Please tell me that you don't think employment is the sole factor in determining that? I never said things hadn't improved any, just that improvement was modest.
"We have to start by asking: What does "end the depression" mean? The technical definition of a recession is a specified period of shrinking gross domestic product (GDP). (We may think of a depression as a severe and prolonged recession). The focus on GDP seems to suggest that a recession ends when GDP stops shrinking and starts growing.
But there's a problem: There's less to GDP than meets the eye. It's a statistical aggregate that includes government spending, but in itself, it tells us nothing about what's happening with living standards.
In human terms, a depression isn't a shrinking GDP or some other changed statistical construct. It's a decline in real people's living standards. Therefore, ending a depression requires not a change in sign from minus to plus in a statistical measure, but a rise in prosperity. You can tell a depression has ended by the fact that people live better than they did previously.
When we apply this standard to life during World War II in America, it's clear that the war did not end the depression in any meaningful sense. Economic historian
Robert Higgs has debunked the statistics that purport to show that the depression ended during the war. Take unemployment. Unemployment of course was historically high throughout the 1930s, and the rate plummeted once the U.S. government entered the war. But this was no sign of returning prosperity. The government drafted 10 million men into the armed forces and others enlisted to avoid conscription. Those men were not producing prosperity by making consumer goods. They were fighting a war. Moreover, statistics showing that industrial production picked up steam in the 1940s are no indication of prosperity because those plants weren't making consumer goods; they were making war materiel. In fact, those plants
diverted scarce resources from the production of consumer goods. The few consumer goods that
were produced were rationed. People could buy only a fixed and small quantity of foods, gasoline, and other previously taken-for-granted products. Many things weren't available at all.
Thus the aggregate statistics fail to capture essential details of life. A million dollars spent making automobiles and a million dollars spent making tanks look the same in the GDP tables. But the difference is vast in terms of consumer welfare."
http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/27/world-war-ii-spending-did-not-end-the-gr
