HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 1.2
Posted on | March 24, 2010 | No Comments
This is the seventh post in the mini-series How IT Came to Rule the World
Containment policy’s intellectual cornerstone was the state-centric and industrial-based Keynesian economics that had become the doctrine of economic management and development after the Great Depression. The New Deal had restructured the US policy environment and with the industrial stimulus of World War II, saved liberal capitalism in the United States. IBM for example had been clutched from the jaws of the Great Depression by the Social Security Act, which provided a major market for its new keypunch calculating machines.
The war was a horrid affair, but an economic blessing for the United States. Not only did it transfer the majority of the world’s gold and silver into US vaults at Fort Knox and West 
Point, but it also stimulated such innovations as radar and the general-purpose computer and provided a technical foundation for the new post-war economy. New systems of national production accounting such as Gross National Product (GNP) justified deficit spending for the war and extensive new post-war spending programs, including the US’s entry into a permanent war economy to contain the spread of communism helped shape unprecedented economic growth. Finally war mobilization had also led to the narrowing of the economy as the top 500 companies emerged through war contracts to dominate over 80% of the economy.
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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is the Professor of Global Media at Hannam University in South Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. He also taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and was a Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii in the 1990s.
Tags: communism > Fort Knox > Gross National Product (GNP) > Keynesian economics > New Deal > Social Security Act > World War II
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Professor and Associate Chair at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea. Recently taught at Hannam University in Daejeon, South Korea. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, media economics, and strategic communications.
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