Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "World War Management 101" video.

-Germany had its huge population and had no oversees colonies to import food from, and the British Navy stopped all imports. -UK had both colonies and trade partners and a superior navy but it was hard hit by submarine warfare. - Russia was not an industrial country like France, Germany or England, but more of a feudal peasant economy and its tiny industry was so hopelessly inadequate that the Russian artillery lacked shells and solidiers had to attack without rifles like in the movie !enemy at the gates! - simply because the industry couldn't produce enough weapons for all solidiers. So Russia undertook an enormous industrialization project in the middle of the war. And when so much manpower was moved to the military and into the factories, then food shortages and higher prices came about. And industrial workers got higher wages so more farmers would feel happy to leave their farms and more into a factory. And the result of higher industrial wages, more expensive food, and wartime shortages of all kinds of things led to high inflation and an economic collapse. France probably had large foodshortages as well. But perhaps less severe than the other nations.
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It could also be interesting to look at the harvest to seed ratio. Since France and Belgium got great fertile soils producing 3 times larger harvest than places like Poland.
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Russia had much weapons in world war 2. But in World War 1 they lacked everything - except manpower. And that was also the reason why the allies tried to breaktrough the Dardanelles, so they could ship weapons and ammunition to the Russians, so they could unleash the Russian beast with its huge manpower reserves. But as we all know, all this things failed. The battle of Galliopoli became an allied failure, and the Russians got nothing.
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And with so much new unskilled workers there will be lots of noob mistakes, and handling big heavy equipment doesn't make things less risky. The American shipbuilding industry was particulary hard hit by industrial accidents during WWII because it expanded so greatly over a shortperiod of time, and it got unemployed Americans from the middle of the country to move to the coasts for work.
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- Untrained workers - Much overtime - Lower safety regulations - Hasty production
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The uboat wars was directly intented to starve England. While the allies targeted Norway and Romania for its iron and oil during world war 2. And Hitler thought that caucausus was an extremely important strategic goal because of its black soil, its huge amounts of oil, and its industrial capacity.
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Stole them from Belgium?
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They would probably have a hard time. Industrial countries does have an advantage - like the North had in the American Civil War. And in world war 1 Russia was suffering from a cronic shortage of rifles, guns - and most of all: Ammunition. Building up an industry is something that takes time. At best it would normally take 15-30 years for a country to industrialize. Not only do you need a factory, you also need to import tools and machinery and modern production technologies in order to be able to build modern tanks, planes, cruise missiles and submarines.... You will also have to solve the problem, that a country that does not do any manufacturing will not get any foreign currency to pay for all imports. And even if you somehow get some imports and manage to steal a perfect blueprint of the latest fighter jet from the pentagon, you will not be able to copy it unless you got skilled workers and years of technological know-how within the aircraft producers in your country. Allow me to quote economic proffessor Ha Joon Chang: "When Germany became as poor as Peru and Mexico right after the Second World War, no one suggested that it should be reclassified as a developing country, because people knew that it still had command over technological, organizational and institutional knowledge that had made it one of the most formidable industrial powers before the war." So as you see, building up technological know-how, organizatinal skills, and well-functioning institutions takes a long time. And neighter Peru or Mexico have catched and are as rich as Germany today despite their GDP was roughly the same size in 1945.
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Switzerland is an odd country. It was one of the first countries to industrialize and its also one of the few countries that could be argued to have done so without protectionism. It did in fact not have a patent law until the early 1900s because they though intellectual property rights gave the owner a monopoly - and thus so it was seen as something opposite to the free market. Today it is the most industrialized country in the world measured in industrial production per citizen. But almost seem aware of that fact since Switzerland mostly export capital goods rather than consumer goods. And despite being so rich and succesful, its still odd that this country for so long have refused to let women vote and it (did atleast have) a pretty low number of people who have ever studied at academia. Its multicultural, neutral and its not occupied by Brussels. So to me it seems like this is a conservative country that likes to go its own way. Its decentralized democracy makes it time consuming to get things done. Overall do I wish my country could be a bit more like Switzerland with its strong direct-democracy, strong military and own way of doing things. But I would skip some of the traditionalist values, and having such a huge banking sector is not only unhealthy, but also very dangerous for society.
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All countries believed that they had enough supplies when world war 1 began, but after a few months of fighting they all started to run out of ammunition, and the fighting on both fronts started to calm down. Then wartime production was expanded and fighting could start again. But Russia never had managed to build an industry capable of supplying its own army, so oftentimes did the Russians had to start offensives where many men didnt even have their own gun. But Russia attacked anways since she was a faithful ally that gave what she could when the western powers screamed for help and needed to have some pressure taken off their front. But in the long run, did Russias unindustrialize economy doom their war effort. And shortages, higher prices and higher losses led to riots and the bolsjevik revolution.
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Excellent video
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Soviet farms used female labour and relied much upon human workers since the poor country didn't have any tractors or machines.
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I would say that Americas mobilization for World War 2 is a perfect schoolbook example of how a country should do things. You do keep demand up and let government keep buying military equipment even after the war, but you decrease the amounts you buy year after year. With high inflation you can pay off old war debts. And with high amounts of rationing during the war, people would have saved lots of money during the war because there was nothing much to buy. So when peace came, then some rationing restricts were lifted and consumer demand for goods replaced government demand for stuff (you know, war materials and such). So the momentum of the economy kept going even after the war, and the transition was smoothed out.
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The other example on how not to do is unfortunatly pretty common, since people are were backwards in their thinking and ignorant of history. Frederick the Great after the Seven years war (1756-1763) was eager to transition the Prussian economy back to normal as soon as possible after the war. He made hard cuts to the spending on the military and war materials - which left many arms producers in a dire situation when peace suddenly came. And he did a deflationary economic policy to deal with the inflation that had occured during the war - and the result became that the economy crashed since there no longer was any money left for consumers, and sellers couldn't get paid, and old debts became harder to pay off by all deflation. And Frederick was far from alone. Sweden also had an economic crash after world war 1 because of all eagerness to balance budgets and bring down inflation. To me all this just look stupid. When people lose their jobs they don't pay taxes, they don't consume as much to keep the privat sector alive, and they need more help from the government to survive - which costs money. So I rather have a smooth transtition to a peacetime economy that would take a few years. And I would be merciless on the military industrial complex that had been growing up during the war so it would know its place.
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World war II was a bit special, America had its great depression and lots of unemployed, and women were outside the labourmarket, so it was possible to smoothly move workers into new jobs. In a future war I do think the west still got much to give in a war effort. The post-industrial society is largely a myth. Fewer people work in the industry today and more people work in the service sector for two main reasons. Firstly because there is a trend that companies wanna specialize in their core activities, and back in the old days a car manufacturer, for example Volvo, could hire people to work as cleaners and having people handling all the bills. But now those same cleaners and finance experts could do the exactly same jobs as before for Volvo, but now they work for a separate cleaning or finance company that works for Volvo. Nothing has changed in the real world, but in statistics things seems to have changed because the cleaner and banker no longer works in an industry company but are now instead classed as service sector workers. Another reason why less people are working on the factory floor is because industrial robots and machinery can do the job more effective oftentimes. You don't have any worker strikes, no paid vacations, no maturnity leave, no sick workers staying home, and no gossip. And robots can also work in enviroments too dangerous for human labour, they can work in noisy dirty enviroments, and they can lift things that weight many tonnes, and they can make things with greater precision than a human surgeon. So I wouldn't say that the industry lacks capacity, in fact I think the contrary is true. And in terms of money that are going into the government by taxes, we still see that the industry still plays a huge role in most western economies. And if a world war with China starts, then I think people would consume less and money would instead be used for investments in more industrial robots and new production plants. And labour-intensive production methods would be replaced with capital intensive production methods, since we got lots of money and techological know how, and little manpower. And China would do the opposite since they got much people that can become workers, but they can not afford many machines. So the west would be able to send a larger proportion of its male population to war since fewer people are needed to produce a tank than what China would need due to its lack of robots. We still have high unemployment today today, and most people do work with bullshit jobs - marketing/advertisement, tourism, selling financial products of no use to society, genderstudies proffessors, making goldplated toilets and luxury yachts for billionaires, salesmen of anal bleaching, public relations executives and management consultants....... yep there are lots of people one can pick and either dressup in a military uniform or put to work in a factory to make that uniform.
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USA is still the largest economy in the world and most of the highly productive Fortune 500 companies are stationed there, and the country holds a technological leadership. And Britain is still one of the largest economies in the world despite their shrinking importance of their manufacturing industry, the country still produces a lot of things, but if we divde up the industrial production with the number of citizens, then country produces very little nowadays and needs to reindustrialize. And Germany, Japan, Scandinavia are still making things. I would not go so far as to say its decline has been a statistical illusion To some extent it is. And it can explain atleast some of the decline. People always say that we live in a post-industrial society, but I would say that manufacturing is still the most important sector in an economy. Neighter farming or the service sector can make the same productivity increases. We are 400 times more productive in making cotton clothes than we were in the early 1800s, and while a skilled worker could make 2000 cigares per day in the early in 1800s, there are now machines that can make 5000 cigarettes per minute. So could a farmer do the same and increase his harvest 400 times bigger than his ancestors? nope. Can a service sector person make two hundred more haircuts per hour than a barber in Rome? no. Can a chef serve a hundred more meals? no. Only manufacturing can also bring in foreign currency into the country to pay for all the imports. So I would say that manufacturing still plays a key roll in the modern economy. Unfortunatly it has often been neglected by modern intellectuals who say that a service based economy and banking is the future. The US will be fine, lots of cash protected by two oceans, the worlds biggest navy to keep supply lines open and an abundance of most resources. Europeans, Japan, Russia ect. I might be alot harder for them. Germany and Japan could build a huge military, but they have just choosen not to do so. And if they were to spend more on their own military - as America wants - then they would get some substantial military forces, as West-Germany had during the cold war. And Britain and France still got some of the most powerful armies in the world. And the German, South Korean and Japanease airforces are still quite large, and relativly strong compared to the Chinease airforce which still uses ancient garbage like MIG-17 fighter jets.
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Prior to World war 1 did Sweden have a trade defecit and borrowed lots of money for its industrialization, mainly from Germany. So the years before the war all Swedes were worried how they would ever be able to pay off their huge foreign debt that had been growing for a 60 year time and now exceeded the countrys own GDP. So what Germany did when the war began was to collect all claims they had on foreigners. So Sweden exported endless amounts of iron to the kaiser to pay off all debts. So in 1918 when the war was over, Swedens situation had canged dramaticly. And the huge foreign debt had been completly eliminated, and the capacity of the Swedish industry had grown greatly to meet new strong demand from Germany, as well as the wartime needs of its own. In World war 2 did Germany not have the same luxury of getting stuff for nothing in return, since Sweden didn't owe Germany any money this time around. So Swedish iron had to be paid for with German coal and a little bit of blackmailing. Anyways, World War 2 never became this huge exporting boom like World War 1 had been for Sweden.
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Most french iron mines were also under German occupation
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Sweden was also neutral in both world wars, but women had their right to vote in 1919.
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"Long hours in hastily constructed industrial plants increased the rate of industrial accidents. Shipbuilding, a dangerous business in the best of times, was especially dangerous when undertaken by inexperienced workers in yards crowded with supplies." - The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison
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