The last two decades have witnessed the emergence of what some have called a new, decidedly critical “welfare consensus” in Europe and North America. Many politicians, academic observers, public policy analysts, and public and private administrators of social services have come to agree on a relatively coherent set of axioms: that the state is overburdened; that the expansion of the welfare state has hindered economic growth; that the social safety net has created an inflation of needs; that welfare bureaucracy is too big, too inefficient, and more adept at creating problems than solving them; that the sovereignty of the individual and of civil society has been eroded by the proliferation of state welfare activities; that welfare has created institutional and electoral interests that irrationally prop it up; that the entire system is over-professionalized; and that welfare promotes anti-social values.

Criticism and the ensuing retrenchment have not been directed indiscriminately at the welfare state, however. Cuts to date have targeted mostly poor relief and housing programs, but have left pensions relatively untouched. Meanwhile, welfare has been the principal object of the backlash, as social insurance has continued to grow. In fact, throughout the supposedly “anti-welfare state” 1980s, surveys showed that citizens of welfare states overwhelmingly supported the entire range of social insurances that constitute and are commonly referred to as “social security.”