The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism

What we have been discussing, up to this point, constitutes the overall social objectives that welfare states are supposed to serve. Different types of welfare regimes approach those tasks differently. Each different type of welfare regime embodies a different strategy, embedded in different institutions, internalizing different emphases among the goals and setting different standards of institutional success.

Those specific institutional objectives and standards of success, internal to the logic of each type of welfare regime, are what we turn to explore next. It is not enough simply to ask which welfare regimes produce the best results, according to our overall criteria of moral assessment. To do that would be to treat each regime as a ‘black box’, asking no questions about how exactly each welfare regime works to produce the results it does. But then we cannot be confident what credit, if any, the particular welfare regime actually deserves for any accomplishments with which it is notionally associated. To know with any confidence that welfare regimes work to achieve our social objectives, we need to know how they work. To give them any genuine credit for working, we need to know that they work as intended, foreseen and planned.

It is also important to recall (from chapter 3 above) that the mechanisms by which each particular type of welfare regime works to promote people's welfare includes primary as well as secondary, pre-government (family and market) as well as post-government components.