The main issue dividing political parties today divided their predecessors two decades, two centuries, and two millennia ago: What role should redistribution through government play in our lives? While the issue is eternal, the facts are recent. More than two millennia ago, Aristotle foresaw that the poor could use their political voice to get transfers from the rich, yet through most of history the poor never gained either the voice or the transfers. Only in the past 200 years has government social spending grown large. Only in the past two decades have scholars and government agencies put together the information needed to explain why the growth of social spending has been so recent and to judge what impact it has had on economic growth.

Telling the story of social spending and economic growth requires weaving together a wide variety of materials. Most of the key ideas and displays of evidence can serve a very wide audience, but some are statistical. To address different audiences, I have divided the book into two volumes. Volume 1 is written for human beings and Volume 2 for social scientists. Here is a quick tour of the contents of Volume 2, which carries the subtitle Further Evidence:

PART FIVE: THE UNDERLYING FRAMEWORK

1. 13. A Minimal Theory of Social Transfers

2. Sketches a simple unified theory that predicts many of the key findings of the whole book.

3. 14. A Guide to the Tests

4. Sets up the procedures and conducting tests and judging impacts in Chapters 15–19.

PART SIX: ACCOUNTING FOR SOCIAL SPENDING, JOBS, AND GROWTH

1. 15. Explaining the Rise of Mass Public Schooling

2. Backs up some main findings of Chapter 5 statistically, with alternative samples and with emphasis on the causal links between democracy and public schooling.

3. […]