As president, Dwight Eisenhower warned that tampering with, much less abolishing, Social Security, unemployment insurance and other social programs would mean the extinction of the Republican Party.īut then it all came apart. The very breadth of economic expansion made the public highly receptive to all these programs, including the social safety net. The developed economies grew by an annual average of 3% during those years. However one defines it, social democracy worked, ushering in what DeLong calls "thirty glorious years" of prosperity (actually 1938-1973 - the phrase was coined by a French economist, referring to the postwar French economy of 1939-1979). Social democracy, in DeLong's telling, encompassed a vast array of programs not normally thought of as core economic ventures - airport construction, the National Park Service, government-funded research in health, Head Start in education. "So you need things like the GI Bill to produce a money flow into education, and things like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because otherwise funding homeownership expansion on the scale that America needed would be all but impossible." In the post-Depression era, it became understood that "not only shouldn't the market be left to do it all," DeLong says, "it can't do it all or very much unless it is properly primed and aided and guided." "You will get a large group of people wanting to elect someone who will do something about the system." "Polanyi's counter was that whether saying the market can do it all or that it's all we can have, people will not stand for it," DeLong told me during a lengthy conversation about his book. This was the era of social democracy, reflecting the views of Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi, who rejected the conservative view that the market had to be permitted to function without interference, even if it produced unjust outcomes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |