It can also be spectacularly successful . Although it wasn't a jobs program, WWII and its aftermath, driven by the state and centrally planned, resulted in great economic prosperity -perhaps unprecedented prosperity. Why can't we have a WWII on infrastructure, green energy, science funding, pollution cleanup, transportation, hyper-loops ?
>> WWII and its aftermath (...) resulted in great economic prosperity -perhaps unprecedented prosperity
I don't think that applies to any other country except the U.S. England, for instance, almost went bankrupt and had to ask for an enormous loan from the U.S [1].
The entirety of the Mashall plan [2], if you only consider the western part of the iron curtain, is definite proof that WWII not only didn't benefit those countries but put those former colonial powers in a position of extreme weakness and external dependency.
Basically the only reason for the U.S. rise from an isolationist country to the superpower it became was due to the distance from the actual fighting and the fact that it had the only intact industry, infrastructure and transportation network of the whole western world.
Wars are great tools for prosperity redistribution from the losers to the winners, and from the parties not involved to the (Eisenhower coined) military industrial complex, but very lousy tools for actual prosperity creation for the same reason the proverbial "broken window" is a fallacy.
I happen to believe prosperity can be willed into existence in some cases, and it doesn't require war. If you have significant unemployment, cooking up a plan to put those people to work in >0 productivity endeavors will result in increased prosperity, even if it isn't nearly as efficient (productive) as the free market would produce. The degree of the effectiveness is a function of how inefficient the natural economy is at the time (and monetary & cultural factors, etc), so it's certainly not a simple formula.
Unemployment was historically low. The balance sheet of the private sector was restored during and after WWII. All of it resulting from enormous unprecedented Keynesian spending programs. We can do the same thing again but aimed at large scale infrastructure upgrades and I'd even throw in a job/income guarantee.
It has been argued by many that WWII was not an economic high point in the lived experiences of most citizens. Even in America which faced almost no destruction of its territory and infrastructure there was severe rationing of basic commodities, durables, and food. For a large number of people, the war years were a downgrade in lifestyle from even late depression standards.
The economy did do well after the war, but you could also attribute that to delayed purchases as spending money on new homes, automobiles, and all sorts of goods was finally possible. This combined with a much larger labour pool as some women remained in the workforce, while many families who had delayed child-rearing started families and needed to earn and spend to support that. The post-war boom years were marked by a huge reduction of central planning and government spending. Most Keynesians at the time were actually predicting a return to deep recession because of this, and the opposite happened.
Prosperity for whom? Certainly not Western Europe. And yeah, when you're the only major industrialized power not to be horrifically bombed, you may enjoy "unprecedented" economic activity in the following decades.
Exactly, it's not that big investments are bad, it's that doing them for the sake of providing jobs could mean employing people for the sole purpose of giving them a handout and wasting their time. You might as well just send them a check and let them have their time to raise their kids or... whatever.
WW II didn't cause that, it was the effects of the war including the subsequent dismantling of the British Empire and its trade barriers. In other words, a precursor to globalization.
