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141 " Nonetheless, he was sensitive not just to the need for countercyclical economic policies to head off future depression, but also to the prudential virtues of ‘the social security state’. "
― Tony Judt , Ill Fares the Land
142 " Until fairly recently it would only have been a slight exaggeration to say that most Norwegians, if they were not themselves farmers or fishermen, were their children. "
143 " Size and homogeneity are of course not transferable. There is no way for India or the USA to become Austria or Norway, and in their purest form the social democratic welfare states of Europe are simply non-exportable: they have much the same appeal as a Volvo—and some similar limitations—and may be hard to sell to countries and cultures where expensive virtues of solidity and endurance count for less. "
144 " The priorities of the traditional state were defense, public order, the prevention of epidemics and the aversion of mass discontent. But following World War II, and peaking around 1980, social expenditure became the main budgetary responsibility for modern states. "
145 " there is clear evidence that while homogeneity and size matter for the generation of trust and cooperation, cultural or economic heterogeneity can have the opposite effect. A steady increase in the number of immigrants, particularly immigrants from the ‘third world’, correlates all too well in the Netherlands and Denmark, not to mention the United Kingdom, with a noticeable decline in social cohesion. "
146 " There may be something inherently selfish in the social service states of the mid-20th century: blessed for a few decades with the good fortune of ethnic homogeneity and a small, educated population where almost everyone could recognize themselves in everyone else. Most of these countries—self-contained nation-states exposed to very little external threat—had the good fortune to cluster under the umbrella of NATO in the post-1945 decades, devoting their budgets to domestic improvement and untroubled by mass immigration from the rest of Europe, much less further afield. When this situation changed, confidence and trust appears to have fallen off. "
147 " It is, quite simply, humiliating. "
148 " We are all the beneficiaries of those who went before us, as well as those who will care for us in old age or ill health. "
149 " An older generation of free market economists used to point out that what is wrong with socialist planning is that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never vouchsafed to ordinary mortals. They were right. But it transpires that the same is true for market theorists: "
150 " Unsurprisingly, planning was most admired and advocated at the political extremes. "
151 " we have smuggled in a misleadingly ‘ethical’ vocabulary to bolster our economic arguments, "
152 " These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others. "
153 " The intellectual case for planning was never very strong. Keynes, as we have seen, regarded economic planning much as he did pure market theory: in order to succeed, both required impossibly perfect data. "
154 " The late Ralf Dahrendorf, an Anglo-German political scientist well placed to appreciate the scale of the changes he had seen in his lifetime, wrote of those optimistic years that “[i]n many respects the social democratic consensus signifies the greatest progress which history has seen so far. Never before have so many people had so many life chances.”12 "
155 " For the postwar peace, he preferred to minimize direct government intervention and manipulate the economy through fiscal and other incentives. "
156 " So why has this potentially self-destructive system of economic arrangements lasted? Probably because of habits of restraint, honesty and moderation which accompanied its emergence. "
157 " usually without giving the matter too much thought, we see ourselves as part of a civic community transcending generations. "
158 " The more equal a society, the greater the trust. And it is not just a question of income: where people have similar lives and similar prospects, it is likely that what we might call their ‘moral outlook’ is also shared. "
159 " By the early ’70s it would have appeared unthinkable to contemplate unraveling the social services, welfare provisions, state-funded cultural and educational resources and much else that people had come to take for granted. "
160 " This makes it much easier to institute radical departures in public policy. In complex or divided societies, the chances are that a minority—or even a majority—will be forced to concede, often against its will. This makes collective policymaking contentious and favors a minimalist approach to social reform: better to do nothing than to divide people for and against a controversial project. "