Keep from All Thoughtful Men: How U.S. Economists Won World War II

Keep from All Thoughtful Men overturns much accepted historical dogma on how World War II strategy was planned and implemented. It is taken for granted that the Axis powers were defeated by an avalanche of munitions that poured forth from pitiless American factories. So it is amazing that the story of how this “miracle of production” was organized and integrated into Allied strategy and operations remains untold.

Keep from All Thoughtful Men is the first book that tells how revolutions in both statistics and finance changed forever the nature of war. While the book relates the overall story of how economics dictated war planning at the highest levels, more specifically it tells how three obscure economists came to have more influence on the conduct of World War II than the Joint Chiefs. Because military historians rarely understand economics and economic historians just as rarely involve themselves with the details of war, there has never been a military history that shows how economics influenced the planning of strategy and the conduct of any war. This is sadly true of even World War II, which has been called by Paul Samuelson, “The Economist’s War.”