quashing dissent is illegal in the West, but that isn't the thing that needs to be changed to get industrial results. We need to legalise the industry part. Pollution has to be acceptable, mistakes decriminalised and it needs to be easy to employ people productively. All these Western countries are going a good way to banning mining, restricting cheap energy, blocking industrial processes as environmentally unsound and over-regulating how business is done. All on purpose and largely due to consensus opinions that too much industrial progress is bad for people. The result is much to most of the capital investment for the last few decades seeming to have happened in Asia where they were happy to let the world improve around them. It has nothing to do with division. If anything we don't have enough division, the people who want progress are hamstrung because they are forced to conform to the whims of timid environmentalists.

(and I endorse bcrosby95's reading of my comment).

[rayiner]

> The quashing of dissent isn't what is propelling them forward though - it is probably holding them back more than anything else.

OP’s reading above was that quashing of dissent was what helped everyone pull in the same direction in world war ii.

[divbzero]

I only learned recently that several Japanese Americans were killed in those camps.

[1]: https://www.history.com/articles/japanese-american-relocatio...

[2]: https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Homicide_in_camp/

[Duwensatzaj]

Do you know about the Niihau Incident?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident

[GuardianCaveman]

You don't think people with victory gardens, and buying warbonds, scraping together spare silk and aluminum and other metals to donate to the war effort, manufacturing of vehicles and other factories converted to output munitions and tanks and other materials is impressive?

You can be amazed at the output and the point of the article without turning this into yet another guilt post about how bad America is. What we did was wrong. But also, we stopped the nazis and the japanese and the italians. the war in the pacific killed 15-20 million chinese civilians, and I won't even go into the other theaters or the war crimes of the japanese or the axis powers (nothing to do with the internment). But maybe whatever the opposite of rose tinted glasses is the way you're viewing the wars.

And no, no amount of good by US forces justifies or absolves us of the sin of the japanese internment but maybe some credit is due at least.

[int_19h]

FWIW, what stopped the Nazis, for the most part, was the bodies of Soviet conscripts.

[mrguyorama]

"British intelligence, US material, and Soviet blood"

Which is STILL a ridiculous oversimplification that does not accurately capture the level of death and sheer effort expended because Germany and Japan decided that reality wasn't important and Fascism was neat.

[tzs]

Yup, but they needed arms to do that and a huge amount of Soviet arms came from the US.

The US supplied a little over half of all ammo, shells, mines, and explosives the Soviet Union used during the war. The US also supplied something like 400k trucks, 13k combat vehicles, 14k aircraft, and 13k tanks along with petroleum and food that the Soviet army needed to sustain operations.

[bluGill]

The us is getting great manufacturing results - but because of automation only a few people labor and so it is invisible

[brandonmenc]

We can't build ships.

[bluGill]

We could but divison of labor is a good thing in general.

[rascul]

We do build some ships, though.

[khuey]

I don't know how young you are but I was around the last time the American society nearly universally agreed on what direction to pull and it led to invading two countries (one on a notorious lie), around 60,000 casualties and god only knows how many civilian casualties, and five trillion dollars spent. Be careful what you wish for.

[amanaplanacanal]

And then at the next election we re-elected the same people! It still boggles my mind.

[jonstewart]

There was a fair bit of this after 9/11–and much of the military/intelligence apparatus expanded and figured out how to disrupt terrorist organizations—but it was shortlived as the Iraq War was divisive (and rightfully so).

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Same for very early on in COVID

[beAbU]

The Apollo programme is another example of this for me. You need an existential threat, or the threat of eternal embarrassment and suddenly everyone is pulling in the same direction.

IMO most of the world's woes these days are persisting because of a lack of political will to fix them.

I sometimes feel that China is able to achieve the things it's achieving because the government's near-absolute control over the population. The political power is absolute, and it's wielded in a very very effective way. If China decides tomorrow that they want to colonize Mars, they will probably get it done within a decade.

[mrguyorama]

That same near-absolute control is what drove the 4 pests campaign and cultural revolution so... Maybe don't emulate the cult of personality part?

Too late.

[FpUser]

>"there really is something incredibly romantic about the era of war mobilization. Ordinary people had a purpose simply assigned to them, and if nothing else I think it's still the case that people in all eras crave purpose."

Sure. Food rationing, mass poverty, inability to do anything but prescribed work, mass hysteria. All things to look forward to.

[GuardianCaveman]

Yeah next time we can just sit it out and let the enemy bayonet babies and slaughter 20 million Chinese people. Ever read rape of nanking?

[FpUser]

>"...just sit it out and let the enemy..."

If enemy attacks you then you do not have to sit it out. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. But calling this "do" romantic is pure BS in my opinion, well unless somebody craves looking at mutilated corpses in "romantic" way.

[cadamsdotcom]

Yep, purpose.

Societies today have immense latent potential. So many people are doing bullshit jobs that tick things over, sitting there wishing to be put to use for some intrinsically motivating purpose. An existential threat - war - is a well known way to bring that out. But war is too destructive for modern tastes.

We've seen developing countries get great results by government directing private industry in stronger ways than we're used to in the West. For example China's regularly published national development priorities for the next 5 years. If you hew to these you'll be helped in various ways. Singapore's and South Korea's rises to global powers were helped along by government getting everyone to row in the same direction - among other things, I'm greatly simplifying. But to focus on this one idea, I hope you can agree that providing purpose through top-down leadership is a great way to harness societies' latent potential and mobilize in a given direction..

Rudderless, laissez-faire governance got the US a surprisingly long way. But we are seeing the resultant directionlessness leave leaders unable to agree on whether to tear up what's been built, leave it in place, or go some completely random direction.

It's not the ships that were built, it's what they represented. That was what got them built.

[southernplaces7]

The latent authoritarianism in in opinions like yours makes it easier to understand why authoritarians keep rising to the top of different societies, so they can destroy lives, squander wealth and crush individual peoples' own perfectly productive capacities for finding their own cooperative purposes in life.

[vkou]

Pretty sure the current crop of politicians that are destroying lives, squandering wealth, and crushing individual people are doing it as banner-bearers, not of any kind of Eastern collectivism, but of the uniquely American brand of 'fuck you, fuck everyone, fuck any responsibilities I may have, don't tread on me, I've got mine'.

[southernplaces7]

I'd suggest you fixate just a bit less on just the media frenzy around the American example of Trump and his grab bag of incompetent nodding clowns in congress and cabinet for examples of authoritarianism in action. My comment was intended more broadly, because the problem is indeed broader.

There's no shortage of authoritarian governments all over the world, many of which use exactly the guise of collective purpose or some other similar nonsense to justify their destructive, repressive activities..

[vkou]

Well, of course they have to, it's kind of hard to run a regime that murders and tortures and robs people without, you know, at least pretending that you're doing it for their own good.

They also use 'upholding the law' as a common excuse, but that hardly results in "the guise of having laws or some other similar nonsense is an entry point to authoritarianism' becoming a reasonable thing to say.

[refulgentis]

In their personal lives. When they have to deign to consider the impact of decisions on other people.

In their professional lives, they are Patriots Advancing American Independence.

The unquestioned Purpose is what enables the lack of care for others (that blossom in oh-so-many dangerous ways)

[vkou]

You're assuming the agents behind all of this actually believe in anything but power and wealth, and aren't just cynically rolling out the authoritarian playbook to justify why they have to seize it.

[int_19h]

The ones that were just cynically using this popular sentiment for their own benefit were the previous wave.

But the problem with that kind of thing is that eventually it results in a wave of true believers. It doesn't mean that they stop padding their pockets, mind you - why would they, when they're obviously entitled to their fair share as the Champions of Something Great. But it vastly increases their capacity for damage because now they are going to do it even in situations where it doesn't benefit them in any way, and may even harm them, for the sake of their beliefs.

[refulgentis]

> So many people are doing bullshit jobs that tick things over, sitting there wishing to be put to use for some intrinsically motivating purpose

We're a generation of men raised by Fight Club—I'm wondering if a self-induced mass-culling event is really the answer we need.

[dredmorbius]

Before Fight Club was the Hitchhiker's Guide "B-Ark". Before the B-Ark was Robads 1000 Clowns. Before 1000 Clowns was Chaplin's Modern Times. Before Modern Times was ... pretty much all of Dickens's ouvre. And that potted list omits much.

Laughing at the futility of present-day enterprise, whatever the present or the enterprise, is a long-standing tradition.

And really no need to call for culls, directly or otherwise.

[refulgentis]

Dickens ~= Fight Club is a tough sell. :)

Most obvious reason: Dickens characters would be quite bemused by the idea we need to Retvrn from "email jobs" because something something we need meaning. :)

[dredmorbius]

Both are criticisms of the established economic order. I'm not trying to draw much further relation.

Again: there's a great deal other work. Erewhon, Looking Backwards, The Dispossessed come to mind. Arguably much of Neal Stephenson's work. Earlier, Gulliver's Travels and More's Utopia, though pre-industrial satire has a different vibe to it.

This turned up in search: Dystopian books on economy and work culture: <https://bookriot.com/dystopian-books-about-the-economy/>

[southernplaces7]

I don't see anything romantic about this. The mass mobilization of a society so well over 400,000 members of its youngest and brightest can die grotesquely overseas while industry, society and culture are forcefully synchronized to a single government issued purpose is not usually something to desire.

I do understand the needs of that particular war, The Nazis and Imperial Japan were truly invasive evils, big and globally dangerous enough to be worth fighting, even if it meant mass mobilization, but generally, there's no nostalgic beauty to such vast butchery, destruction and creation for the sake of destruction. I prefer finding my own purpose in life, and knowing that my children won't be ripped apart by artillery in some blood-soaked field of mud due to government decree.

[stevenwoo]

Studs Terkel's collection of interviews with various populations of the USA in The Good War is a good antidote to overromanticization of World War 2 conditions.

[dredmorbius]

And if that's not enough for you, there's the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, which is an absolute treasure:

<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/>

(There's a related podcast, though it appears on hiatus: <https://studs.show/>).

[southernplaces7]

This is wonderful! Thanks for the link. I appreciate Terkel's work but didn't know about this particular source.

[dredmorbius]

Enjoy! It really is amazing.

Studs ran a daily program from the 1950s through at least the 1990s, and possibly into the 2000s. The sampling, depth, and breath is absolutely incredible.

[southernplaces7]

Very much agreed, as are many other narratives, from both soldiers and civilians about the more cynical aspects and hardships of that purpose filled time. The people childishly downvoting my comment expressing a desire to not be forced into a vast government project of destruction and death would do well to read such texts.

[mitthrowaway2]

Your comment is being downvoted not because they disagree with the noble opinion you express, but because you were misreading the comment you replied to, making yours a beautifully-written non-sequitur in context.

[zelphirkalt]

I think what the GP is relating to is that we could achieve so so sooo much more, if we didn't have all the opportunistic selfish people in our midst, who will go against any worthy goal, if it means they can enrich themselves. It is about the distribution of resources to reach goals. It would be quite easy for example to ensure, that every school meets some standards, enabling children to learn well. But there are always some lobbyists lobbying against it, and some politicians working against it, because there is no short term gain to be had for their business or for themselves. Also an educated population is maybe not what every politician wants in the first place, even though we all know, that raising the general education level would be beneficial in the long run.

Or what we could achieve in terms of renewable energy, if we all were behind the goal. There are many examples that benefit society, but anti-social forces and influences are everywhere, delaying, stopping, and sabotaging our future.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

You're strawmanning.

>It is about the distribution of resources to reach goals. It would be quite easy for example to ensure, that every school meets some standards, enabling children to learn well.

In the US, educational spending went up massively without much improvement in outcomes:

https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/primary_scost.gif

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/...

Small-government types like me aren't against good things. We just believe that it takes much more than simply throwing resources at a problem to solve it.

In my view, the "you're just against good things" finger-pointing merely gets in the way of a constructive discussion regarding what actually works.

Based on what I've read about WW2, the US was able to rapidly mobilize because it had great leadership at the time. We're not able to mobilize in the same way nowadays because our government leadership sucks. The civic culture is weaker (in part due to political polarization, and also demoralization due to our failures in Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). There's lots of anti-Americanism in America nowadays. Even the right has become anti-American. (Arguably, that's a good thing if it gets us in fewer wars!) And politicians seem to care more about signalling to their constituents that "something is being done" rather than actually succeeding at the thing.

Salaries are higher and projects are more exciting in the private sector. US multinationals are growing fast, and starving the US government of the brilliant, hardworking individuals that would be needed for the government to do awesome stuff. The government turns those people off due to red tape, lower salaries, and a generally bad working environment. I graduated from one of the top universities in the US, and I don't remember talking to any student who even considered working for the government.

[amanaplanacanal]

You seem to be arguing against yourself here. At the beginning you are arguing for small government and against throwing money at problems, and at the end you are saying that we can't get good government because salaries are too low.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

I think good salaries are necessary but far from sufficient. This blog seems good, here's a post on hiring in particular:

https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/dear-mr-kupor-please-fix-fede...

[mrguyorama]

>In the US, educational spending went up massively without much improvement in outcomes:

Funding to school systems increased.

Not funding to education. Paying the superintendent more money doesn't teach the kids any better, especially when the teachers still can't afford basic office supplies.

This is a persistent myth in the US that "oh no actually we spend so much on education".

No. We've spent decades giving more and more and more of the US's resources to MBAs and middle managers who ignore their domain experts and just take home huge salaries and wonder why we aren't making any progress.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

I'm not taking your claims at face value without a solid citation. But in any case, they would seem to underscore my point that just throwing money at a problem isn't sufficient. The money has to be spent in the right way, and it's not obvious how to do that in advance.

And rent-seekers are omnipresent. Greed motivates workers in the public sector just like it motivates workers in the private sector. There's nothing about the phrase "you are now working for the government" which makes someone magically less greedy. That's another point that your account underscores (assuming your account is accurate).

[Spooky23]

Honestly, I felt the same way during the pandemic. People moved mountains to help each other and everyone in different ways.

Of course, the poison of social media took care of that in short order. FDR cracked down hard on misuse of the airwaves and the extremists for a reason.