The new distribution of wealth (called by Krugman and some others The Great Compression) far from destroying prosperity, "seems if anything to have invigorated the economy." With World War II came a "great boom in wages" that "lifted tens of million of Americans ...from urban slums and rural poverty to a life of home ownership and unprecedented comfort." With Roosevelt's policies in place, a postwar middle-class society arose "in just a few years." It was, says Krugman, politics taking the lead rather than the "impersonal economic forces" that those hostile to Roosevelt preferred.