The USA wasn't "the only economy left" except for the immediate postwar years. The 1950s and 1960s, the period when the US was doing so well according to the li

The USA wasn't "the only economy left" except for the immediate postwar years. The 1950s and 1960s, the period when the US was doing so well according to the linked article, also saw economic booms for France (les trente glorieuses) and West Germany (Wirtschaftswunder), for example. The socialist world wasn't necessarily stuck in place either: Yugoslavia's high point, the years of the vikendica and middle-class leisure travel across Europe and Asia, was the 1960s-1970s. Granted, Yugoslavia was outside the Iron Curtain, but even the USSR is instructive here: living standards were rising even there during the Krushchev era, which is why the Brezhnev era is regarded as such stagnation.