alt Hacker NewsNot very. The missing macro is that during and after WWII, the US had the luxury of being the only intact industrial economy.
In this environment, Shockley, who himself was the child of an engineer and has been criticized as a eugenicist (ie. explicitly not welcoming outsiders, despite his father speaking eight languages, and being born in London), ran a Bell research lab and was exposed to a plurality of emergent military problems to which he applied physics.
After the war, and co-inventing the transistor (probably largely in response to this wartime experience), some of his ex employees including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore split off and started research under Fairchild.
Notably, this occurred right when chemistry was having its moment, and the US had huge postwar capacity to enable innovation. While total industrial production reached 247% of prewar levels during WWII, chemical production soared to 412%.
The group succeeded in 1960. Of the eight who left to found this novel research group, only two were immigrants. Six were educated at elite US universities like Caltech, MIT and Stanford.
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> In this environment, Shockley, who himself was the child of an engineer and has been criticized as a eugenicist (ie. explicitly not welcoming outsiders, despite his father speaking eight languages, and being born in London), ran a Bell research lab and was exposed to a plurality of emergent military problems to which he applied physics.
Eugenics doesn't have anything in particular to say about whether outsiders should or should not be welcomed. It makes a set of scientific claims about how heredity affects people and a set of moral claims about how people should attempt to control these effects.
> The missing macro is that during and after WWII, the US had the luxury of being the only intact industrial economy.
While true, this is generally overemphasized. The destruction of industry in other countries helped the postwar US, but the US didn't need that help to begin with to achieve an absurd lead over everyone else.
If we look at 1938, the US still has a higher GDP than Germany and the USSR (#2 and #3) combined. This is just before the war, so everyone has had over 20 years to recover, and they hadn't started bombing each other yet.
Stats based on: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334182/wwii-pre-war-gdp...
The US is massive, has cheap undeveloped land, natural resources, and easy transit (you have a massive river running down the center for barges, along with lots of flat runs for railroads). Compare with Europe, where space and resources are a constant problem, alongside tensions between countries wasting time.
The US was playing the industrial revolution on easy mode, in comparison to everyone else