(When you're trying to find something, it helps if you actually look)

The other day I showed Capacity Utilization for the 1950s, from the Economic Report of the President, 1962. I was surprised to find the graph, and thought I might try to find something on the missing years of the 1960s.

Gene Hayward found some data going back to 1962, which filled the missing years nicely. I checked the source link Gene provided, and found an Excel download for the data he found. Perfect.

Gene sort of inspired me to go back to FRED and rummage around there for more data. And wouldn't you know it, there is a measure of Capacity Utilization for manufacturing that goes back to 1948. I put it on a graph with the one that only goes back to 1967, and I thought it was a good match. Then, for comparison, I added the one for total industry. That was a bit off from the manufacturing series, but not far off.

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I want to compare Capacity Utilization and real growth. So I put the two series on a graph and adjusted them by eye: multiplied the RGDP growth values by 1.75 to get its up-and-down variation size-comparable to Capacity Utilization... And subtracted 75 from the Capacity Utilization values to move that data down, near to the RGDP data. If I see anything interesting I can always redo the comparison using a Christensen fit.

Meanwhile, here's the guestimated version