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Manufacturers increased prices to offset the high wages that constituted their side of the compact, which made life hard for Americans whose pay wasn’t tied to industrial revenues. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of the dynamic, “A passenger in even a very fast automobile is reasonably ce…

One of Santa Clara County’s virtues for firms looking to relocate or expand there was the lack of a strong industrial union presence—not an uncommon rationale for selecting a rural factory site. Like railroad engineers, salaried engineers at firms such as HP and IBM remained tough to organize, but …

The postwar compact between labor and capital was that a privileged segment of workers shared in the profits from rocketing productivity. In exchange, the labor elite agreed to spend a lot and stay away from communists. And build the best bombs in the world. But freed from the wartime no-strike ple…

It’s an understatement to say that much of the world was devastated by its second war, but the United States got off relatively easy. As one of the two superpowers left standing, America was responsible for rebuilding its half (or third, depending on whom you asked) of the world, and that meant get…

World War I ended with the collapse of Europe’s global empires, and with them went the colonial model of the California engineer. As new countries formed, some repudiated the debts and concessions imposed on them by previous unelected governments. But if populations held some sort of fundamental ri…