Why We Need the Welfare State

One of the major historical rationales for the welfare state has been equalizing living standards between similar families with different numbers of workers and dependents. Around the 1970s, this rationale began to fall out of the welfare state discourse, and these days you rarely hear anyone talk about it.

This is a shame, because the horizontal equality case for the welfare state is extremely strong and also helps explain why the welfare state should feature universal benefits rather than means-tested benefits.

To help communicate this argument for the welfare state, I asked Jon White to recreate an old welfare state diagram from 1940s Switzerland.

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