[MrJohnDClare]

I received this request today:

Quote

I am an university student studying in Hong Kong. To be straight forward, I need your help. My history teacher gave me a difficult essay question about cold war, but I cannot solve it mysellf. Therefore, I would like to ask for your help.

My essay question is listed follow.
The historian Mark Mazower has argued that Europe experienced a “miracle of growth” between the 1950s and 1970s. Do you agree?

I do not have idea about this question.
Would you mind helping me list both sides of ideas here? Like if I agree with it, what I can say to explain my opinion.

[MrJohnDClare]

David
This is really a question about economic history, and there will be a specialist section in your university library.
(I loved economic history when I was in the 6th form and at university, much more than political history.)
If you check it out, you may find that this is an area of historiographical debate, which you would need to show you knew about.


Before that, however:
A good starting point will simply to read the relevant section in Chapter 9 of Mark Mazower's book Dark Continent.
It is a very easy-to-read section, VERY one-sided ('for' the proposition') and covers the main issues in a non-economist way.
Check out also the 'Wirtschaftswunder', and Macmillan's 'never had it so good'.
There is a great deal of evidence for an economic miracle, not least the pace of innovation.


As for the alternative view (the antithesis), I can't find any simple websites which put the other view.

• You might check out 'stop-go' - the (Keynesian-inspired) economy in the 1950s kept overheating -resulting in inflation - and had to clawed back regularly in periods of 'stop'; in the end monetarists won and the was a significant recession during the Thatcher years - the monetarists argued that Keynesian economics had ruined the economy, and that a time of recession was necessary to cut out the slack which had grown up. Read this article.
  
• The 'miracle of growth' in Britain at this time was connected to a very poor balance of trade deficit, and frequent economic crises, including devaluation, currency freezes and IMF loans. British manufacturing industry shrank alarmingly.
  
• At this time, the REAL growth was in Japan and the USA. West Germany and France grew rapidly too, but whole areas of western Europe actually stagnated (Eire, Portugal).
  
• My personal theory about all this is that there was little economic growth AT ALL. 'Wealth' is created by a number of factors, not least the 'velocity of transactions' (the speed with which money changes hands). I have a suspicion that faster communications, the extension of credit facilities and steady inflation created the APPEARANCE of growth, much greater than the actual economic growth itself was. Note also that the Welfare State was spreading the wealth out much more than before the war, which added to this feeling of prosperity.
  
• The precariousness of the 'miracle' was revealed in the 1970s, when the 'oil wars' reduced the western economy to chaos in months.