“We need a new Marshall Plan” (history lesson for the day)

Last updated on: May 26, 2014 at 5:09 pm by Jane the Actuary

“We need a new Marshall Plan” (history lesson for the day) 2014-05-26T17:09:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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That’s a throw-away line you hear periodically: we need a Marshall Plan in the inner cities, for black Americans, for Africa, and so on. It’s shorthand for “if only we spend gobs of money on the problem, we’ll fix it,” with a measure of “we were willing to spend gobs of money on defeated Germans, so we ought to be equally-willing to do so for” some other group.

I read this line again today, and looked up the Marshall Plan in Wikipedia. It’s a pretty good article, and makes me want to see if I can find a book with an in-depth treatment. Key points:

The Marshall Plan was not about “learning the lessons of the harsh Treaty of Versailles reparations.” The Allies were actually rather harsh with the defeated Germans, dismantling factories, limiting their steel production, and so on. There was quite a lot of hunger in the immediate post-war period (as a child, my father-in-law received literal CARE packages from the U.S. to provide some nutrition, and remembers being grossed out by the orange cheese they contained), made all the worse by the Germans losing their fertile farmland in the East (by which I mean not lands they conquered but historic German territory given to Poland) and having to absorb 12 million refugees from the East (that is, both from territory Germany lost as well as Ethnic Germans in Hungary, Yugoslavia, etc.). When the Plan was implemented, the amount of aid accorded Germany was actually substantially smaller than that for France and the U.K.

The Marshall Plan was not as big a program as we think of: in today’s dollars, $148 billion — far less than the wasteful “stimulus” of 2008 of nearly a trillion.

The Marshall Plan was planned in 1947 and implemented in 1948, and was motivated, to a significant degree, by the emerging Cold War; its immediate impetus was the Greek Civil War against communists.

And the Marshall Plan was established to help countries with previously-functioning economies, legal systems, and governments as well as a skilled labor force, functioning educational system, and an overall “developed” culture — all they really needed was the money to jump-start their economies, and specifically to be able to buy imported goods and raw materials.

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