Economics

Brad DeLong quotes an article about politics and economics which offers an interesting explanation for the development of Europe's current mild socialism.

Mr Judt stresses the primacy of politics in human affairs and explains how postwar Europe created something novel in human history by transforming a tax-raising, military-spending state into a social state devoting huge amounts of money to health, education, pensions, housing, welfare and public facilities. Europe built these liberal welfare states, Mr Judt reminds his audience, not as a vision of a utopian socialist future but as a means of securing political stability and preventing a recurrence of its terrible past ....

There's also a good bit in which a Martian economist finds the economists of Earth confusing, if you like that sort of thing.