The Marshall plan was a tiny drop in the ocean of capital needed to reconstruct the West German economy. At most you could consider it a bit of pump-priming.

The Marshall plan was a tiny drop in the ocean of capital needed to reconstruct the West German economy. At most you could consider it a bit of pump-priming. The Marshall plan was also equally applied to other war-torn Western European nations which didn't experience the same growth. I agree that you can't isolate a specific economic philosophy from the general population and culture - the German people have always been very engineering minded and hard working - but something very interesting happened to post-war Germany, and it's always a good idea to look at this (same as the Finnish school example) and see what might have contributed.