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About two-thirds of the budget will go on subsidies for farmers and on development projects in the EU's poorer regions, as in previous years. But the spending on such projects - called the "cohesion" budget - is being cut by about 7bn euros.

He said that "alongside the historic 3.8% reduction which we have secured on the EU's long-term budget, this is further evidence of us bringing genuine discipline to EU spending".

"With the budget to be reduced 6% compared with 2013, the outcome is not only devoid of ambition, it will also lead to a situation again next year where the EU is facing budget shortfalls compared with programmed spending."

The deal, once signed off, should pave the way for the European Parliament to adopt the EU's long-term trillion-euro budget for 2014-2020.

An additional 400.5m euros will also be spent from the EU "solidarity" fund to help areas of Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Romania which were hit by flooding this year.

nearly five million Americans fall into what’s called the “Medicaid gap”

In Germany, employees' premiums are a percentage of their incomes, so low-wage workers simply pay rock-bottom insurance rates.

Germany actually pioneered this type of insurance—it all started when Otto von Bismarck signed his Health Insurance Bill of 1883 into law. (It’s still known as the “Bismarck model” because of his legacy, and other parts of Europe and Asia have adopted it over the years.)

You can think of this setup as the Goldilocks option among all of the possible ways governments can insure health. It's not as radical as single-payer models like the U.K.’s, where the government covers everyone. And it's also not as brutal as the less-regulated version of the insurance market we had before the ACA.

Since there are no provider networks in Germany, doctors don’t know what other providers patients have seen, so there are few ways to limit repeat procedures.

All things considered, it’s good to be a sick German. There are no network limitations, so people can see any doctor they want. There are no deductibles, so Germans have no fear of spending hundreds before their insurance ever kicks in.

There’s also no money that changes hands during a medical appointment. Patients show their insurance card at the doctor’s office, and the doctors' association pays the doctor using money from the sickness funds. "You don’t have to sit at home and sort through invoices or wonder if you overlooked fine print,”

That insurance card, by the way, is good for hospital visits anywhere in Europe.

of all of the countries studied, Germans were the most likely to be able to get a same-day or next-day appointment and to hear back from a doctor quickly if they had a question. They rarely use emergency rooms, and they can access doctors after-hours with ease.

And Germany manages to put its health-care dollars to relatively good use: For each $100 it spends on healthcare, it extends life by about four months, according to a recent analysis in the American Journal of Public Health. In the U.S., one of the worst-performing nations in the ranking, each $100 spent on healthcare resulted in only a couple of extra weeks of longevity.

those differences aside, it’s fair to say the U.S. is moving in the direction of systems like Germany’s—multi-payer, compulsory, employer-based, highly regulated, and fee-for-service.

The German government is similarly trying to push more people into “family physician” programs, in which just one doctor would serve as a gatekeeper.

like the U.S., Germany may see a shortage of primary-care doctors in the near future, both because primary-care doctors there don’t get paid as much as specialists, and because entrenched norms have prevented physician assistants from shouldering more responsibility

With limitations on how much they can charge, German doctors and hospitals instead try to pump up their earnings by performing as many procedures as possible, just like American providers do.

Similarly, “In Germany, it will always be an operation,” Göpffarth said. “Meanwhile, France and the U.K. tend to try drugs first and operations later.”

With few resource constraints, healthcare systems like America's and Germany's tend to go with the most expensive treatment option possible. An American might find himself in an MRI machine for a headache that a British doctor would have treated with an aspirin and a smile.

Perhaps the biggest difference between our two approaches is the extent to which Germany has managed to rein in the cost of healthcare for consumers. Prices for procedures there are lower and more uniform because doctors’ associations negotiate their fees directly with all of the sickness funds in each state. That's part of the reason why an appendectomy costs $3,093 in Germany, but $13,000 in the U.S.

Now, Maryland is going a step further still, having just launched a plan to cap the amount each hospital can spend, total, each year. The state's hospital spending growth will be limited to 3.58 percent for the next five years. “We know that right now, the more [doctors] do, the more they get paid,” John Colmers, executive director of Maryland’s Health Services Cost Review Commission, told me. “We want to say, ‘The better you do, the better you get paid.’”

certain U.S. states have tried a more German strategy, attempting to keep costs low by setting prices across the board. Maryland, for example, has been regulating how much all of the state’s hospitals can charge since 1977. A 2009 study published in Health Affairs found that we would have saved $2 trillion if the entire country’s health costs had grown at the same rate as Maryland’s over the past three decades.

“In Germany, there is a uniform fee schedule for all physicians that work under the social code,” Schlette said. “There’s a huge catalogue where they determine meticulously how much is billed for each procedure. That’s like the Bible.”

“The red states are unlikely to follow their lead. The notion that government may be a big part of the solution, instead of the problem, is anathema, and Republican controlled legislatures, and their governors, would find it too substantial a conflict to pursue with any vigor.”

no other state has Maryland’s uniform, German-style payment system in place, “so Maryland starts the race nine paces ahead of the other 46 states,” McDonough said.

the unique spirit of each country is what ultimately gets in its way. Germany’s more orderly system can be too rigid for experimentation. And America’s free-for-all, where hospitals and doctors all charge different amounts, is great for innovation but too chaotic to make payment reforms stick.

rising health costs will continue to be the main problem for Americans as we launch into our more Bismarckian system. “The main challenge you’ll have is price control,” he said. “You have subsidies in health exchanges now, so for the first time, the federal budget is really involved in health expenditure increases in the commercial market. In order to keep your federal budget under control, you’ll have to control prices.”

Much of this treatment is meted out through the power of the campus party scene, the boozy, hook-up-happy world of Greek life. This “party pathway,” the authors write, is “a main artery through the university,”

Such party-pathway students aren’t particularly motivated academically, but because they have well-off parents and clear-enough career goals they don’t necessarily need to be, and because they don’t require much financial aid they’re crucial to the university’s bottom line.

The party pathway’s influence, though, is potentially devastating for less well-heeled students.

The party pathway is designed for the daughters of both the 1 percent and of what Piketty calls the “petits rentiers” — families that are affluent but not exorbitantly rich.

“Paying for the Party” is also a story about the socioeconomic consequences of cultural permissiveness — about what happens, who wins and who loses, when a youth culture in which the only (official) moral rule is consent meets a corporate-academic university establishment that has deliberately retreated from any moralistic, disciplinary role.

The losers are students ill equipped for the experiments in youthful dissipation that are now accepted as every well-educated millennial’s natural birthright.

The winners, meanwhile, are living proof of how a certain kind of libertinism can be not only an expression of class privilege, but even a weapon of class warfare.

a close look at the rich list supports the thesis made famous by Thomas Piketty in his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” — namely, that we’re on our way toward a society dominated by wealth, much of it inherited, rather than work.

these days a lot of top money managers’ income comes not from investing other people’s money but from returns on their own accumulated wealth

Over time, extreme inequality in income leads to extreme inequality of wealth; indeed, the wealth share of America’s top 0.1 percent is back at Gilded Age levels. This, in turn, means that high incomes increasingly come from investment income, not salaries. And it’s only a matter of time before inheritance becomes the biggest source of great wealth.

why does all of this matter? Basically, it’s about taxes.America has a long tradition of imposing high taxes on big incomes and large fortunes, designed to limit the concentration of economic power as well as raising revenue. These days, however, suggestions that we revive that tradition face angry claims that taxing the rich is destructive and immoral

there is an inexhaustible supply of passionate but irreconcilable, and familiar, statements of who is "more to blame" for the escalating violence and who originally wronged whom. 

For us living here, the current military operation and the ongoing drizzle of rockets are neither unbearable nor threatening in an existential way. Iron Dome has enabled Israelis to continue with their normal lives neither terrified nor terrorized.

this video because watching it reminded me, through its absence, of the quality of moral breadth, compassion, and bravery that distinguishes people willing to take risks for peace.

When you write that many "vastly more Palestinian families have been killed..because of differences in offensive weaponry and defensive systems and other factors" you might mention that the "other factors" included the Hamas government's refusal to build shelters and defensive systems to protect their people, as well as their use of civilians as shields to hide behind when they shoot rockets at Israeli civilians.

consider this recent CNN exchange between Wolf Blitzer and Israeli Economics Minister Naftali Bennett. I have heard from people in Israel, America, and Europe who say that Bennett is speaking tough, plain, necessary truths. I have heard from others in those same places who think, as I do, that Bennett sounds appallingly callous about other people's loss of life—in this case, the deaths of the four little boys on the beach. Wolf Blitzer himself seems taken aback by what he is hearing. It's worth noting that Bennett features this clip on his own YouTube site. 

the rabbi grossly exaggerated the impact of Hamas terror on Jerusalem and portrayed it with unduly epic dimensions. In so doing, he distorts the actual power imbalance in this tragic situation, in addition to victimizing me and my fellow Israeli citizens.

As a society, we are a (powerful) side in this conflict, not a helpless victim.

The blinding victimhood embodied in the rabbi's comments is shameful because it points at an abject moral, spiritual and leadership failure.

The rockets are not really scary nor are they a true existential threat. Racism, radicalism, and religious intoxication from brute power has become an imminent danger to our old and beloved peoplehood. When people are accustomed to hearing that they are perpetual innocent victims of Palestinian aggression, they eventually translate they frustration into rage and start seeking justice in revenge. If you continue looking up to the sky, you will not notice that the house is already burning from within. 

how can people be unaware of this development, or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have.

defenses of extreme inequality almost always invoke the examples of movie and sports stars. But celebrities make up only a tiny fraction of the wealthy, and even the biggest stars earn far less than the financial barons who really dominate the upper strata

For example, according to Forbes, Robert Downey Jr. is the highest-paid actor in America, making $75 million last year. According to the same publication, in 2013 the top 25 hedge fund managers took home, on average, almost a billion dollars each.

Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is.

defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate.

Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

To provide a detailed account of the size of the religious groups that populate the U.S. landscape;

To describe the demographic characteristics, religious beliefs and practices, and social and political values of those religious groups; and

To document how the religious profile of the U.S. has changed since the first study was conducted in 2007. With more than 35,000 interviews each, both the 2007 and 2014 studies have margins of error of less than one percentage point, making it possible to identify even relatively small changes in religious groups’ share of the U.S. population.

The results of the 2014 Religious Landscape Study will be published in a series of reports over the coming year.

The Koch brothers have put together a coalition that intends to spend almost $1 billion in 2016. Some donors complained after McCutcheon that they'd no longer be able to hide behind limits when they didn't want to give, but the overall landscape has clearly shifted toward those writing the checks.

Members of Congress get the shaft, too, spending up to 12 hours a day dialing for dollars. The simple drag of having to do all that seems like a potent reason for candidates to push back

even as it fails to rise to the top of most voters' agendas, majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents have voiced concern about the corrupting influence of money in polls, and the public generally supports spending caps.

The candidates who are doing best at fundraising, or for whom super PACs are likely to raise money effectively, are staying tactfully quiet on the issue.

she also called last week for a constitutional amendment to create limits or mandate transparency for campaign cash.

Peter Schweizer has excited the political world with allegations of quid pro quos, in which foreign governments gave to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton, then serving as secretary of state, did them favors—essentially alleging bribery in foreign affairs

Shadowy organizations funded by multimillionaires, many of which scrupulously cover up their sources of donations, are going to pour huge amounts of money into trying to sway the democratic process—all in an attempt to prove that huge, insufficiently transparent infusions of cash from wealthy donors can corrupt a public servant’s policy decisions. Is this irony lost on the donors and the candidates they back, or does it simply not bother them?

The panel estimated that its change in sentencing guidelines eventually could result in 46,000 of the nation’s approximately 100,000 drug offenders in federal prison qualifying for early release. The 6,000 figure, which has not been reported previously, is the first tranche in that process.

an additional 8,550 inmates would be eligible for release between this Nov. 1 and Nov. 1, 2016.

The releases are part of a shift in the nation’s approach to criminal justice and drug sentencing that has been driven by a bipartisan consensus that mass incarceration has failed and should be reversed.

Along with the commission’s action, the Justice Department has instructed its prosecutors not to charge low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who have no connection to gangs or large-scale drug organizations with offenses that carry severe mandatory sentences.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously for the reduction last year after holding two public hearings in which members heard testimony from then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., federal judges, federal public defenders, state and local law enforcement officials, and sentencing advocates. The panel also received more than 80,000 public comment letters, with the overwhelming majority favoring the change.

The policy change is referred to as “Drugs Minus Two.” Federal sentencing guidelines rely on a numeric system based on different factors, including the defendant’s criminal history, the type of crime, whether a gun was involved and whether the defendant was a leader in a drug group.

An average of about two years is being shaved off eligible prisoners’ sentences under the change. Although some of the inmates who will be released have served decades, on average they will have served 8  1/2 years instead of 10  1/2 , according to a Justice Department official.

“Even with the Sentencing Commission’s reductions, drug offenders will have served substantial prison sentences,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said. “Moreover, these reductions are not automatic. Under the commission’s directive, federal judges are required to carefully consider public safety in deciding whether to reduce an inmate’s sentence.”

More broadly, some economists say, the lack of family-focused policies reflects the power imbalance between companies and workers in the American economy today. The share of economic output flowing to corporate profits has surged, while employee compensation has stagnated.

The technology industry is a striking example because it attracts some of the country’s smartest people, many of whom have far more bargaining power than most workers. Silicon Valley also has outsize cultural significance, as the face of American ingenuity and a magnet for global talent.

But it is also a place that often expects total commitment to work. That grows from the notion that in tech, unlike in other industries, companies become overnight successes, and believe their work is changing the world.

“People who give you millions of dollars for nothing but an idea at the very least expect your complete commitment to that idea,”

Start-ups are unlikely to have parental policies because they are more focused on growing as quickly as possible.

Though it’s off limits for interviewers to ask candidates whether they have children, tech companies use euphemisms to indicate that parents or older employees are not welcome, said a tech executive who would speak only anonymously. They say people are not a good “culture fit” and cannot “align on priorities” or make it in a “rapidly moving company.” The translation, he said: “People who are not exactly like us.”

“When people have kids, they have other priorities — and start-ups can be pretty brutal about not having other priorities,”

“Young people just have simpler lives,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a talk to would-be entrepreneurs in 2007, when he was 23. “We may not own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.”

In some ways, an aging Silicon Valley is beginning to look more like the rest of corporate America, where most workers have families. The challenge is retaining the youthful optimism that they can do the impossible — while also showing their employees that working and having families is realistic.

on the core issue of providing jobs for people who really should be working, at this point old Europe is beating us hands down despite social benefits and regulations that, according to free-market ideologues, should be hugely job-destroying.

The policy mistakes that created the euro crisis — mainly creating a unified currency without the kind of banking and fiscal union that a single currency demands — basically had nothing to do with the welfare state, one way or another.

“Before Uber was a thing, I would rarely go to Hollywood,” said Drew Heitzler, an artist who lives in Venice, a potentially treacherous drive away. “The prospect of going to Hollywood on a weekend night, if I was invited to a party or an art event, it just wouldn’t happen. I would just stay home.”

Taxis here were often unreliable, he added, but ride shares are always just a swipe away.

“There’s a lot of New Yorkers here, and they’re saying it’s almost like New York.”

Once, only the privileged few, the studio bosses and pampered starlets, could afford to have a chauffeur and a waiting car to transport them around sprawling Los Angeles. Now anyone with a credit card can enjoy that freedom.

“Uber and Lyft have made it much more affordable, and encouraged people to venture out of their neighborhoods, and to explore.”

That is especially true of downtown Los Angeles, which is enjoying the double whammy of a recent cultural resurgence — partly bolstered by the Ace, which opened its hotel and performance space in a historic 1920s movie palace in January — and the car services that deliver once-reluctant visitors. Along with Santa Monica and West Hollywood, it is the area with the highest ridership, according to an Uber representative, though the company refused to release specific figures.

A night out in Los Angeles used to involve negotiating parking, beating traffic and picking a designated driver. Excursions from one end to the other — say, from the oceanfront city of Santa Monica to the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood on the eastern side — had to be planned and timed with military precision, lest they spiral into a three-hour commute. More often than not, they were simply avoided.

Grand Central Market, a food hall from 1917, has lately turned Smorgasburg-y; on weekends, preppily dressed crowds wait patiently for sandwiches from Eggslut. Outside, the street is blocked off for pedestrians, with cafe tables and umbrellas, and nearby is a linger-worthy bookstore and a retro barbershop with shuffleboard. Along Broadway, between discount stores and pupusa stands, are boutiques like OAK NYC and Acne Studios, the Swedish fashion label that opened a giant store there this fall.

“I find myself going down there a lot and taking friends that are coming to visit, because there’s so much cool stuff to do,” s

Ride sharing, some analysts say, has become a viable alternative to owning a car: between the cost of gas, insurance, garages and valet tips, it’s often more economical to get a lift in a professional’s Toyota than to drive solo in your own, and that’s without factoring in the mental cost of sitting in gridlock on Interstate 405.

A short ride through downtown in UberX, the company’s lower-priced service, introduced here last spring, can cost as little as $4, while parking lots charge $5 for 15 minutes.

In a nod to the city’s continued obsession with the status ride, the company recently implemented, in Los Angeles and Orange County only, UberPlus, with a fleet of BMWs and other luxury vehicles. Even with ride shares, what you pull up in matters.

companies like his “will move to strengthen encryption,” and require governments to get court orders if they want data.

Mr. Hannigan, in an opinion article on Tuesday in The Financial Times, singled out the Islamic State, the radical group also known as ISIS and ISIL, as one “whose members have grown up on the Internet” and are “exploiting the power of the web to create a jihadi threat with near-global reach.”

Increasingly encrypted products and services are “a challenge,” Admiral Rogers said. “And we’ll deal with it.”But he also pushed for better sharing of data between the intelligence community and private technology companies. Moves to set up a formal information-sharing system have stalled in Congress in the face of objections from the private sector.

But Mr. Hannigan’s comments, calling for “a new deal between democratic governments and the technology companies in the area of protecting our citizens,” seemed to urge a further review of the balance between civil liberties and national security. Britain, like other European nations, has been increasingly concerned about online recruitment of potential fighters from within its borders by radical groups.

Facebook said in a company blog post that requests by governments for user information were rising steadily, by about a quarter in the first half of the year over the second half of last year.“In the first six months of 2014, governments around the world made 34,946 requests for data,” the post said. “During the same time, the amount of content restricted because of local laws increased about 19 percent.”

Twitter received more than 2,000 requests for information about user accounts from roughly 50 countries in the first six months of 2014, according to a company statement. The number of requests represented a 46 percent increase compared with the same period last year, and more than 60 percent of the requests came from the United States government.

In the past, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, which have broken with the Islamic State, “saw the Internet as a place to disseminate material anonymously or meet in ‘dark spaces,’ ” Mr. Hannigan wrote, while the Islamic State “has embraced the web as a noisy channel in which to promote itself, intimidate people and radicalize new recruits.”The opinion article by Mr. Hannigan referred specifically to messaging and social media sites and apps such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp.“There is no need for today’s would-be jihadis to seek out restricted websites with secret passwords: They can follow other young people posting their adventures in Syria as they would anywhere else,” he wrote.

back in America we haven’t had an official, declared policy of fiscal austerity — but we’ve nonetheless had plenty of austerity in practice, thanks to the federal sequester and sharp cuts by state and local governments. The good news is that we, too, seem to have stopped tightening the screws: Public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. And the economy is doing much better as a result. We are finally starting to see the kind of growth, in employment and G.D.P., that we should have been seeing all along — and the public’s mood is rapidly improving.

You know the spiel: that the U.S. economy is ailing because Obamacare is a job-killer and the president is a redistributionist, that Mr. Obama’s anti-business speeches (he hasn’t actually made any, but never mind) have hurt entrepreneurs’ feelings, inducing them to take their marbles and go home.

The truth is that the private sector has done surprisingly well under Mr. Obama, adding 6.7 million jobs since he took office, compared with just 3.1 million at this point under President George W. Bush. Corporate profits have soared, as have stock prices. What held us back was unprecedented public-sector austerity: At this point in the Bush years, government employment was up by 1.2 million, but under Mr. Obama it’s down by 600,000. Sure enough, now that this de facto austerity is easing, the economy is perking up.

what about the United States? Before the 1914 war, the great economic potential of the U.S. was suppressed by its ineffective political system, dysfunctional financial system, and uniquely violent racial and labor conflicts. “America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit,”

as World War I entered its third year—and the first year of Tooze’s story—the balance of power was visibly tilting from Europe to America. The belligerents could no longer sustain the costs of offensive war. Cut off from world trade, Germany hunkered into a defensive siege, concentrating its attacks on weak enemies like Romania. The Western allies, and especially Britain, outfitted their forces by placing larger and larger war orders with the United States

His Wilson is no dreamy idealist. The president’s animating idea was an American exceptionalism of a now-familiar but then-startling kind.

That staggering quantity of Allied purchases called forth something like a war mobilization in the United States. American factories switched from civilian to military production; American farmers planted food and fiber to feed and clothe the combatants of Europe

But unlike in 1940-41, the decision to commit so much to one side’s victory in a European war was not a political decision by the U.S. government. Quite the contrary: President Wilson wished to stay out of the war entirely. He famously preferred a “peace without victory.” The trouble was that by 1916, the U.S. commitment to Britain and France had grown—to borrow a phrase from the future—too big to fail.

His Republican opponents—men like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root—wished to see America take its place among the powers of the earth. They wanted a navy, an army, a central bank, and all the other instrumentalities of power possessed by Britain, France, and Germany. These political rivals are commonly derided as “isolationists” because they mistrusted the Wilson’s League of Nations project. That’s a big mistake. They doubted the League because they feared it would encroach on American sovereignty.

Grant presents this story as a laissez-faire triumph. Wartime inflation was halted. Borrowing and spending gave way to saving and investing. Recovery then occurred naturally, without any need for government stimulus. “The hero of my narrative is the price mechanism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand,

It was Wilson who wished to remain aloof from the Entente, who feared that too close an association with Britain and France would limit American options.

Wilson was guided by a different vision: Rather than join the struggle of imperial rivalries, the United States could use its emerging power to suppress those rivalries altogether. Wilson was the first American statesman to perceive that the United States had grown, in Tooze’s words, into “a power unlike any other. It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.”

Wilson hoped to deploy this emerging super-power to enforce an enduring peace. His own mistakes and those of his successors doomed the project,

What went wrong? “When all is said and done,” Tooze writes, “the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans and the Japanese [leaders of the early 1920s] to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security. … Given the violence they had already experienced and the risk of even greater future devastation, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain could all see this. But what was no less obvious was that only the US could anchor such a new order.”

And that was what Americans of the 1920s and 1930s declined to do—because doing so implied too much change at home for them: “At the hub of the rapidly evolving, American-centered world system there was a polity wedded to a conservative vision of its own future.”

The Forgotten Depression is a polemic embedded within a narrative, an argument against the Obama stimulus joined to an account of the depression of 1920-21. As Grant correctly observes, that depression was one of the sharpest and most painful in American history.

Then, after 18 months of extremely hard times, the economy lurched into recovery. By 1923, the U.S. had returned to full employment.

“By the end of 1916, American investors had wagered two billion dollars on an Entente victory,” computes Tooze (relative to America’s estimated GDP of $50 billion in 1916, the equivalent of $560 billion in today’s money).

the central assumption of his version of events is the same one captured in Rothbard’s title half a century ago: that America’s economic history constitutes a story unto itself.

Americans, meanwhile, were preoccupied with the problem of German recovery. How could Germany achieve political stability if it had to pay so much to France and Belgium? The Americans pressed the French to relent when it came to Germany, but insisted that their own claims be paid in full by both France and Britain.

Germany, for its part, could only pay if it could export, and especially to the world’s biggest and richest consumer market, the United States. The depression of 1920 killed those export hopes. Most immediately, the economic crisis sliced American consumer demand precisely when Europe needed it most.

But the gravest harm done by the depression to postwar recovery lasted long past 1921. To appreciate that, you have to understand the reasons why U.S. monetary authorities plunged the country into depression in 1920.

Monetary authorities, worried that inflation would revive and accelerate, made the fateful decision to slam the credit brakes, hard. Unlike the 1918 recession, that of 1920 was deliberately engineered. There was nothing invisible about it. Nor did the depression “cure itself.” U.S. officials cut interest rates and relaxed credit, and the economy predictably recovered

But 1920-21 was an inflation-stopper with a difference. In post-World War II America, anti-inflationists have been content to stop prices from rising. In 1920-21, monetary authorities actually sought to drive prices back to their pre-war levels

James Grant hails this accomplishment. Adam Tooze forces us to reckon with its consequences for the rest of the planet.

When the U.S. opted for massive deflation, it thrust upon every country that wished to return to the gold standard (and what respectable country would not?) an agonizing dilemma. Return to gold at 1913 values, and you would have to match U.S. deflation with an even steeper deflation of your own, accepting increased unemployment along the way. Alternatively, you could re-peg your currency to gold at a diminished rate. But that amounted to an admission that your money had permanently lost value—and that your own people, who had trusted their government with loans in local money, would receive a weaker return on their bonds than American creditors who had lent in dollars.

Britain chose the former course; pretty much everybody else chose the latter.

The consequences of these choices fill much of the second half of The Deluge. For Europeans, they were uniformly grim, and worse.

But one important effect ultimately rebounded on Americans. America’s determination to restore a dollar “as good as gold” not only imposed terrible hardship on war-ravaged Europe, it also threatened to flood American markets with low-cost European imports. The flip side of the Lost Generation enjoying cheap European travel with their strong dollars was German steelmakers and shipyards underpricing their American competitors with weak marks.

American leaders of the 1920s weren’t willing to accept this outcome. In 1921 and 1923, they raised tariffs, terminating a brief experiment with freer trade undertaken after the election of 1912. The world owed the United States billions of dollars, but the world was going to have to find another way of earning that money than selling goods to the United States.

Between 1924 and 1930, world financial flows could be simplified into a daisy chain of debt. Germans borrowed from Americans, and used the proceeds to pay reparations to the Belgians and French. The French and Belgians, in turn, repaid war debts to the British and Americans. The British then used their French and Italian debt payments to repay the United States, who set the whole crazy contraption in motion again. Everybody could see the system was crazy. Only the United States could fix it. It never did.

The reckless desperation of Hitler’s war provides context for the horrific crimes of his regime. Hitler’s empire could not feed itself, so his invasion plan for the Soviet Union contemplated the death by starvation of 20 to 30 million Soviet urban dwellers after the invaders stole all foodstuffs for their own use. Germany lacked workers, so it plundered the labor of its conquered peoples. By 1944, foreigners constituted 20 percent of the German workforce and 33 percent of armaments workers

“If man accumulates enough combustible material, God will provide the spark.” So it happened in 1929. The Deluge that had inundated the rest of the developed world roared back upon the United States.

From the start, the United States was Hitler’s ultimate target. “In seeking to explain the urgency of Hitler’s aggression, historians have underestimated his acute awareness of the threat posed to Germany, along with the rest of the European powers, by the emergence of the United States as the dominant global superpower,” Tooze writes. “The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order.”

Germany was a weaker and poorer country in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Compared with Britain, let alone the United States, it lacked the basic elements of modernity: There were just 486,000 automobiles in Germany in 1932, and one-quarter of all Germans still worked as farmers as of 1925. Yet this backward land, with an income per capita comparable to contemporary “South Africa, Iran and Tunisia,” wagered on a second world war even more audacious than the first.

That way was found: more debt, especially more German debt. The 1923 hyper-inflation that wiped out Germany’s savers also tidied up the country’s balance sheet. Post-inflation Germany looked like a very creditworthy borrower.

On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed. The Hitlerian vision of a united German-led Eurasia equaling the Anglo-American bloc proved a crazed and genocidal fantasy.

The foundation of this order was America’s rise to unique economic predominance a century ago. That predominance is now coming to an end as China does what the Soviet Union and Imperial Germany never could: rise toward economic parity with the United States.

t is coming, and when it does, the fundamental basis of world-power politics over the past 100 years will have been removed. Just how big and dangerous a change that will be is the deepest theme of Adam Tooze's profound and brilliant grand narrative

emphasizing the religious aspects of violence can easily devolve into cultural essentialism: the belief that “ancient hatreds” drive modern conflicts. It’s a view most commonly associated with Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts

“Here men have been doomed to hate,” he writes. The word “doomed” suggests the kind of resigned pessimism that, two decades later, characterizes Washington hand-wringing in response to the manifest failures of the Arab Spring. According to this view, we can never hope to understand the Middle East, with all of its sectarian complexity and sheer religious passion

this is what makes Egypt’s conflict so frightening: It is not between sects but within one sect. In Syria or Lebanon, the lines are clear for those who insist on seeing them: Sunnis are Sunnis and Shiites are Shiites. In Egypt, however, it’s never entirely clear who is “Islamist” and who is “secular,” to say nothing of the many shades in between. Because their numbers can’t be defined, each side claims the vast majority of Egyptians as their own. The conflict, then, isn’t between fixed identities but rather fluid ideas of what the state is and what it should be.

The word “Islamists,” or Islamiyoun in Arabic, did not exist centuries ago, not because Muslims didn’t believe that Islamic law should play a central role in politics, but because it went without saying.

slamism, as a distinctive construct, only made sense in opposition to something else—and that something else was secularism, which grew in influence during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Islam was no longer just a way of being; in the face of Western dominance, it became a political theology of authenticity and resistance and a spiritual alternative to liberal-secular democracy.

The default to inaction in the face of a complex region we cannot hope to understand, and when our “vital” interests do not seem to be engaged, is one response. Implicit here, and explicit in Bacevich’s account, is the notion that military action is distinctly unsuited for conflicts in which primeval divides predominate, and that America’s reliance on the use of force has only made matters worse.

For those who file claims, the vast majority would be for players who received diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease or advanced dementia. They would be expected to receive more than $800 million in awards.

both sides expected only several dozen former players to receive the largest monetary awards, up to $5 million for diagnoses of Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or C.T.E.

about 28 percent of former players, totaling 5,900, will develop compensable injuries. Only about 60 percent, or 3,600, of those players are expected to file claims,

One in 10 girls under the age of 18 was forced to have sex, it says.

38 percent of women who are murdered are killed by their partners.Continue reading the main story

Where there are laws on the books, like ones that criminalize domestic violence, for instance, they are not reliably enforced.