Welfare is a coming-of-age novel about one high school boy against the world, the system, and adulthood. Leaving the comfort of his unloving father's home, squatting on couches of friends, the anti-hero of Welfare smokes and drinks and avoids all responsibility until freedom appears

The welfare state has been under attack for decades, but now more than ever there is a need for strong social protection systems—the best tools we have to combat inequality, support social justice, and even improve economic performance. In this book, José Antonio Ocampo and Joseph E. Stiglitz bring together distinguished contributors to examine the global variations of social programs and make the case for a redesigned twenty-first-century welfare state. The Welfare State Revisited takes on major debates about social well-being, considering the merits of universal versus targeted policies; responses to market failures; integrating welfare and economic development; and how welfare states around the world have changed since the neoliberal turn. Contributors offer prescriptions for how to respond to the demands generated by demographic changes, the changing role of the family, new features of labor markets, the challenges of aging societies, and technological change. They consider how strengthening or weakening social protection programs affects inequality, suggesting ways to facilitate the spread of effective welfare states throughout the world, especially in developing countries. Presenting new insights into the functions the welfare state can fulfill and how to design a more efficient and more equitable system, The Welfare State Revisited is essential reading on the most discussed issues in social welfare today.

This text offers a clear explanation of policy analysis. SOCIAL WELFARE: POLICY AND ANALYSIS, Third Edition, shows students how to apply the methods and processes of policy analysis to current American welfare programs. The description of welfare programs provides a basic introduction to the field and the explanations of how the programs have developed make them more understandable to social welfare students.

Based on ten years of research, the book follows individuals and families as they apply for and live on public aid and eventually leave the system. Rank's chronicle of their day-to-day experiences reveals the many sacrifices and crises that tax ordinary people in extraordinary ways. Beginning with a history of welfare from Roosevelt to Clinton, he focuses on AFDC and the Food Stamp program. He then describes the backgrounds of the recipients, their hopes for the future and attitudes toward welfare, their daily routines and problems, their work behavior, and the effect of welfare on family dynamics. Living on the Edge reveals the experiences of female-headed families, married couples, single men and women, and the elderly.

Exploring the lived realities of both poverty and prosperity in the UK, this book examines the material and symbolic significance of welfare austerity and its implications for social citizenship and inequality. The book offers a rare and vivid insight into the everyday lives, attitudes and behaviours of the rich as well as the poor, demonstrating how those marginalised and validated by the existing welfare system make sense of the prevailing socio-political settlement and their own position within it. Through the testimonies of both affluent and deprived citizens, the book problematises dominant policy thinking surrounding the functions and limits of welfare, examining the civic attitudes and engagements of the rich and the poor, to demonstrate how welfare austerity and rising structural inequalities secure and maintain institutional legitimacy. The book offers a timely contribution to academic and policy debates pertaining to citizenship, welfare reform and inequality.

This Very Short Introduction discusses the necessity of welfare states in modern capitalist societies. Situating social policy in an historical, sociological, and comparative perspective, David Garland brings a new understanding to familiar debates, policies, and institutions.

The welfare state is one of Britain's crowning achievements. Or is it? In this seminal book, now studied in universities in Britain and elsewhere, James Bartholomew advances the sacrilegious argument that, however well meaning its founders, the welfare state has done more harm than good. He argues that far from being the socialist utopia the post-war generation dreamed of, the welfare state has led to avoidable deaths in the NHS, falling standards in schools, permanent mass unemployment and many other unintended consequences. At a deeper level, he contends that the welfare state has caused millions to live deprived and even depraved lives, undermining the very decency and kindness which first inspired it. This landmark book changed the way many people think about the welfare state. It played a major role in the political debate that led to recent reforms. Now with a new introduction by the author assessing the value of these reforms, this classic text still shocks with the power of its arguments and the weight of its supporting evidence.

Much of today's political rhetoric decries the welfare state and our maze of government regulations. Critics hark back to a time before the state intervened so directly in citizens' lives. In The People's Welfare, William Novak refutes this vision of a stateless past by documenting America's long history of government regulation in the areas of public safety, political economy, public property, morality, and public health. Challenging the myth of American individualism, Novak recovers a distinctive nineteenth-century commitment to shared obligations and public duties in a well-regulated society. Novak explores the by-laws, ordinances, statutes, and common law restrictions that regulated almost every aspect of America's society and economy, including fire regulations, inspection and licensing rules, fair marketplace laws, the moral policing of prostitution and drunkenness, and health and sanitary codes. Based on a reading of more than one thousand court cases in addition to the leading legal and political texts of the nineteenth century, The People's Welfare demonstrates the deep roots of regulation in America and offers a startling reinterpretation of the history of American governance.

Two-thirds of UK government spending now goes on the welfare state and where the money is spent – healthcare, education, pensions, benefits – is the centre of political and public debate. Much of that debate is dominated by the myth that the population divides into those who benefit from the welfare state and those who pay into it – 'skivers' and 'strivers', 'them' and 'us'. This ground-breaking book, written by one of the UK’s leading social policy experts, uses extensive research and survey evidence to challenge that view. It shows that our complex and ever-changing lives mean that all of us rely on the welfare state throughout our lifetimes, not just a small ‘welfare-dependent’ minority. Using everyday life stories and engaging graphics, Hills clearly demonstrates how the facts are far removed from the myths. This revised edition contains fully updated data, discusses key policy changes and a new preface reflecting on the changed context after the 2015 election and Brexit vote.

Can religion cure poverty? The first book to explore the ideas about God and government behind the faith-based initiative. When the Bush administration's faith-based initiative was introduced in 2001 as the next stage of the "war on poverty," it provoked a flurry of protest for violating the church-state divide. Most critics didn't ask whether it could work. God and the Welfare State is the first book to trace the ideas behind George W. Bush's faith-based initiative from their roots in Catholic natural law theory and Dutch Calvinism to an American think tank, the Center for Public Justice. Comparing Bush's plan with the ways the same ideas have played out in Christian Democratic welfare policies in Europe, the author is skeptical that it will be an effective new way to fight poverty. But he takes the animating ideas very seriously, as they go to the heart of the relationship among religion, government, and social welfare. In the end Daly argues that these ideas—which are now entrenched in federal and state politics—are a truly radical departure from American traditions of governance. Although Bush's initiative roughly overlaps with more conventional conservative efforts to strengthen private power in economic life, it promises an unprecedented shift in the balance of power between secular and religious approaches to social problems and suggests a broader template for "faith-based governance," in which the state would have a much more limited role in social policy.