The free-lunch puzzle: hard times for critics of social spending

From the US to Britain and across the European Union, governments have been ramping up public spending to deal with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. For a long time, common wisdom dictated that social spending drags down the growth and level of GDP. Peter H. Lindert says that history shows otherwise. He writes that over the past 140 years larger social-spending budgets have not accompanied any net loss of GDP, skills, or work.