The New Deal and Recovery, Part 20, Appendix: The Fate of Rosie the Riveter

George SelginInassessing the possibility that a severe downturn occurred at the end of WWII, I took issue with conventional wartime and postwar output statistics, while taking the period ' s unemployment statistics at face value. In so doing I set aside a hypothesis that disputes the unemployment numbers themselves. According to it, large numbers of would-be wartime women workers left the labor force not because they didn ' t want to keep working, but because they faced impossible odds of staying employed. If that was the case, then official figures substantially understate the real extent of unemployment, and whatever actual U.S. postwar output was, it was well below its potential.Frances Copolla has recently stated and defended the hypothesis in question with great vehemence. " There was never full employment, " she says. " The low unemployment of the post-war years is a massive statistical fudge. In fact, over five million people lost their jobs immediately after the end of the war, most of whom never worked again. But they were never listed as unemployed —because they were women. "[1]In defending this claim, Copolla takes the accuracy of conventional wartime and postwar output measures for granted. " The fall in real GDP in 1945-46, " she says, " dwarfs both the Great Recession and the Covid-19 recession. Only the Great Depression was worse. " Observing, further, that it " is extremely odd for unemployment to be so low in a recession of such severity, " she concludes, n...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs