Taken in combination, the per capita productivity of the American worker was the highest in the world. Additionally, American managerial practice at that time was the best in the world. factories were, on average, more modern and automated than those in Europe or in Japan. Seventeen time's Japan's national income.Įighty (80) times the automobile production.įurthermore, America had some hidden advantages that didn't show up directly in production figures. America, even in the midst of seemingly interminable economic doldrums, still had:

However, a dispassionate observer would also note a few important facts. Further, Japan's successes in fighting far larger opponents (Russia in the early 1900's, and China in the 1930's) and the fact that Japan's own economy was practically 'superheating' (mostly as the result of unhealthy levels of military spending - 28% of national income in 1937) probably filled the Japanese with a misplaced sense of economic and military superiority over their large overseas foe. To an outside culture, particularly a militaristic one such as Japan's, America certainly might have appeared to be 'soft' and unprepared for a major war. In economic terms, our 'Capacity Utilization' (CapU), was pretty darn low. workers were either unemployed (10 million in 1939) or underemployed, and our industrial base as a whole had far more capacity than was needed at the time.

The net effect of the Depression was to introduce a lot of 'slack' into the U.S. They say that economics is the 'Dismal Science' you're about to see why.īy the time World War II began to rear its ugly head (formally in 1939 in Poland, informally in China in 1937), America had been in the grips of the Great Depression for a decade, give or take. Most of them are taken from Paul Kennedy's 'The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers' (which, among other things, contains an excellent analysis of the economic forces at work in World War II, and is an all-around great book) and John Ellis' 'World War II: A Statistical Survey.' In this comparison I will focus primarily on the two chief antagonists in the Pacific War: Japan and the United States. So, just go give you an idea of the magnitude of the mismatch here, I decided to compile a few statistics. However, the sheer, stunning magnitude of this economic disparity has never ceased to amaze me.

It's no secret that Japan was, shall we say, 'economically disadvantaged' in her ability to wage war against the Allies. Grim Economic Realities Why Japan Really Lost The War

World conqueror 4 japan 1939