Following the end of World War II, the United States dominated global economics. Initially, after the war, the United States was the only significant economy that was not totally in ruins (Germany, Japan, Italy) or deeply damaged by the sacrifices entailed in fighting the war (Great Britain, Russia).
The great U.S. manufacturers were untouched; they had produced awesome amounts of war material (aircraft, vehicles, electronics); these facilities proved rapidly convertible into consumer goods to satisfy pent up American (and global) demand. Simultaneously, U.S. scientific and technical innovation across the economic and cultural spectrum generated an apparently endless flood of benchmark products: commercial television; ocean-spanning passenger aircraft; computers that evolved from “size-of-your-living-room,” vacuum tube-using, primitives to iPhones with greater computing power than those early monsters; and green revolution agriculture virtually feeding the world at some points. Perhaps the zenith of this dominance was placing men on the moon in 1969, little more than a half century after Lindberg’s 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
But steadily this primacy declined. Others developed comparable technological prowess (more than occasionally accelerated by U.S. manufacturers creating factories in these countries to advantage themselves of lower labor costs). And the United States transformed from being the world’s factory to being the world’s greatest consumer—of consumer goods produced outside our borders.
