The World in the Long Twentieth Century by Dickinson Edward Ross;

Author:Dickinson, Edward Ross;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

THE WELFARE STATE, 1950–1975

We . . . consider it Our duty to reaffirm that the remuneration of work is not something that can be left to the laws of the marketplace; nor should it be a decision left to the will of the more powerful. It must be determined in accordance with justice and equity; which means that workers must be paid a wage which allows them to live a truly human life and to fulfill their family obligations in a worthy manner. . . . Economic progress must be accompanied by a corresponding social progress, so that all classes of citizens can participate in the increased productivity. The utmost vigilance and effort is needed to ensure that social inequalities, so far from increasing, are reduced to a minimum.35

Pope John XXIII, 1961

One important facet of the project of High Modernity was the major global investment in innovation witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s. That investment in people’s minds and talents was an essential element in building what came to be called the welfare state in the wealthy, industrial societies of the North Atlantic, Japan, and Australia and New Zealand. There was never a unitary welfare state agenda or program; instead lawmakers and reformers in each country chose a distinct mix from a range of policy options in pursuit of a shared set of goals. Some welfare states focused more on planning, while others concentrated more on state ownership of infrastructure; some adopted needs-testing, while others provided more universal benefits; some relied more on regulation of markets, while others “freed” their citizens from the demands and constraints of the market economy; some created incentives for corporations to take care of their workers, while others relied more on direct state intervention—and so forth. The more liberal-democratic welfare states sought to maximize the societal space for individual responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit. The more Social Democratic welfare states sought to build societies founded on the idea of solidarity. In most of Western Europe the welfare state was built primarily by Christian Democrats who believed in individualism and markets, but also thought that societies had a duty to make sure that selfishness and materialism were sufficiently constrained that they did not compromise economic and societal efficiency—and to ensure that the Christian principle of the essential dignity of man could be concretely realized in social life broadly.36 Nevertheless, the term welfare state is useful, in part because all the welfare states actually shared four fundamental goals.

The first was to stabilize their societies, to foster social integration and inclusion, to reduce social discontent and rule out social upheavals, and thereby to reduce the attractiveness of radical alternatives—whether left or right—to the existing system. Obviously, the disaster of fascism and communism in the 1930s and 1940s was crucial in focusing minds on that goal. The second was to minimize the kinds of social and economic inefficiencies that the unpredictable risks of free markets can create. That meant above all reducing poverty and its social and economic costs (ill

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