Tony Judt’s Post War filling in a lot of blanks for me about that period I hadn’t realized were there; I mean, what did European reconstruction after WWII even look like? (Interesting that Americans apply that word “reconstruction” only to the U.S. Civil War. Etymonline suggests it was the Union, not the war-damaged South, that was being “reconstructed.”)
Surprised to read that the total amount of aid in The Marshal Plan (1947) was about 200 billion dollars, in early 2000-era dollars, if you consider it as a percentage of U.S. GDP, which seems small to me. That’s only about a third of the American Rescue Plan, if memory serves, which got us out of the Financial Crisis, to say nothing of the size of the pandemic assistance package(s).
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 