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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   28167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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When it comes to mechanization, he gives the US and Australia pre-WWII, which basically just means the US. I don't know for post-1938, since Tooze doesn't get into the numbers for that and I've had trouble finding any serious efforts to pull apart the results of policy from the results of everything with wheels getting blown up. Much of the productivity difference beyond that is more prosaic: German agriculture focused more than the typical country on staple crops than cash crops or animal products, run by small and often inefficient farms, which had major labor shortages, while dependent on external feedstocks of fertilizers and vulnerable to bad weather.

But Tooze's argument is more:

What is more surprising, from our early twenty-first-century perspective, is Germany's marked inferiority relative to Britain. According to Clark, Britain not only had a higher per capita income than Germany; he believed that despite the much smaller size of the British population, the British economy was still somewhat larger than that of Germany. This conclusion has been modified by more recent calculations. We now believe that the German economy in the 1930s was slightly larger. However, the claim that per capita incomes in Germany were substantially lower than in Britain has proved robust. This difference was clearly not attributable to any qualitative difference in the productivity of British and German manufacturing. In virtually every industrial sector, German and British firms were closely matched. What dragged Germany down was its large and highly inefficient agricultural sector and the substantial tail of small shops and workshops in the craft and service sectors. In the 1930s productivity per head in German agriculture was only half that in German industry, at a time when more than 9 million people were still employed in farming.

The comparison is unfair, and Tooze knows it's unfair -- the British economy shrunk its agricultural sector by having someone else do it, in a way that post-WWI and pre-Nazi Germany wasn't going to be allowed to do. But it's the argument he makes.

Correlli Barnett's works, however, paint a rather unflattering picture of the British war economy, don't they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlli_Barnett#The_Pride_and_Fall_Sequence

It's been a long time since I read the The Collapse of British Power, but I thought most of the wartime manufacturing criticism focused on pre-WWI, where British on shore manufacturing was an absolute mess of tiny shops with no serious production capabilities. By the 1920s, the Barnett highlights the development of national manufacturing as a turnaround (if with US and continental assistance) from an area where engines, steel, and basic mechanisms couldn't be produced at all. For WWII, the problem is instead political and peacetime economics, with the UK waiting until years after the last minute to start re-arming and then finding itself slow to build the tools to build the tools to get back up to parity, as well as struggling entirely to modernize aircraft work (though I remember Barnett kinda glossed over a lot of interwar British aviation work).

((There was, to return to the topic, some criticism of Churchill in the book... but more under his Treasury policies.))

To some extent, yes, both countries hard major problems moving to mass manufacturing, in different ways. Barnett highlighted some extremely powerful mills and lathes that interwar Britain had to import from Germany, as part of Britain's general issues bringing together general-purpose.... but even where 1930s Germany had as many lathes-per-metalworking-employee as the US they were largely manual work

I can definitely recall his observation that the manufacture of one Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft took on average three times as many working hours as that of a comparative Bf-109 in Germany, for example.

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