Thread by @kevinakwok

Recently read the book Arsenal of Democracy. About Ford Motors during WWII

Lots of fascinating details, that maybe I'll write about some time

But wanted to first share some charts I made about definite optimism and the sheer adaptability of industry

amazon.com/Arsenal-Democr…

As FDR geared up for WWII, he gave speeches stating "I should like to see this Nation geared up to the ability to turn out at least 50,000 planes a year"

We weren't making 1,000 planes a year then. Advisors said it was crazy and had no basis in reality

mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/Wo…

Yet by end of the war we were producing way more than 50k planes a year

In fact, we outpaced the Germans in sheer production of aircraft. It's hard to look at this chart and imagine a world where the US could have lost WWII

As a very odd fact, Ford Europe was producing the planes for the Nazis. So another way one can look at this chart, is that we had Ford build factories to build bombers to bomb Ford factories in europe building planes to bomb us

How did we do this?

Part of it is significantly ramping up production via facilities like Willow Run. Which was largest factory of its time. But two aspects are notable to me
1) that in some sense FDR's definite optimism was self-fulfilling
2) that we switched an entire industry

FDR set a goal that nobody thought was possible and America willed it into success. Of course, this wouldn't be possible without the massive alignment towards the war effort that existed post-Pearl Harbor

But this cumulative chart is striking. We basically perfectly hit the goal

And it almost didn't happen. If Pearl Harbor hadn't happened, we still would have entered war, but hard to imagine there'd be as much alignment towards the war effort at the expense of all else

As an example, until Pearl Harbor, Henry Ford refused to build planes for the Allies

And it's crazy how much we shifted an entire industry

Ford had never built a plane before WWII. Yet by the end of WWII it was producing tens of thousands of planes a year

Even more striking is that the car industry just *stopped* producing cars during the war. Chart below

It's hard to imagine today the US telling a company like Google to just stop maintaining its search engine, and pivot entirely into something else. Or to imagine what it would take for us all to get behind that kind of government intervention

Recommend Arsenal of Democracy. It's good reminder of what definite optimism can look like.

Even more so, it's good reminder of how much we operate at very low levels of alignment

May we never be forced to be that aligned. But may we always seek it during better times