ID4/IDR: Economy during the interwar period

This is just a speculation, and mostly a reply to an IMDb thread post about Independence Day: Resurgence.

The first IDR trailer is out since December, but the film won't be out before Summer 2016.

The post started out, that the economy would tank, and the many U.S. carmakers would go bankrupt and would cease to exist.

I think the government(s) would have bailed out any and all carmakers, because they manufacture transport vehicles, which are crucial to rebuilding the infrastructure. Really important manufacturing locations are also kept away from large population centres.

For a short while, the model selection would be either less varied or less luxurious overall, and based on what parts are available at any time. Basically, a logistics's nightmare.

The production emphasis would have reoriented towards making parts for existing cars, and manufacturing transport and military vehicles. Cargo transport is actually more important, as it's responsible for supplies of, like, everything.

Because of petrol shortages, commuter transport in the U.S. would become very widespread. Trams, trolleybuses, trains, etc. would be more prevalent; provided there'd be enough electricity available. I haven't specifically mentioned petrol-based buses, because the military infrastructure would take those off city lines at any time for their own purposes.

Reverse-engineering alien tech can also help. It seems that they did a lot of that presumably under the U.S. aegis, as the world united.

After WWII, the Soviet war loot (aka contributions) from Germany — including a number of German scientists — allowed the Soviet Union to keep up technological parity to some extent until about mid-to-late 1970s, when self-imposed isolation (and some export restrictions) allowed the split between the West and the Soviet sphere to became more visible.

'Common-mold' products would be more widespread. People would certainly splurge less, and concentrate more on essentials, such as food, medicine, clothes and maintentance of creature comforts. Interestingly, lots of manufacturing would not have been moved to China.

Of important note is, that in 1996, many companies that were supposed to rely on redundant tech, had not made any, or had not finished deploying backup contingencies that were done during the onset of Y2K. If the ID4 situation had happened on 9/11 instead, the U.S. and many other countries would have been better-prepared to recover. (As it happened, many companies continued running on 9/11, because their tech infrastructure switched to using backup locations.)

Presumably, there would very likely be a holdout of people who would never use alien-based tech, and they would even try to maintain and improve native technologies. The Amish might probably be an example of that. So I wouldn't be surprised, if many of the common people would have chosen to only keep [consumer] tech from 1996 and somewhat before. Nowadays in the real world, there are people who make this a lifestyle choice to live like people once did in 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s even.

Locations that were not as affected by alien attacks, would be burdened with supplying food and medicine and everything else. There would be rationing until after production rates would have recovered to sufficient levels.

The state of refugees and internally displaced persons would be something akin to what Syrians and Iraqis are experiencing.

And then there's the question of what happened to some of the aliens that crashed. The trailer and the War of 1996 website suggest that some concentrated in Congo.

Update: The IDR website does get occasional updates, so the story along the timeline evolves.

As with any movie website, The War of 1996 site uses the latest technologies; so, compared to most other sites, it's obviously one of those that have actual system requirements with regard to hardware and sofware. More about that is detailed in a post in my technology-oriented blog.