As a country, we are on the brink of a substantial, long-term increase in social investment that will move our economy much closer to the mixed, and substantially larger public welfare models, of Canada and Western Europe.
It's my position that the arguments Chris marshaled are significant, and deserving of attention, but that they don't really show such a victory, but only the potential for it.
In Part 1, I laid out four reasons for taking this position, and argued that turning potential into reality would depend, in part, on getting a clearer picture of how spending had varied in the past, how it was projected to change, and how the US compared with other countries. I dealt with the US record in Part 1. Now it's time to compare us to other countries.
This diary is an interlude between Parts One and Two of "US Public Spending In Context", a two-part response to Chris's diary, "Long-term, Center-left Victory on Public Spending Highly Likely". While I generally agreed with Chris's reading of signs, I thought what they pointed to was merely potential. My intention was to take a closer look at US spending, past, present and future, and in comparison with other welfare states. Part One looked at US spending in its own terms, while Part Two will look at it comparatively. This interlude is intended to discuss a bit of the theoretical framework that's become increasingly common for international researchers to use.
Although attempts to analyze and categorize welfare state began as far back as the 1950s, the commonly-recognized watershed work was the 1990 book, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism by Gosta Esping-Andersen. While others have criticized his work, and more different types have been suggested, there seems to be no discarding of his basic accomplishment, only additions and revisions, whereas earlier efforts have primarily been mined for spare parts. In this diary, I'm going to focus primarily on a 2001 paper that contains a much more sophisticated re-analysis that ends up largely confirming the Three Worlds hypothesis in one sense, before exploring another sense in which two of the worlds appear to meld, leaving only two distinct worlds. I will also make some reference to other approaches. My basic perspective is that there is no one "right" model of how many "worlds" there are, but that the "Three Worlds" model is particularly useful for relating the US to how mature Western European systems work.
In 1990, Gosta Esping-Andersen published a book, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism which sought to explain the similarities of modern welfare states amidst their evident diversity. Esping-Andersen presented a three-fold theoretical construct of basic types: the conservative welfare state, typified by Germany, which aims to consolidate the existing social order and its hierarchical relations in various ways, the liberal welfare state, typified by English-speaking countries from Britain to the US and Canada to Australia and New Zealand, which aims to deal with imperfections in the market system with minimal interference to the basic system, and the social democratic welfare state, which aims to provide maximal protections for all. A good, relatively brief overview can be found in an online student paper here.
Esping-Andersen's typology can help shed significant light on current political debates, and provide a more nuanced understanding of the various different ways in which, for example, Obama's politics can be progressive in one sense, yet conservative in another.
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