But doesn't that overstate it in the other direction? Talking about investments in proportion to GDP back when any estimate of GDP probably wasn't a good measure of total economic output?

We're talking about the period before modern finance, before income taxes, back when most labor was agricultural... Did the average person shoulder the cost of railroads more than the average taxpayer today is shouldering the cost of F-35? (That's another line in Paul's post.)

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topspin 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The F-35 case is interesting. Lockheed Martin can, given peak rates seen in 2025, produce a new F-35 approximately every 36 hours, as they fill orders for US allies arming themselves with F-35's. US pilot training facilities are brimming with foreign pilots. It's the most successful export fighter since the F-16 and F-4, and presently the only means US allies have to obtain operational stealth combat technology.

What that means for the US is this: if the US had to fight a conventional war with a near-peer military today, the US actually has the ability to replace stealth fighter losses. The program isn't some near-dormant, low-rate production deal that would take a year or more to ramp up: it's a operating line at full rate production that could conceivably build a US Navy squadron every ~15 days, plus a complete training and global logistics system, all on the front burner.

If there is any truth to Gen Bradley's "Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics" line, the F-35 is a major win for the US.

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bluedino an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Lockheed Martin can, given peak rates seen in 2025, produce a new F-35 approximately every 36 hours

Until we run out of materials

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/minerals-magnets-and-military-capa...

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palmotea 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Lockheed Martin can, given peak rates seen in 2025, produce a new F-35 approximately every 36 hours ... it's a operating line at full rate production that could conceivably build a US Navy squadron every ~15 days, plus a complete logistics and training system, all on the front burner.

That's amazing. I had no idea the US was still capable of things like that.

I wonder if there's a way to get close to that, for things that aren't new and don't have a lot of active orders. Like have all the equipment setup but idle at some facility, keep an assembly teams ready and trained, then cycle through each weapon an activate a couple of these dormant manufacturing programs (at random!) every year, almost as a drill. So there's the capability to spin up, say F-22 production quickly when needed.

Obviously it'd cost money. But it also costs a lot of money to have fighter jets when you're not actively fighting a way. Seems like manufacturing readiness would something an effective military would be smart to pay for.

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topspin 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"I had no idea the US was still capable of things like that."

It's more than just the US though. It's the demand from foreign customers that makes it possible. It's the careful balance between cost and capability that was achieved by the US and allies when it was designed.

Without those things, the program would peter out after the US filled its own demand, and allies went looking for cheaper solutions. The F-35 isn't exactly cheap, but allies can see the capability justifies the cost. Now, there are so many of them in operation that, even after the bulk of orders are filled in the years to come, attrition and upgrades will keep the line operating and healthy at some level, which fulfills the goal you have in mind.

Meanwhile, the F-35 equipped militaries of the Western world are trained to similar standards, operating similar and compatible equipment, and sharing the logistics burden. In actual conflict, those features are invaluable.

There are few peacetime US developed weapons programs with such a record. It seems the interval between them is 20-30 years.

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rickydroll 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Now let's talk about the 155mm artillery shells

	▲	tim333 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think people were surprised to suddenly have a lot of demand for those.
	▲	topspin 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Sure. Heavy industry. It's important. Maybe don't send it all to Asia because it's dirtier than software and finance.

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peyton 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We do—our automotive assembly lines. F-22 is more of a deterrent. If we need more, it’s failed.

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bombcar 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's the problem with going too far using "money" or "GDP" - you can roughly compare the WWII 45% of GDP spent with today - https://www.davemanuel.com/us-defense-spending-history-milit... because even by WWII much was "financialized" in such a way that it appears on GDP (though things like victory gardens, barter, etc would explicitly NOT be included without effort - maybe they do this?).

As you get further and further into the past you have to start trying to measure it using human labor equivalents or similar. For example, what was the cost of a Great Pyramid? How does the cost change if you consider the theory that it was somewhat of a "make work" project to keep a mainly agricultural society employed during the "down months" and prevent starvation via centrally managed granaries?

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helterskelter 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You don't even need to go that far back to run into issues, when I read Pride and Prejudice, I think Mr. Darcy was one of the richest people in England at around £10,000/year, but if you to calculate his wealth in today's terms it wasn't some outrageous sum (Wikipedia is telling me ~£800,000/year). The thing is that the economy was totally different back then -- labor cost practically nothing, but goods like furniture for instance were really expensive and would be handed down for generations.

With £800K today, you may not even be able to afford the annual maintenance for his mansion and grounds. I knew somebody with a biggish yard in a small town and the garden was ~$40K/yr to maintain. Definitely not a Darcy estate either.

Thinking about it, an income of £800K is something like the interest on £10m.

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zozbot234 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Newsflash, old antique furniture from around that time is still really expensive even today. It was a hand-crafted specialty product, not run-of-the-mill IKEA stuff. If you compare the prices of single consumer goods while adjusting for inflation, they generally check out at least wrt. the overall ballpark. The difference is that living standards (and real incomes) back then for the average person were a lot lower.

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psychoslave 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

~£800,000/year when compared to median value in current UK? Outrageous is relative sure, but for most people out there it should be no surprise they would feel that as an outrageously odd distribution of wealth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom

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bombcar 6 hours ago | parent [-]

The point is that ~£800,000/year is high, even possibly "very high" but it is not "most wealthy man in Britain" high, and certainly nowhere near "hire as many people as worked for Darcy".

	▲	cm2012 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Its more like making 800k per year today in India, where a lot of people make much less so you can have servants

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somenameforme 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The big change is the end of any sort of backing in money. The Minneapolis Fed calculated consumer price index levels since 1800 here. [1] Of course that comes with all the asterisks we're speaking of here for data going back that far, but their numbers are probably at least quite reasonable. They found that from 1800 to 1950 the CPI never shifted more than 25 points from the starting base of 51, so it always stayed within +/- ~50% of that baseline. That's through the Civil War, both World Wars, Spanish Flu, and much more.

Then from 1971 (when the USD became completely unbacked) to present, it increased by more than 800 points, 1600% more than our baseline. And it's only increasing faster now. So the state of modern economics makes it completely incomparable to the past, because there's no precedent for what we're doing. But if you go back to just a bit before 1970, the economy would have of course grown much larger than it was in the past but still have been vaguely comparable to the past centuries.

And I always find it paradoxical. In basic economic terms we should all have much more, but when you look at the things that people could afford on a basic salary, that does not seem to be the case. Somebody in the 50s going to college, picking up a used car, and then having enough money squirreled away to afford the downpayment on their first home -- all on the back of a part time job was a thing. It sounds like make-believe but it's real, and certainly a big part of the reason boomers were so out of touch with economic realities. Now a days a part time job wouldn't even be able to cover tuition, which makes one wonder how it could be that labor cost practically nothing in the past, as you said. Which I'm not disputing - just pointing out the paradox.

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...

	▲	wahern 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And yet the homeownership rate in 1950 was 53% (an all-time high up to that point) compared to 65% today: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Housi... Only 80% of units had private indoor toilets or showers. It is notable that the median monthly rent was $35/month on a median income of $3000, so ~15% of income spent on rental housing. But it's interesting reading that report because a significant focus was on the overcrowding "problem". Housing was categorized by number of rooms, not number of bedrooms. The median number of rooms was 4, and the median number of occupants >4 per unit (or more than 1 person per room). I don't think it's a stretch to say that the amount of space and facilities you get for your money today is roughly equivalent. Yes, greater percentage of your income goes to housing, and yet we have far more creature comforts today then back in 1950--multiple TVs, cellphones, appliances, and endless amounts of other junk. We can buy many more goods (durable and non-durable) for a much lower percentage of our income. There's no simple story here.

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chaos_emergent 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I posted just that on the Twitter feed but then I realized that railroad started at the beginning of an industrial revolution where labor was a far larger portion of GDP compared to industrial production. So it kind of makes sense that the first enabling technology consumed far more GDP than current investments do, even on a marginal basis.