The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society. The great Jane Jacobs noted as much with respect to the very practical business of urban life and the maintenance of cleanliness and civ...
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 privileg...
Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.
Margaret Thatcher’s notorious bon mot: there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families.
Even at their height, the Scandinavian welfare states left the economy to the private sector—which was then taxed at very high rates to pay for social, cultural and other services. What Swedes, Finns,...
A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.
Usually without giving the matter too much thought, we see ourselves as part of a civic community transcending generations.
High taxation was not regarded in these years as an affront. On the contrary, steep rates of progressive income tax were seen as a consensual device to take excess resources away from the privileged
By 1945 few people believed any longer in the magic of the market. This was an intellectual revolution.
What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.’(Arthur Koestler)
We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity.
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.
Those who got the twentieth century right, whether in anticipation [..] or as contemporary observations, had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent.
These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others.
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains...
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.
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’.
Keynes knew perfectly well that fascist economic policy could never have succeeded in the long-run without war, occupation and exploitation.
We need to learn... how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our...