This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By William Watson, June 4, 2024
Suppose it’s 1924. The Olympics are going to be in Paris (though the TV coverage will be sketchier than for this summer’s Paris Olympics). Calvin Coolidge, who took over as president when Warren Harding died a week after visiting Vancouver, is cruising to his first and only election as president, his opposition split between regular Democrats and Progressives. Not that anyone notices presidents much. Mackenzie King is in his first term as prime minister. Canadian prime ministers matter even less than U.S. presidents.
By 1924, the North American economies have recovered nicely from the short, very sharp recession that followed the worldwide influenza epidemic. Prices fell 45 per cent in the U.S. in 1920, but were back to steady not long afterwards. Though you don’t know it yet, real per capita GDP will grow at 2.7 per cent per year for the rest of the Roaring Twenties.
Then somebody asks: How will things look in 1950, 26 years from now?
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