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121 " Beginning with a handful of outstanding intellectual refugees from interwar Europe, we pass through two generations of academic economists intent on re-configuring their discipline … and arrive at the banking, mortgage, private finance and hedge fund scandals of recent years. "
― Tony Judt , Ill Fares the Land
122 " Whatever their other differences, French Gaullists, Christian Democrats and Socialists shared a common faith in the activist state, economic planning and large-scale public investment. Much the same was true of the consensus that dominated policy-making in Scandinavia, the Benelux countries, Austria and even ideologically-riven Italy. "
123 " By the late 1960s, the idea that “nanny knows best” was already starting to produce a backlash. "
124 " The idea that those in authority know best—that they are engaged in social engineering on behalf of people who do not understand what is good for them—was not born in 1945, but it flourished in the decades that followed. "
125 " The consequences are clear. There has been a collapse in intergenerational mobility: "
126 " Thus the incidence of mental illness correlates closely to income in the US and the UK, "
127 " between 1983 and 2001, mistrustfulness increased markedly in the US, the UK and Ireland—three "
128 " life closely track your income: residents of wealthy districts can expect to live longer and better. "
129 " The wider the spread between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the worse the social problems: a statement which appears to be true for rich and poor countries alike. "
130 " What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is. "
131 " The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed. "
132 " by 1945 few people believed any longer in the magic of the market. This was an intellectual revolution. "
133 " two world wars had habituated almost everyone to the inevitability of government intervention in daily life. "
134 " Socialism for social democrats, especially in Scandinavia, was a distributive concept. It was about making sure that wealth and assets were not disproportionately gathered into the hands of a privileged few. And this, as we have seen, was in essence a moral matter: "
135 " The most obvious symptom of the change came in the form of ‘planning’. "
136 " However, there is something worse than idealizing the past—or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it. "
137 " place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of ‘blacks’, ‘students’, ‘women’ and, a little later, homosexuals. Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separately represented in the institutions of welfare societies, the new Left presented itself quite consciously as opposing not merely the injustices of the capitalist order but above all the ‘repressive tolerance’ of its most advanced forms: precisely "
138 " Above all, the new Left—and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency—rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor. "
139 " The only democracies left in continental Europe were the tiny neutral states of Sweden and Switzerland, both dependent on German goodwill. "
140 " Nothing, of course, is ever quite as good as we remember. The social democratic consensus and the welfare institutions of the postwar decades coincided with some of the worst town planning and public housing of modern times. From Communist Poland through "