In last week’s post, I provided some data on how much physical capital has grown in the last one hundred years. When measured by certain proxies, such as the production of steel, it looks like about a 30x growth in the last 100 years and nearly 100x if you go back just two decades further to 1900. We also saw that significant growth has occurred since World War II, which as a first approximation is at least a 10x growth.
Now someone might suggest that this growth could all be due to the population explosion, but that’s not the case. Over the same timeframe the global population has grown a lot less: from 1900 to today a bit less than 5x and from the end of World War II to today only by a bit more than 3x. Put differently, the increase in physical capital has far outstripped population growth.
Now one might still question whether this capital is sufficient to meet everyone’s needs as I have asserted. I believe that the strongest evidence for my claim comes from considering what happened during World War II. Here is a chart that shows how government share of GDP in the US spiked during the war years.
Let’s dive a bit deeper and look at the manufacturing efforts. The US ramped production of tanks, airplanes, battleships and guns at an extraordinary clip in the war years. Here is a table that tabulates this for different weapons systems.
The numbers are staggering. For example, in 1943 the US built 2654 major naval vessels. That’s more than 7 every day, or roughly one every three and half hours! In 1944 the US built over 74 thousand combat aircraft, that’s about 8.5 combat aircraft *every hour*.
We are not talking about simple devices here. These are complex high-performance systems with many components (think of the aircraft engines alone!). And that’s just the US production. There were similar scale efforts in Germany, Japan, the UK, and Russia. For example, adding up all the combat aircraft production in 1944 is 185 thousand units, which is 21 aircraft every hour.
Now here in the US while all of this production was happening, people were not starving, there was enough clothing, and were doing surprisingly well overall. But as we saw in last week’s post, the production of cars dropped dramatically — so how were people’s transportation needs met during this time? Through a massive increase in public transportation. The connection was made quite explicitly with the government running ads “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.” This is a perfect illustration of separating a need, transportation, from its solutions, in this case individual versus shared mobility.
The continued ability to meet needs while at the same time repurposing half or more of physical capital strongly supports the claim of sufficient capital. As a first approximation much of that capital was previously used to meet wants. And it went back to meeting wants after World War II which partially explains the tremendous economic boom of the post war years.
All of this is to say that today’s economy with at least an order of magnitude more capital than during World War II can easily meet our needs. Importantly it also means that we have plenty of additional capacity that could be allocated to solving the climate crisis. For example, we could dramatically ramp the production of everything from solar panels to nuclear reactors to heat pumps.
But there is more to be gleaned from what happened during World War II production. It isn’t just that we collectively made a lot of complicated stuff rapidly. We also innovated on extremely compressed time scales. The Manhattan project is the most obvious example of that which in a span of three years developed the nuclear bomb. It is hard to exaggerate how extensive this effort was, including for example uranium mining, as well as the exploration of several different bomb designs.
Important technologies were either invented or significantly advanced during World War II. For example, at the beginning of the war, radar was a nascent technology. Towards the end of World War II through the invention of the cavity magnetron, the Allies managed to build radars small and lightweight enough to put on planes. Penicillin, which had been discovered in 1928, was not widely used until mass production was unlocked as part of a secretive World War II effort.
Production and deployment at high volume also drove important improvements. Take fighter planes as an example. Early fighters had limited range which meant that bombers had to fly into enemy territory without escorts. Their only defense against local fighters were plane mounted machine guns. It was only as the war went on that escort fighters of sufficient range were developed to accompany bombers. This was made possible by a combination of technological advances, such as more powerful engines, and the insights gained from battle.
So what are the key takeaways? First, during peacetime mode much of the capital is used to meet wants not needs (the third installment in this post will look at this with regard to all the needs identified). Second, when switched into wartime mode, much of the productive capital can be redirected quickly towards accomplishing specific goals that are different from needs. This was already true at a much lower amount of physical capital per capita than is available today. Third, innovation can in fact be accelerated dramatically by focusing resources on critical problems.
The obvious threat we are facing today that requires a massive reallocation of – and improvement in – capital is the climate crisis. Whether this can be accomplished is determined entirely by what we choose to pay attention to. Hence, the defining scarcity of our time is attention, not capital.
