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crucially, unlike in Russia and Ukraine, central European countries largely avoided a situation where a few people walked off with the majority of the prized former state assets.

“Joining the EU was the key moment, not because of subsidies, but because of frameworks: anti-monopoly rules, environmental protection and so on,” says Grabski

In some countries in the region, these institutional frameworks are still under attack from governments, but the situation compared with neighbouring Ukraine, for example, where the courts, police and tax authorities are hopelessly dependent on political and big business interests, is incomparable

if there is one factory that symbolises both central Europe’s growth over the last three decades and the potential pitfalls going forward, it is not the Gdańsk shipyard but the Audi plant at Győr, in north-west Hungary.

Things took off when Hungary joined the EU in 2004 and could be integrated fully into the manufacturer’s supply chain. Today, Audi Hungaria is a modern-day capitalist version of a Soviet monogorod, or one-factory town. The vast complex on the outskirts of Győr is a set of nondescript white hangars linked by an internal road system, and the plant has its own restaurants, medical clinic, fire station and postal service.

Going forward, the key will be moving away from an economic model of western European countries outsourcing production to the east, and towards one that sees ideas and innovation developed inside the region. Only in this way, analysts say, will the countries of the region be able to fully close the gap in wealth and living standards with the other half of Europe. So far, however, there is little sign of the spending on research and development, or institutional reforms, that would be required for such a long-term shift

on average even the poorest parts of society are better off than they were 30 years ago, this is little comfort to those in former industrial areas or rural regions where there is an overwhelming sense of decay; indeed, that decay can feel ever more pressing when compared to the progress experienced in shinier areas

In the three decades since independence, the populations of all the region’s countries have shrunk. Latvia has lost more than a quarter of its population, Bulgaria and Romania around a fifth. With higher salaries a short and easy flight away, the process was inevitable. In parts of the region, this has led to chronic shortages of doctors and other skilled workers.

it’s worth acknowledging just how fast things have improved. Poland has moved from 25% of German income levels 30 years ago to 60% today. “You can’t expect Poles to completely catch up with Germans within one generation. It’s only natural for people to aspire to a good life as quickly as possible. But it’s just unrealistic for this to happen. The whole region has been the dark periphery of Europe for the last 1,000 years,”

They also provided up to three meals a day for children, with some offering prepared meals for mothers to take with them when they picked up their kids.

“The ones that we often hear about were the ‘model’ day nurseries that were set up at airplane factories [on the West coast],” says Michel. “Those were ones where the federal funding came very quickly, and some of the leading voices in the early childhood education movement…became quickly involved in setting [them] up,” she says. 

For these centers, organizers enlisted architects to build attractive buildings that would cater to the needs of childcare, specifically. “There was a lot of publicity about those, but those were unusual. Most of the childcare centers were kind of makeshift. They were set up in [places like] church basements.”

When the World War II childcare centers first opened, many women were reluctant to hand their children over to them. According to Chris M. Herbst, a professor of public affairs at Arizona State University who has written about these programs in the Journal of Labor Economics, a lot of these women ended up having positive experiences.

As the war ended in August 1945, the Federal Works Agency announced it would stop funding childcare as soon as possible. Parents responded by sending the agency 1,155 letters, 318 wires, 794 postcards and petitions with 3,647 signatures urging the government to keep them open. In response, the U.S. government provided additional funding for childcare through February 1946. After that, it was over.

This was during the Cold War, a time when anti-childcare activists pointed to the fact that the Soviet Union funded childcare as an argument for why the United States shouldn’t. President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, arguing that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”

U.S. history that the country came close to instituting universal childcare.

The tensions have risen as Ford and other global automakers have spent billions of dollars designing and building EVs, a move that looked especially smart a year ago when they were caught off guard by the strong demand for their new offerings. 

This past week, General Motors said it would delay opening a large EV truck factory in Michigan by a year, citing a need “to better manage capital investments while aligning with evolving EV demand.” The move followed an earlier announcement by Ford pushing back to late 2024 a target of building 600,000 EVs annually. The company has also temporarily cut one of the production shifts for its electric pickup and paused construction of a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan. 

In the U.S., for every five Democrats owning an EV there are two Republicans, said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, which surveys new-vehicle buyers. 

His data finds that Democrats give priority to “environmentally friendly” when buying their cars while Republicans have other things they are looking for, such as performance and prestige.

On the campaign trail, however, EVs don’t always sound so cool. The GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who is against subsidies, has drawn laughs as he suggests that EV buyers are motivated by “a psychological insecurity,” while former Vice President Mike Pence said during the second Republican presidential primary debate that Biden’s efforts “are driving American gasoline, automotive manufacturing, into the graveyard.”  

“I don’t get why Ford and GM, why these carmakers, aren’t fighting…to make cars that are going to sell, to make cars that are going to be able to go on long distances,” Trump said at a rally during which he predicted the EV policies would lead to “hundreds of thousands of American jobs” being lost. 

“The real question is whether we’ll lead or we’ll fall behind in the race to the future; or whether we’ll build these vehicles and the batteries that go in them here in the United States or rely on other countries,” Biden said while visiting a Ford factory early in his administration. 

Underpinning the politics of EVs is an economic divide, made more stark by the rise of interest rates. Most EVs are more expensive than the average new vehicle—which sold for about $46,000 in September.

As new cars and trucks become more costly, the practical effect on buyers shows up in Strategic Vision’s survey: The median family household income of new-car buyers has risen to $122,000. That is a significant increase from around $90,000, where it had been at for a couple of decades until just recently. EV buyers are even better off, with a median household income of $186,000.

In some ways, the green car tensions are a return to the 2012 political season, when GM’s Chevrolet Volt became the embodiment of the Obama administration’s rescue of the Detroit auto industry in 2009 and efforts to promote electrified vehicles.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination, said the problem with the “Obama car” was that one couldn’t put a gun rack in the plug-in hybrid vehicle.

Sales of the Volt disappointed, and Dan Akerson, then CEO of GM, was left fuming that the company hadn’t designed the sedan to become “a political punching bag.”

GM later killed off the Volt.

Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm.

Over the past two centuries, per capita incomes in all advanced economies, from Sweden to Japan, have grown at compound rates of around 1.5% to 2% a year

these distinctly non-euphoric averages mean that most of the time, over the long sweep of history, people’s incomes typically take about 40 years to double.

looking from one year to the next, the improvements in living standards that come from higher incomes are glacial. The data may show that life is getting better, but average families feel no reason to break out the champagne.

that is no longer good enough. Americans expect the economy to be buoyant, not boring. Yet this expectation is shaped not by prosaic economic realities but by a most unusual period in history: the quarter-century that began in the ashes of World War II, when the world economy performed better than at any time before or since.

The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.

Many factors played a role in this achievement.

The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated.

As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value.

New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost.

Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.

Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.

The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lowered thermostats. It shocked the world economy.

But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply.

The consequences of the productivity bust were severe. Full employment vanished. It would be 24 years before the U.S. unemployment rate would again reach the low levels of late 1973

and the infinitesimal unemployment rates in France, Germany and Japan would never be reached again. Through the rest of the 20th century, the jobless rate in 28 wealthy economies would average nearly 7%.

the world’s overall economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% a year from 1951 through 1973 to an average of just 3.1% for the balance of the century.

With economic planners and central bankers unable to steady their economies, voters turned sharply to the right

Conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Helmut Kohl in West Germany swept into power, promising that freer markets and smaller government would reverse the decline, spur productivity and restore rapid growth.

But these leaders’ policies—deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy—proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them

Some insist that the conservative revolution stimulated an economic renaissance, but the facts say otherwise: Great Britain’s productivity grew far more slowly under Thatcher’s rule than during the miserable 1970s, and Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts brought no productivity improvement at all.

It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control

That, too, seems to be a proposition — sensible internationalism — that center-right and left can agree upon.

It is here, perhaps, that the conscientious center-right and center-left can join forces. Both should reject the steady diet of xenophobia on the right and identity politics on the left. Both should insist on a revival of civic education.

a sense of shared responsibility for the fate of our neighbors, especially those facing economic or other hardship, should be the basis of our public policy discussion

“We can talk about a specific factory moving from Ohio or Indiana to Mexico and the jobs that might be saved or lost in a move like that, but the long-term factor is that each of those factories have so many fewer workers. We are talking about 7 percent of the U.S. workforce now working in industrial jobs.”

Neither party, he said, is focusing on the real challenges — creating lifetime learners who can navigate through economic shifts we cannot now anticipate.

Sasse is unusual because, sadly, so few pols talk to voters like adults, addressing rather than denying complexity and appealing to American ideals rather than base fears and tribal prejudices

The 1950s was a remarkable decade for blue-collar male workers. Union membership in the private sector peaked at 35 percent. The male labor-participation rate peaked in 1951. The next year, unemployment fell under 3 percent for the only period on record. Factories that once made shrapnel turned out lawn mowers and washing machines that supplied a happy migration to the suburbs. All this occurred within an economy that was uniquely closed, as the economist Robert Gordon wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth:

The high tariff wall allowed American manufacturing to introduce all available innovations into U.S.-based factories without the outsourcing that has become common in the last several decades. The lack of competition from immigrants and imports boosted the wages of workers at the bottom and contributed to the remarkable “great compression” of the income distribution during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Thus the closing of the American economy through restrictive immigration legislation and high tariffs may indirectly have contributed to the rise of real wages … and the general reduction of inequality from the 1920s to the 1950s.

What happened? The road from there to Trump is long and punctuated with many markers. But here are three significant turns: the 1968 election; the 1979 peak in manufacturing employment, and the 2008 election of Barack Obama.

In a shockingly frank 1981 interview looking back at the 1968 election, the Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained how Nixon disguised his appeal to anti-black voters in the language of economic angst. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Was the white south’s shift to the Republican column really all about civil rights? In a 2015 study, Yale University researchers drawing from Gallup surveys dating back to 1958 concluded that although southern white Democrats held racist views before the 1960s, the correlation between “conservative racial views” and “Democratic identification” disappeared after Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act in 1963.

Essentially, almost all of those voters became Republicans. “Defection among racially conservative whites explains all of the decline in relative white Southern Democratic identification between 1958 and 1980” and three-quarters of the decline until 2000, they concluded.

The most important American industry for most of the 20th century had been manufacturing. Once employing more than a third of the private workforce, and mostly men without a college education, manufacturing employment peaked in the summer of 1979 at almost 20 million workers.

But by the end of the early 1980s recession, the sector had lost almost 3 million jobs. Today, there are about 12 million people working in manufacturing, altogether. In the cities where these jobs were concentrated, the fallout was particularly brutal.

Since 1980, the share of men between 25 and 54 who are neither working nor looking for work has increased with each passing decade. Since 1980, this figure, called the "inactivity rate," has more than doubled

Meanwhile, work has shifted toward service-sector jobs where less-educated women have fared better than men. Women without a college degree are earning more than they were 20 years ago, but since 1990, median real earnings for men without a college degree have fallen 13 percent.

nly one age-and-ethnic group is dying at higher rates than they were 15 years ago: middle-aged American whites without a college education.

. In 2004, white Republicans and white Democrats were similarly likely to say that "too much" money was spent to improve conditions for black people. Eight years later, Republicans were three times more likely to agree.

although the expression of racism by all whites toward blacks has decreased over time, "they’ve failed to decrease under Obama” among Republicans.

The reemergence of racial antagonism is concentrated among Trump supporters. Six out of ten of them think Obama is a Muslim, and only 21 percent acknowledge that the president was born in the United States.

economic anxiety can amplify racial threat effects by leading the majority to fear losing scarce resources to the rising minority. According to "group position theory,” or “group threat,” people in an ethnic majority identify with each other and feel threatened when their position in the cultural hierarchy is tenuous

Berkeley, applied group position theory to the rise of the Tea Party, arguing that racial resentment was the motor of the movement. They concluded that “the election of the first nonwhite president [and] the rising minority population have been perceived as threatening the relative standing of whites in the U.S.”

In short, scarcity triggers tribalism. Despite the long decline in racism among most American voters, prejudice is blooming where voters are most pessimistic and afraid.

most policy makers would confidently predict that a fourfold increase in a people’s material living standard would make them considerably happier.

Although the rate of layoffs dropped considerably in the early 2000s and unemployment started falling, Chinese people’s concerns about jobs and safety-net benefits persisted.

Yet there is no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier, according to an analysis of survey data that colleagues and I conducted. If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately.

The transition to a more private economy in the 1990s abruptly overturned the iron rice bowl.

Before free-market reforms kicked in, most urban Chinese workers enjoyed what was called an “iron rice bowl”: permanent jobs and an extensive employer-provided safety net, which included subsidized food, housing, health care, child care, pensions and jobs for grown children. Life satisfaction during this period among urban Chinese, despite their much lower levels of income, was almost as high as in the developed world.

Evidence of a fraying social safety net is indicated by the decline in self-reported health among the bottom third: those reporting that their health was good or very good dropped to 44 percent, compared with 54 percent in 1990.

China’s transition has been similar in several respects to the transitions of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, for which we have similar life-satisfaction data.

Underlying the dispute is a complicated economic and political landscape of factories and farms that at once entrench the Israeli occupation and help feed the Palestinian families that oppose it. About 25,000 Palestinians work legally for Israelis in the West Bank, many in construction, building the settlements they hope will soon be dismantled.

. They have about 1,000 plants — sophisticated aluminum and food manufacturers as well as tiny textile and furniture workshops — that pump roughly $300 million into the Palestinian economy through salaries and, at the same time, take up vast acreage in what Palestinians see as their future state.Palestinian officials and boycott advocates say that these settlement businesses exploit a vulnerable work force, and that Israel’s occupation is largely responsible for the moribund Palestinian economy that makes its own jobs appealing. Israeli leaders and factory owners, though, say the companies do more to help than hurt Palestinians, and provide rare opportunities for coexistence between the two peoples.

Israeli industries operating in settlements that most of the world considers illegal and a prime obstacle to peace have become a focus of global attention in recent weeks, amid growing momentum for a boycott movement targeting Israeli businesses and institutions

Palestinian minimum wage was $410 a month, compared with Israel’s $1,217, and most Palestinian workers lacked pensions, vacation days and disability insurance — factors she and others say are the fault of the Palestinian Authority as well as Israel.

The Palestinian Authority began boycotting settlement products in late 2009, but stopped short of punishing people who helped produce them. Mohammed Mustafa, the Palestinian deputy prime minister for economic affairs, called the industrial parks part of an exploitative pattern of “business colonization” that has blocked the authority from building a viable economy.

“If we have our land, if we have our resources, if we have independence, if we have control of our economy, then we will give them opportunities,” Mr. Mustafa said. “Yes, they are paying them more, but who wants to be working in a settlement? This is, in a way, even worse than not giving them a job.”

The Palestinian Authority cannot inspect these workplaces, and the Israeli Ministry of Economy has jurisdiction over only minimum-wage violations (a spokeswoman said it opened 10 investigations last year).

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.

By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.

In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order: Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3 million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another 1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: taken together, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polish and Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jews killed were Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak. If these people are considered, the East European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)

The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.

The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans

the other state that killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans

German suffering under Hitler and during the war, though dreadful in scale, does not figure at the center of the history of mass killing. Even if the ethnic Germans killed during flight from the Red Army, expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945–1947, and the firebombings in Germany are included, the total number of German civilians killed by state power remains comparatively small

when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state.

Soviet repressions are identified with the Gulag

We know about the Gulag because it was a system of labor camps, but not a set of killing facilities. The Gulag held about 30 million people and shortened some three million lives. But a vast majority of those people who were sent to the camps returned alive.

the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930–1933 and the Great Terror of 1937–1938.

It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.

The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was aimed chiefly at “kulaks,” which is to say peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives. A few national minorities, representing together less than 2 percent of the Soviet population, yielded more than a third of the fatalities of the Great Terror.

If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.

mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.

An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived.

During the war, many Soviet Russians were killed by the Germans, but far fewer proportionately than Belarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention Jews. Soviet civilian deaths are estimated at about 15 million. About one in twenty-five civilians in Russia was killed by the Germans during the war, as opposed to about one in ten in Ukraine (or Poland) or about one in five in Belarus.

Poland was attacked and occupied not by one but by both totalitarian states between 1939 and 1941, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then allies, exploited its territories and exterminated much of its intelligentsia at that time. Poland’s capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed.

By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.

Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian utopia in the East, the USSR wishing to overcome its agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic develop-ment. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

“It has not been a legend that white Southerners have been particularly eager to surrender because it was all part of their sense of grievance, that they had been so severely wronged during the Civil War,”

Sherman’s aggressiveness, the marker concludes, “demoralized Confederates, hastening the end of slavery and the reunification of the nation.”

The reassessment of Sherman comes at a time when the South continues to weigh how to recognize its complex racial history. Earlier this year, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights opened in Atlanta, the same city where Gov. Nathan Deal last year ordered the removal of a statue of an avowed white supremacist from the grounds of the State Capitol. (Officials said that the relocation of Thomas E. Watson’s likeness was to accommodate a construction project and that the state could not afford to return the statue to its former position.)But the Confederate battle emblem still flies on the grounds of the South Carolina State House, and there is a push underway in Mississippi to amend its Constitution to enshrine “Dixie” as the state song.

“The old stereotype is a long way from disappearing. There’s this sort of instinctive sense of Sherman embodying the whole Yankee cause and the presumed vindictiveness and unrelenting harshness that the white South was subjected to.”

The enduring nature of that lore, Dr. Marszalek said, was in itself a testament to Sherman’s maneuvers.“His whole concept was psychological warfare,” Dr. Marszalek said. “He did such a good job getting into people’s minds, he’s still there in many ways.”

The workers I interviewed after the recession for my book on unemployment—less-educated factory workers—offer some tentative clues about what might be driving the disquieting trends described by the Case and Deaton study.

This is one of the groups hit hardest by the rising inequality and greater risk of unemployment and financial insecurity that have become features of today’s economy, and their experiences put in concrete terms how the economy and culture have become more hostile to workers not lucky enough to be working in posh offices on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

When it comes to explaining American economic trends, it is important to remember how critical a role manufacturing and unions have played in the building—and now dismantling—of a strong middle class.

or generations, factories provided good jobs to people who never went to college, allowing families—first white ethnic immigrants, and then others—to be upwardly mobile.

But in the late ’90s—the beginning of the crisis period that Case and Deaton identify—the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. dropped dramatically.

Political leaders, bankrolled by the wealthy, rolled back the interventionist policies of the New Deal and postwar period.

Corporations, once relatively tolerant of unions, tapped a cottage industry of anti-union consultants and adopted unseemly tactics to crush any organizing drives in their workplaces.

the two-thirds of Americans over the age of 25 who don’t have a bachelor’s degree

Certainly, it cannot be said enough that African Americans and Latinos continue to fare significantly worse than whites in terms of their overall rates of death and disease, even if the racial gap has narrowed.

. In the decades after World War II, racial minorities were denied many of the jobs, loans, and other resources that allowed the white majority to buy homes and accrue wealth.

If the gains of economic growth have gone largely to the rich in recent years, in that earlier period the white working class could count on hefty rises in living standards from generation to generation, and they grew accustomed to that upward trajectory of growing prosperity.

For example, while the disappearance of high-paying jobs for those with little education is a large part of the overall story of a shrinking middle class, it can’t wholly account for the uptick of mortality identified in the Case and Deaton study.

Likewise, the groups that have been affected most viciously by these market trends in the U.S., African Americans and Latinos, have not suffered the dramatic increases in death by suicide or substance abuse that whites have.

hite Americans, for instance, are more likely to see success as the result of individual effort than African Americans are (though not Hispanics). The less educated, particularly less-educated whites, also share this view to a disproportionate degree.

As scholars of family life as politically distinct as Andrew Cherlin and Charles Murray have stressed, college graduates and the less educated have greatly diverged in terms of when and how they partner up and have kids.

Nowadays, well-educated couples are much more likely to marry, stay married, and have children within marriage than those with less schooling.

A large part of the explanation for this must be that society’s attitudes about the sanctity and permanence of marriage have changed. But it’s important to note that there is an economic dimension to these trends, too—as the frequent separations and divorces I saw among the long-term unemployed made plain to me.

Those struggling financially are less likely to follow the traditional path of first comes marriage, then comes a baby.

The waning of religious belief may be another trend aggravating the modern malaise of the white working class. Since the ’90s, the number of Americans who declare no religious preference on surveys has almost tripled—from 8 percent at the beginning of that decade, to 21 percent in 2014.

Many said their faith was helping them get through their ongoing troubles, yet they rarely or never went to church. Some felt ashamed to be around people because they were out of work.

For others, their religious belief was somewhat a source of self-help, rather than a source of community.

The larger context of this isolation and alienation is America’s culture of individualism. It, too, can worsen the despair. Taken to an extreme, self-reliance becomes a cudgel: Those who falter and fail have only themselves to blame.

America’s frontier spirit of rugged individualism is strong, and it manifests itself differently by race and education level, too.

When asked in national surveys about the people with whom they discussed “important matters” in the past six months, those with just a high-school education or less are likelier to say no one (this percentage has risen over the years for college graduates, too).

To this day, the supreme value of education remains one of the few things that Americans of all persuasions (presidential candidates included) can agree on.

Some of the analysis of the Case and Deaton article has focused rightly on recent developments in this country’s drug crisis—namely, the surge in abuse of prescription opioids, and the resurgence in heroin use, notably among whites.

There is clearly a pressing need to deal more vigorously with this drug problem and the epidemic of fatal overdoses and liver disease that has affected the poor and working class in particular.

At the same time, it should be said that risky individual behaviors are shaped by broader social conditions. As the researchers Bruce Link and Jo Phelan have argued, effective health interventions need to consider the underlying factors that put people “at risk of risks”—specifically, socioeconomic status and social support.

One parting observation, then, is that policies to keep people from sinking into poverty and long-term unemployment can make a huge difference.

The modern GE was built by Jack Welch, the youngest CEO and chairman in company history when he took over in 1981. He ran it for 20 years, becoming the rare CEO who was also a household name, praised for his strategic and operational mastery.

their most obvious problem. GE couldn’t live without GE Capital, still so big it was essentially the nation’s seventh largest bank. But investors couldn’t live with GE Capital and its unshakable shadow of risk, either.

it worked more like a collection of businesses under the protection of a giant bank. As the financial sector came to drive more of the U.S. economy, GE Capital, the company’s finance arm, powered more of the company’s growth. At its height, Capital accounted for more than half of GE’s profits. It rivaled the biggest banks in the country, competed with Wall Street for the brightest M.B.A.s and employed hundreds of bankers.

The industrial spine of the company gave GE a AAA credit rating that allowed it to borrow money inexpensively, giving it an advantage over banks, which relied on deposits. The cash flowed up to headquarters where it powered the development of new jet engines and dividends for shareholders.

Capital also gave General Electric’s chief executives a handy, deep bucket of financial spackle with which to smooth over the cracks in quarterly earnings reports and keep Wall Street happy

GE shares were trading at 40 times its earnings when Welch retired in 2001, more than double where it had historically. And much of those profits were coming from deep within Capital, not the company’s factories.

When the financial crisis hit, Capital fell back to earth, taking GE’s share price and Immelt with it. The stock closed as low as $6.66 in March 2009. General Electric was on the brink of collapse. The market for short-term loans, the lifeblood of GE Capital, had frozen, and there was little in the way of deposits to fall back on. The Federal Reserve stepped in to save it after an emergency plea from Immelt.

the near-death experience taught investors to think of GE like a bank, a stock always vulnerable to another financial collapse

At its peak, General Electric was the most valuable company in the U.S., worth nearly $600 billion in August 2000. That year, GE’s third of a million employees operated 150 factories in the U.S., and another 176 in 34 other countries. Its pension plan covered 485,000 people.

What if the GE Jack Welch built didn’t work any more?

Cracks in the performance of the company’s industrial lines—its power turbines, jet engines, locomotives and MRI machines—would now be plain to see, some executives worried, without Capital’s cash to help cover the weak quarters and pay the sacrosanct dividend

Most of the shortfall came from its service contracts, which should have been the source of the easiest profits. Instead, the heart of the industrial business was hollow. And its failure was about to tip the entire company into crisis.

Former colleagues compared him to Bill Clinton because of his magnetic ability to hold the focus of a room. He sounded like a leader. He was a natural salesman.

Immelt was so confident in GE’s managerial excellence that he projected a sunny vision for the company’s future that didn’t always match reality. He was aware of the challenges, but he wanted his people to feel like they were playing for a winning team. That often left Immelt, in the words of one GE insider, trying to market himself out of a math problem.

Alstom’s problems hadn’t gone away, but now its stock was cheaper, and Immelt saw the makings of a deal that fit perfectly with his vision for reshaping his company. GE would essentially swap Capital, the cash engine that no longer made sense, for a new one that could churn out profits each quarter in the reliable way that industrial companies were supposed to.

To the dismay of some involved, GE’s bid crept upward, from the €30 a share that the power division’s deal team already believed was too high, to roughly €34, or almost $47. Immelt and Kron met one-on-one, and the deal team realized the game was over. The principals had shaken hands.

The visions for the present and the future were both fundamentally flawed. As GE’s research department was preparing white papers heralding “The Age of Gas,” the world was entering a multiyear decline in the demand for new gas power plants and for the electricity that made them profitable.

When advisers determined that the concessions to get the deal approved might have grown costly enough to trigger a provision allowing GE to back out, some in the Power business quietly celebrated, confiding in one another that they assumed management would abandon the deal. But Immelt and his circle of closest advisers wanted it done. That included Steve Bolze, the man who ran it and hoped someday to run all of General Electric.

“Steve’s our guy,” McElhinney said in one meeting. If Bolze was elevated to CEO, those behind him in Power would rise too. “Get on board,” he said. “We have to make the numbers.”

Immelt, trapped in Welch’s long shadow, craved a bold move to shock his company out of the doldrums that had plagued his tenure. It was time for GE to be reinvented again.

In the dry language of accounting in which he was so fluent, Flannery was declaring a pillar of Immelt’s pivot had failed: GE had been sending money out the door to repurchase its stock and pay dividends but wasn’t bringing in enough from its regular operations to cover them. It wasn’t sustainable. Buybacks and dividends are generally paid out of leftover funds.

when GE spun off Genworth, there was a chunk of the business, long-term-care insurance, that lingered. Policies designed to cover expenses like nursing homes and assisted living had proved to be a disaster for insurers who had drastically underestimated the costs

The bankers didn’t think the long-term-care business could be part of the Genworth spinoff. To make the deal more attractive, GE agreed to cover any losses. This insurance for insurers covered about 300,000 policies by early 2018, about 4% of all such policies written in the country. Incoming premiums weren’t covering payouts.

Two months after Miller flagged the $3 billion, it was clear the problem was a great deal larger. GE was preparing for it to be more than $6 billion and needed to come up with $15 billion in reserves regulators required it to have to cover possible costs in the future. The figure was gigantic. By comparison, even after the recent cut, GE’s annual dividend cost $4 billion.

JP Morgan analyst Steve Tusa, who led the pack in arguing that GE was harboring serious problems, removed his sell rating on the stock this week. GE’s biggest skeptic still thinks the businesses are broken but the risks are now known. The stock climbed back above $7 on Thursday, but is down more than 50% for the year and nearly 90% from its 2000 zenith.

This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people’s relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home.

The same goes for today’s digital revolution. While often described as a second machine age, our current historical moment is better understood as a second industrious revolution. It has been underway for at least 40 years, encompassing the collapse, since the 1970s, of the relatively secure wage-work economy of the postwar era — and the rise of post-industrialism and the service economy.

Over these four decades we have seen an increase in the use of day laborers, office temps, management consultants, contract assemblers, adjunct professors, Blackwater mercenaries and every other kind of worker filing an I.R.S. form 1099. These jobs span the income ranks, but they share what all work seems to have in common in the post-1970s economy: They are temporary and insecure

In the last 10 years, 94 percent of net new jobs have appeared outside of traditional employment. Already approximately one-third of workers, and half of young workers, participate in this alternative world of work, either as a primary or a supplementary source of income.

services like Uber and online freelance markets like TaskRabbit were created to take advantage of an already independent work force; they are not creating it. Their technology is solving the business and consumer problems of an already insecure work world. Uber is a symptom, not a cause.

Today’s smartphone app is an easy way to hire a temp, but is it really that much easier than picking up a phone was in 1950?

shortly after World War II, a Milwaukee man named Elmer Winter founded Manpower, the first major temp agency, to supply emergency secretaries. But by the end of the ’50s, Winter had concluded that the future growth of Manpower was in replacing entire work forces

persuading companies to abandon how they operated was easier said than done, even though Winter could readily demonstrate that it would be cheaper. Few companies took him up on his offer. Higher profits were possible, but not as important, in the lingering wake of the Great Depression, as the moral compact between employer and employee

Big corporations had always had their critics, but no one before the ’70s would have thought that smaller companies would be better run than large ones. Large companies had resources, economies of scale, professional managers, lots of options. Yet terms like “small” and “efficient” and “flexible” would come to seem like synonyms. And with the rise of the lean corporation, work forces became expendable and jobs more precarious.

for the vast majority of workers, the “freedom” of the gig economy is just the freedom to be afraid. It is the severing of obligations between businesses and employees. It is the collapse of the protections that the people of the United States, in our laws and our customs, once fought hard to enshrine.

We can’t turn back the clock, but neither is job insecurity inevitable. Just as the postwar period managed to make industrialization benefit industrial workers, we need to create new norms, institutions and policies that make digitization benefit today’s workers. Pundits have offered many paths forward — “portable” benefits, universal basic income, worker reclassification — but regardless of the option, the important thing to remember is that we do have a choice.

The report in Bild, since confirmed by the family’s spokesman, shows that ancestors of Reimann family were enthusiastic antisemites and keen supporters of Adolf Hitler. They used Russian civilians and French prisoners of war as forced labourers in their factories.

The source of the revelations appears to be a report commissioned by the family themselves, in a bid to learn more about their ancestry. After discovering the extent of the Nazi ties, the family have said they will donate $11.3m (£8.5m) to charity, though they’re yet to say which one.

in some of capitalism’s most rarefied circles including Harvard Business School, where last fall Seth Klarman, a highly influential billionaire investor, delivered what he described as a “plaintive wail” to the business community to fix capitalism before it was too late.

“It’s a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions . . . or harsh ones; to offer good benefits or paltry ones.” If business leaders didn’t “ask hard questions about capitalism,” he warned that they would be asked by “ideologues seeking to point fingers, assign blame and make reckless changes to the system.

Leading politicians, such as Trump, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), were advocating positions on tariffs, wealth taxes and changes in corporate governance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

One of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, home to the next generation of Fortune 500 executives, was a class on “reimagining capitalism.” Seven years ago, the elective started with 28 students. Now there were nearly 300 taking it

“Winners Take All,” a book by Anand Giridharadas, a journalist and former McKinsey consultant, that had hit the bestseller list and was provoking heated arguments in places like Silicon Valley, Davos and Harvard Business School. Giridharadas’s book was a withering attack on America’s billionaire class and the notion that America’s iconic capitalists could use their wealth and creativity to solve big social and economic problems that have eluded a plodding and divided government.

To Brockman, a future without work seemed just as likely as one without meat, a possibility that many in the valley viewed as a near certainty. “Once we have meat substitutes as good as the real thing, my expectation is that we’re going to look back at eating meat as this terrible, immoral thing,”

Added another student: “There was a palpable sense of personal desperation.”

“The best thing that happened to me was that I lost my 2014 election,” he said. “Had I won . . . maybe I would’ve been a traditional neoliberal. It really forced my self-reflection and it pointed out every weakness I ever had.”

Mixed in with the valley’s usual frothy optimism about disruption and inventing the future was a growing sense that the tech economy had somehow broken capitalism. The digital revolution had allowed tech entrepreneurs to build massive global companies without the big job-producing factories or large workforces of the industrial era. The result was more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.

some feared things were only going to get worse. Robots were eliminating much factory work; online commerce was decimating retail; and self-driving cars were on the verge of phasing out truck drivers. The next step was computers that could learn and think.

thinking computers might be able to diagnose diseases better than doctors by drawing on superhuman amounts of clinical research, said Brockman, 30. They could displace a large number of office jobs. Eventually, he said, the job shortages would force the government to pay people to pursue their passions or simply live

For many of the students, schooled in the notion that business could make a profit while making the world a better place, Giridharadas’s ideas were both energizing and disorienting. Erika Uyterhoeven, a second-year student, recalled one of her fellow classmates turning to her when Giridharadas was finished. “So, what should we do?” her colleague asked. “Is he saying we shouldn’t go into banking or consulting?

The same could be true of work in a future in an era of advanced artificial intelligence. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive,’ ” he said

Khanna had a different view. He saw the country’s problems primarily as the product of growing income inequality and a lack of opportunity.

During Aranda’s administration, an ambitious project was adopted for colonizing a depopulated area in the South of Spain, the Sierra Morena, with colonists from abroad, mostly from Germany

Charles certainly tried to reduce the authority and privilege of the Church, but he was pious and his intervention was moderate.

It was not merely what the Inquisition did, but what it deterred men from doing

it is an absolute principle always to do what has been done the day before and to do it in absolutely the same way

Charles issued a decree declaring officially that the trades of tanner, blacksmith, tailor and shoemaker did not degrade the person exercising them, or his family. To carry the point further, he worked from time to time with his hands in his own factories, and he was proud of having made the boots and main items of a soldier’s equipment

It is difficult to exaggerate the darkness of the intellectual climate in which Charles and the men of the enlightenment had to work

It is impossible to understand Charles’ reign or the achievement of the men of the enlightenment in Spain without keeping constantly in mind how widespread and entrenched were the forces of conservatism, intolerance and privilege, and how few were the men who believed that the only hope for the country lay in the introduction of new ideas—in the acceptance of reason rather than tradition as the lode-star of human activity

In 1771 he created a new order that opened the doors of the nobility to the bourgeoisie

Few people here discover any love for the sciences. Books are little read

Much was done to reform the universities

There was a revulsion against war and a condemnation of militarism. ‘This peninsula,’ wrote Cadalso, ‘has not enjoyed anything that can be called peace for nearly 2,000 years. It is a marvel that there is any grass in the fields or water in the fountains

has never produced a speculative scientist of great renown

Along with the embourgeoisement of the Spanish central government went a fresh broom in local affairs that swept away many of the old hereditary offices, opened them up to anyone who was qualified regardless of birth, and even introduced elections for certain posts

He also encountered the deep-seated conservatism of the people who feared the slightest change

He established royal factories for clocks and porcelain; infant industries were protected, and some of the restrictive practices of the enormously powerful guilds were curtailed

The first national bank of Spain was founded, and economic societies were established in many parts of the country to spread technical knowledge

Trade with the colonies was encouraged; new highways were built

Charles was also a considerable patron of the arts and sciences. He founded an astronomical observatory and an immense hospital.

Napoleon remarked to his brother, Joseph, when he gave him the crown of Spain

From all over France and Spain spectators flocked to see the 7,000 British defenders under General George Elliot defeated by the 40,000 men under the command of the renowned Spanish general

The 1733 family Compact between the Kings of France and Spain contained an article committing His Most Christian Majesty to do everything, if necessary using force, to compel the British to restore Gibraltar to Spain

It bound Madrid to Paris and prevented Spain from making common cause with Britain

the main source of five Anglo-Spanish wars in seventy-five years and was the prime objective for which Spain joined France in the War of American Independence

Spain’s participation in the war led at first to a joint French-Spanish plan to invade England, but this soon had to be abandoned and, after the failure of secret peace talks, Spanish activity came to be concentrated more and more upon the capture of the Rock

as if all the ingenuity of Europe was combined against the Rock

But Charles’s struggle for internal reform was partly stultified by his failure to spare the country the cost of further war. In 1775 an expedition was undertaken against Algiers which failed ignominiously

The battle was over, and with it Spain’s chance of recovering the Rock by force

But George III was in favour of giving it up since he was convinced that ‘this proud fortress’, to use his own words, would be ‘the source at least of a constant lurking enmity between England and Spain’

He so arranged things that the British offer never reached the court of Madrid

The French Minister did not want to make the sacrifice of territory necessary to accomplish the exchange; nor did he wish to weaken the ties that bound the Bourbon powers by removing the greatest single obstacle to a reconciliation between Spain and England

In the light of history, it looks as if a golden opportunity was missed for resolving the problem. Spain recovered Minorca and acquired the whole of Florida. But the source of enmity continued to lurk

The war had brought serious consequences for Spain’s internal economy. But it had also not been without its effect on the problems of the Spanish-American colonies which now had a Republic on their doorstep

the movement for separation. The development of trade led to more prosperity among many of the creoles and, hence, to in-dependent-mindedness

the propagation of the ideas of the enlightenment

He insisted on every detail of every new idea being thrashed out in one or other of the various councils of state

like his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, that punctuality is the courtesy of kings

He was not out for himself, but for the welfare and happiness of his subjects

There could be no attenuation of his absolute authority. It was government for the people, certainly, but without the people

If the hopes were not entirely fulfilled and if Spain before long slipped backwards again into the darkness from which Charles had tried to lift her, the causes were hardly his responsibility.

The French Revolution spread such fears amongst the reforming rulers of Spain that they panicked and suspended all progress

Charles simply did not reign long enough to establish for all time the climate of change he had introduced