keep insecurity at bay—at the price of distorting the supposedly neutral workings of the labor market. The remarkable stability of continental societies which had experienced bloody turbulence and civil war only a few years before casts a favorable light upon the European model. Moreover, whereas the British and American economies have been ravaged by the financial crisis of 2008, with well over 16% of the American work force officially unemployed or no longer seeking work at the time of writing (February 2010), Germany and France have weathered the storm with a far lower level of human suffering and economic exclusion.
By protecting ‘good’ jobs at the price of failing to create more low-paying ones, France, Germany and other continental welfare states have made a deliberate choice. In the US and the UK, beginning in the 1970s, low-wage and insecure jobs began to replace the more stable employment of the boom years. Today, a young person might consider himself fortunate to find employment, at minimum wage and with no benefits, in Pizza Hut, Tesco or Walmart. Such openings are less easily come by in France or Germany. But who is to say, and on precisely what grounds, that someone is better off working for low wages at Walmart than she is taking unemployment pay on the European model? Most people would rather have work, to be sure. But at any price?
The priorities of the traditional state were defense, public order, the prevention of epidemics and the aversion of mass discontent. But following World War II, and peaking around 1980, social expenditure became the main budgetary responsibility for modern states. By 1988, with the notable exception of the United States, all the major developed countries were devoting more resources to welfare, broadly conceived, than to anything else. Understandably enough, taxes also rose sharply in these years.
For anyone old enough to remember what had gone before, this crescendo of social expenditure and welfare provision must have seemed little short of miraculous. The late Ralf Dahrendorf, an Anglo-German political scientist well placed to appreciate the scale of the changes he had seen in his lifetime, wrote of those optimistic years that “[i]n many respects the social democratic consensus signifies the greatest progress which history has seen so far. Never before have so many people had so many life chances.” 11
He was not mistaken. Not only did social democrats and welfare governments sustain full employment for nearly three decades, they also maintained growth rates more than competitive with those of the untrammeled market economies of the past. And on the back of these economic successes they introduced radically disjunctive social changes that came to seem, within a short span of years, quite normal. When Lyndon Johnson spoke of building a ‘great society’ on the basis of massive public expenditure on a variety of government-supported programs and agencies, few objected and fewer still thought the proposition odd.
By the early ’70s it would have appeared unthinkable to contemplate unraveling the social services, welfare provisions, state-funded cultural and educational resources and much else that people had come to take for granted. To be sure, there were those who pointed to a likely imbalance between public income and expenditure as the pension bills grew and the baby boom generation aged. The institutional costs of legislating social justice in so many spheres of human activity were inevitably considerable: access to higher education, public provision of legal aid to the indigent and cultural subsidies for the arts did not come free. Moreover, as the postwar boom wound down and endemic unemployment once again became a serious concern, the tax base of the welfare states appeared more fragile.
These were all legitimate reasons for anxiety in the waning years of the ‘great society’ era. But while they account for a certain loss of confidence on the part of the
By protecting ‘good’ jobs at the price of failing to create more low-paying ones, France, Germany and other continental welfare states have made a deliberate choice. In the US and the UK, beginning in the 1970s, low-wage and insecure jobs began to replace the more stable employment of the boom years. Today, a young person might consider himself fortunate to find employment, at minimum wage and with no benefits, in Pizza Hut, Tesco or Walmart. Such openings are less easily come by in France or Germany. But who is to say, and on precisely what grounds, that someone is better off working for low wages at Walmart than she is taking unemployment pay on the European model? Most people would rather have work, to be sure. But at any price?
The priorities of the traditional state were defense, public order, the prevention of epidemics and the aversion of mass discontent. But following World War II, and peaking around 1980, social expenditure became the main budgetary responsibility for modern states. By 1988, with the notable exception of the United States, all the major developed countries were devoting more resources to welfare, broadly conceived, than to anything else. Understandably enough, taxes also rose sharply in these years.
For anyone old enough to remember what had gone before, this crescendo of social expenditure and welfare provision must have seemed little short of miraculous. The late Ralf Dahrendorf, an Anglo-German political scientist well placed to appreciate the scale of the changes he had seen in his lifetime, wrote of those optimistic years that “[i]n many respects the social democratic consensus signifies the greatest progress which history has seen so far. Never before have so many people had so many life chances.” 11
He was not mistaken. Not only did social democrats and welfare governments sustain full employment for nearly three decades, they also maintained growth rates more than competitive with those of the untrammeled market economies of the past. And on the back of these economic successes they introduced radically disjunctive social changes that came to seem, within a short span of years, quite normal. When Lyndon Johnson spoke of building a ‘great society’ on the basis of massive public expenditure on a variety of government-supported programs and agencies, few objected and fewer still thought the proposition odd.
By the early ’70s it would have appeared unthinkable to contemplate unraveling the social services, welfare provisions, state-funded cultural and educational resources and much else that people had come to take for granted. To be sure, there were those who pointed to a likely imbalance between public income and expenditure as the pension bills grew and the baby boom generation aged. The institutional costs of legislating social justice in so many spheres of human activity were inevitably considerable: access to higher education, public provision of legal aid to the indigent and cultural subsidies for the arts did not come free. Moreover, as the postwar boom wound down and endemic unemployment once again became a serious concern, the tax base of the welfare states appeared more fragile.
These were all legitimate reasons for anxiety in the waning years of the ‘great society’ era. But while they account for a certain loss of confidence on the part of the
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