WWII in GR

[Paul Mackin]

Before leaving this topic I wanted give brief notice to an
extremely important link between Nazi Germany and Post War American
whatever-you-want-to-call-it (world hedgemony?) that will never get
fictionalized by any Pynchon anywhere--simply because it belongs to the
domain of the Dismal Science of Economics, more specifically 
MacroEconomics, and most specifically of all America's recovery, at long
last, from the Great Depression of the 1930s.  That horrible event was
still in full swing when WWII broke out in '39 despite the fact that
the knowledge of how to combat low economic demand and low employment
levels through the use of increased govenment spending (multiplier
effect and all that) was readily available in 1935 in what turned out to
be the most influential book by an economist written in the 20th Century,
namely The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John
Maynard Keynes. The problem was, nobody really believed yet in
Keynesianism and by the end of the thirties it was still untried. However
the increase in spending occasioned by the American war buildup starting
in 1940 put Keynesianism pure and simple into practice and Eureka it
worked beyond everyone's wildest dreams. Nazism saved American Capitalism
you might say.

			P.