{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022629310344827586, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004310344827586207, 'mean_word_length': 4.839622641509434, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
William Beveridge: A Biography

A recent history of Britain in the Second World War, referring briefly to the Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, noted that its author was 'an economist and sociologist named Sir William Beveridge'. To describe in this fashion the man who in December 1942 was found by the British Institute of Public Opinion to be, after the prime minister, the bestknown man in the kingdom, is rather like identifying Jimmy Carter as a well-known peanut farmer. But perhaps it reflects the nature of Beveridge's career and the peculiarity of his contribution to British history in the twentieth century. Beveridge falls into that rather large category of public men and women who did important things, or at least affected large matters of state, but who were not themselves important. Their strength was in the ability to think and argue. They were able to direct the minds of men who held the levers of power to which they themselves had no access. Many of these people were, of course, civil servants. But many others, although they may have been on the government pay-roll from time to time, were, like Beveridge, the non-official experts whose proposals have shaped the twentieth-century revolution in government which was once styled the welfare state. Because they generally did not face voters in solicitation of public office, rarely made speeches, talked generally to others of their own kind, and were more likely to be observed in college quadrangles than in Parliament Square, many of them have remained relatively unknown. Perhaps the father of the group, or the patron saint, was Samuel Barnett, who founded Toynbee Hall in 1883 (although Edwin Chadwick, whose career and indeed whose personality provide an illustrative comparison with Beveridge, might be cited as a figure from an earlier period). By the late