Interesting article, as are all of you pieces. However, I feel that three critical issues were missed in this article. The first is rationing. In the U.S., alcohol wasn’t rationed, whereas tobacco certainly was.

A second issue is that many industries pivoted from what they had been producing before WW2 towards producing war goods under government contracts during the war. Additionally, some government contracts were more lucrative than others.

So, to me, the moral of this article shouldn’t be which industries outperform/underperform during global conflict, but instead a question of which industries are likely to receive and benefit the most from government contracts, and this leads to the third issue. Can we reasonably consider that a war 77 years ago provides a starting point for developing expectations today? I’m not sure that it does. Back in WW2, many war goods could be made by pretty much any major firm. Today, too many war goods are seriously tech intensive, (potentially) limiting the industries that could even reasonably bid for, yet alone expect to receive government contracts.