Comment Re:The magical scenario is "gradual social decay." (Score 1) 737
You could rev up to about 1940's era technology pretty quickly. With the exception of flat screen TVs, the internet and integrated circuits that brings us pretty close to modern standards of living. After that you've exhausted all of the low hanging fruit like high tensile steel, most ceramics and crude plastics. Space age technologies (flexible products like modern rubber, silicone rubbers and other elastomers, hyper pure titanium, rare earth alloys, etc and of course Velcro) took about 4% of the national GDP to identify uses for, and then produce on an industrial scale over the period of a decade. This was on top of an incredibly prosperous era and winding down from the education boom of the 1940's that produced the scientists needed for the space race. Given any other outcome, we'd be lucky to have late 1980's technology today.