On Mar 10, 2009, at 2:44 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
> Interesting too that of those that got off lightly, Britain and
> Italy were both lacklustre performers in the post-war era
Not exactly. Italy had a great run during the Golden Age of 1950-73, the third best of 17 rich countries (the UK was last, the US, 13th). If you rank the performance of those 17 from 1929-1950 and from 1950-1973, you get a correlation coefficient of -0.53 between the two lists, suggesting a decent, but far from overwhelming relation between poor performance in the depression/war years and the Golden Age. The results:
1929-1950 1950-1973
6 Australia 2.87% 9 Australia 4.67%
17 Austria 0.20% 4 Austria 5.35%
15 Belgium 0.72% 11 Belgium 4.08%
3 Canada 3.25% 5 Canada 5.07%
9 Denmark 2.45% 14 Denmark 3.81%
5 Finland 2.93% 7 Finland 4.94%
16 France 0.61% 6 France 5.02%
14 Germany 0.94% 2 Germany 5.99%
12 Italy 1.32% 3 Italy 5.64%
13 Japan 1.15% 1 Japan 9.25%
11 Netherlands 1.51% 8 Netherlands 4.74%
1 New Zealand 3.56% 16 New Zealand 3.70%
4 Norway 2.94% 12 Norway 4.06%
2 Sweden 3.35% 15 Sweden 3.73%
8 Switzerland 2.47% 10 Switzerland 4.51%
10 UK 1.74% 17 UK 2.96%
7 US 2.63% 13 US 3.91%
correlation of ranks: -0.534