That analysis completely fails after WWI. The actual cause of the post war boom was a massive increase in agricultural efficiency. This freed up a large chunk of household budgets to be spent of consumer goods which kicked off a long cycle of economic growth.
Timeline and geography doesn't work out for your hypothesis. The Green Revolution began in earnest in the late 50s; at that point, the post-war expansion in the U.S. was alread 10-15 years old and slowing down. It also started in developing nations like Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines - there's perhaps some influence through international trade, but if that's the cause you'd expect Mexico and India to be the geopolitical superstars rather than the U.S.
The timeline does match up with the Marshall Plan and redevelopment of Japan. A much simpler explanation is that the U.S. was the only nation whose capital stock remained intact after WW2. This allowed us to produce high-value goods more efficiently than everywhere else, which allowed us to export more, which led to a strong currency and ample buying power on world markets. Post-war unionization also spread the fruits of this productivity to society as a whole, rather than concentrating it among capital owners.
The US also saw a short term boom after WWI just look at the 20’s. That doesn’t explain why the boom continued for so long after WWII. Also, the green revolution was more a global phenomenon, the US saw significant agricultural productivity growth in the 1940’s from increased mechanization and fertilizer usage.
The 1920s boom was partially global - the U.S, France, and Great Britain boomed, along with non-belligerents like Venezuela. Weimar Germany had one of the worst economic collapses in history. Additionally, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires disintegrated, with widespread hardship (revolutions, civil war, economic problems) occurring during the early 20s and then subsequent trajectories defined by how stable and how market-friendly the successor states were.
See a pattern there? It's really awesome to win a war, particularly if it was never fought on your territory or you got reparations. It really sucks to lose a war. Over the short term (~10-20 years), this effect dwarfs the normal peacetime business cycle. Over the long term (~50-100 years), it's dwarfed by things like the political-economic system, technological development, alliances, population growth & demographics, etc, which tend to set up the winners of next war.
(The U.S. experienced a similar boom after the end of the Cold War in 1991.)
I agree that the US experienced a war related boom after WWI and WWII. I am simply saying the boom lasted as long as it did in large part from the green revolution. This didn’t just mean increased prosperity at home, but a continued stream of new markets opening up. China’s boom for example was delayed due to internal politics, but that just extended the same long term trend for even longer.
The boomer generation wasn’t shaped by a few good years, it was shaped by a lifetime of prosperity which is extremely unusual in historic terms. IT technology played a major role, but looking at the industrial revolution for comparison you find plenty of crashes even during a period of rapid growth.
