In pre-industrial society, the family was the primary source of social support. It still is in much of the world. However, voters in wealthy industrial countries have been willing over the last century to mitigate the extremes of a market economy via the welfare state.
Not that this willingness is boundless. At a time of severe fiscal crisis in Sweden in the 1990s, for example, the government appointed Assar Lindbeck, a respected economist, to review the country’s social programs. He prepared a lengthy report, which he later summed up with the quip that the welfare state is a wonderful innovation of the 20th century—provided the workers are all Lutherans and the administrators are all Prussians.
The opening sentence of James Hughes’s new book, Early Intervention: How Canada’s Social Programs Can Work Better, Save...
John Richards is a former member of the Saskatchewan legislature and a professor of public policy program at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver.
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