Which is all well and fine if you could actually get the political capital to spend on infrastructure improvements. For 20 years that's been very lacking (curre

Which is all well and fine if you could actually get the political capital to spend on infrastructure improvements. For 20 years that's been very lacking (current firehouse of spending aside) but political appetite for war has been evergreen. I doubt those skills were so useless as well, in fact, I would wager that a fair number of the medical workers and logistics experts helping us through the pandemic got their start in the military. We're talking about many millions of careers started over the past 20 years. I would further argue that the human capital is far more important than the physical capital. If you set the continental USA back to a primordial state and provided the population with tents and food aid, I bet we would break all records for a return to a mature service economy. Again, I agree that we are poorer a window, but if the windows never broke, there's ample evidence that we as a society would have just preferred people to starve rather than pay them to do anything useful like building high speed rail or capturing carbon. Broken window fallacy is a nice toy economics idea, but it doesn't relate to how societies actually choose to spend or not spend capital.