For nearly forty years now, governments in rich democracies have been shifting labor market risks from the state and employers to employees, cutting the generosity of social programs even as they tightened restrictions on eligibility. This book analyzes those changes in eighteen countries and shows that the most important factor in explaining whether cuts are made is the economic worldview of a particular government. While the economic pressures that are typically pointed to as the causes of these reforms do exist, Alexander Horn shows that they are nonetheless secondary to ideology.

This textbook explains the fundamental processes involved in the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter. It leads students from a general discussion of electrodynamics, forming the mathematical foundation for the Maxwell equations, to key results such as the Fresnel equations, Snell’s law, and the Brewster angle, deriving along the way the equations for accelerated charges and discussing dipole radiation, Bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation. By considering more and more interacting particles, the book advances its treatment of the subject, approaching the solid-state...