>>/28408/
It was the new "Fordist" phase of capitalism with a new consensus among economists and similar policies applied through different countries, like the New Deal. Then it met its own problems in the 70s and had to reform.
>>/28411/
> What sent them down the chute during the war was the fact that it was dwarfed by both the US's and the SU's productivity. I think the Germans underestimated them by large
The Soviet Union was underestimated and that cost Germany dearly. The USA wasn't, though, Hitler always knew of its advantages. In 1939 he fully understood Germany was outproduced not just by America but also France and Britain. Yet as he had begun his all-out military buildup earlier he had, for the moment, a parity on land and in the air. Thus he gambled on an immediate war when he still had a chance. This bet was extremely risky but he was willing to take it because in his worldview anything less than a victorious war would have apocalyptic results. Tooze devotes much of the 9th chapter to laying out the geopolitical panorama of 1939 and what fueled Hitler's decision, I'll write of it later.
> And the SU: they could churn out waste amount of arms without any actual standard of living and that was mattered in the end and not that their citizen comrades had to eat their own kids during the 30's...
He mentions that this is how the Soviet war machine absorbed the loss of the country's industrial heartland aswell as brutal losses and kept churning out huge armies on the field: in 1942-43 Soviet mobilization was so high it could only be sustained for those two years and hundreds of thousands or even millions starved. Yet it was precisely this time window that secured Stalin's victory.