The Marshall Plan was conceived and implemented 70 years ago. Since then, many aid and development initiatives and institutions of greater scale have been created. Why does the Marshall Plan still matter after 70 years?
First of all, I challenge the premise of greater scale. If you look at the percentage of the federal budget that the United States poured into Europe in the period after the war, it was pretty extraordinary. There have been things that were larger in absolute dollar terms, but as a scale-of-effort phenomenon it was pretty substantial.
Look, it was specific to its time. It came after …read more