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This chapter examines the ideational and political movements advocating market-based forms of delegated governance since the 1970s. In part, the embrace of marketizing reforms reflected the refinement of ideas about the inefficient and oppressive nature of government as juxtaposed with the dynamism, efficiency, and liberating qualities of markets and individual choice. Some conservative and centrist policy-makers also believed the American state was inherently weak—a self-fulfilling prophecy given their longstanding resistance to building effective bureaucratic capacity at the federal level. In a context of rising health care costs, some policy-makers sought ways to make private insurers do the tough work of disciplining health care interests, delegating to these non-governmental authorities responsibility for meting out pain to medical providers. We trace this impulse through the push for allowing HMOs to administer Medicare benefits; the gathering enthusiasm for managed competition and the Clinton health care reform effort of 1993/94; proposals that emerged in the 1990s for complete Medicare voucherization; and the movement for Health Savings Accounts.

This chapter analyzes the first episodes of anticorruption reform in U.S. history. It describes the events leading up to the passage of New York State's 1838 free banking statute, showing how corrupt politics and an iron-handed chartering regime gave way to free market reform and a liberal general incorporation law. This chapter argues that the reform emerged from the Whigs' desire to deprive their opponents of the rents of patronage.

The concluding chapter of the book summarizes the evidence about social progress in Britain, and the extent to which Britain has been successful in tackling Beveridge’s five giants. It shows how patterns differ between the different domains of social progress and in which domains disadvantaged groups fell behind. The chapter also reviews how Britain’s progress compared with that in peer countries. In some cases the evidence suggests that common features were evident in all eight countries, whereas in other cases, notably material prosperity, life expectancy, and unemployment, there were significant deviations from the experience of peer countries. The chapter uses these comparisons to explore whether Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s reform package improved Britain’s economic and labour market performance and whether it had unwanted side effects in the form of reduced equality of opportunity and social cohesion.

Unemployment has a wide range of adverse consequences over and above the effects of the low income which people out of work receive. In the first decades after the war Britain tended to have a lower unemployment rate than most peer countries but this changed in the 1980s and 1990s, when Britain’s unemployment rate surged during the two recessions—possibly as a result of policies designed to tackle inflation. The young, those with less education, and ethnic minorities have higher risks of unemployment and these risks are cumulative. The evidence suggests that the problems facing young men with only low qualifications became relatively worse in the 1990s and 2000s. This perhaps reflects the dark side of educational expansion, young people with low qualifications being left behind and exposed in the labour market.