Okay, not quite. But the just-published Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State, which weighs in at 48 chapters and 912 pages, does cover a good bit of what we know about social policy in the world’s rich nations. Here’s what the book offers by way of answers to a few fundamental questions:

1. What is “the welfare state”? The book has chapters on the following government transfer and service programs: old-age pensions, work accident and sickness benefits, disability benefits, unemployment insurance, social assistance, health care, housing, family benefits and services, education, and labor market activation.

2. When and where did the welfare state originate? “The Elizabethan Act for the Relief for the Poor of 1601 established a national system — to be administered by parishes — for the relief of destitute children, the disabled and infirm, the unemployed and the work-shy. The Prussian Landrecht of 1794 gave the state a clear patriarchal responsibility for the poor, but it was delegated to local communities to provide social care.” Social insurance programs such as contributory pensions, work accident compensation, and sickness compensation originated in Germany under Bismarck in the 1880s. See chapter 5.

3. How large are welfare states? Government net social expenditures averaged 20% of GDP in twenty longstanding democratic countries as of the mid-2000s (this excludes education, which adds another 5%). France, Germany, Belgium, and Sweden led the way at 23-26%. At the low end were Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States at 15-17%. Note that how much governments spend on social policy depends not only on how generous the programs are but also on how many people are in need (elderly, sick, unemployed, etc.). See chapters 8, 23.

4. How generous are welfare states? Generosity consists of eligibility criteria, benefit levels, duration, and other elements. One partial but helpful measure is an average of the benefit replacement rates (the share of your former earnings that you receive) for pensions, unemployment insurance, and sick pay. As of 1995, the most recent year for which data are provided in the book, the average for eighteen countries was 60%, ranging from around 35% in the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland to just shy of 80% in Sweden, Norway, and Austria.

5. What are the most expensive welfare state programs? Pensions, health care, and education, by far. See chapters 23-25, 34.

6. When did welfare states get large? Roughly 1910 to 1980, and particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. See chapter 6.

7. Have thirty years of heightened competition, globalization, and neoliberalism decimated welfare states? No, the share of GDP going to social policy expenditures hasn’t decreased on average. Some countries have reduced the generosity of certain programs, such as pensions, unemployment insurance, sickness/disability compensation, and social assistance. But these cuts have been offset by increases in need (more elderly households, higher unemployment), rising health care costs, and new programs such as child care and other family benefits. See chapters 22, 23, 35, 38.

8. Why did the welfare state come to vary so much across the rich countries? Largely due to differences in the organization of workers and employers, in the influence of left and Christian Democratic (Catholic center-right) political parties, and in the structure of political institutions. See chapters 13-15, 40-43.

9. Have welfare states converged? Yes in certain policy areas, such as labor market activation and long-term health services, but overall very little. See chapters 23-35, 39-43.

10. What do welfare states attempt to accomplish? The principal goals are economic security and redistribution. An increasingly-prominent third aim is labor market participation and success. It’s noteworthy that Denmark and Sweden, two countries with very generous cushions, also are the biggest spenders on education, active labor market programs, and child care. See chapters 23, 30, 32, 34, 40.

11. Have welfare states enhanced economic security? Yes. See chapters 6, 24-33.

12. Have welfare states reduced poverty? Yes. See chapter 36.

13. Have welfare states reduced income inequality? Yes. See chapter 36.

14. Have welfare states increased employment or reduced it? The evidence is mixed. See chapter 37.

15. Have welfare states impeded economic growth? Here too the evidence is mixed. See chapter 37.

In early 2009 Congress and the president passed an $800 billion economic stimulus (tax cut and government spending) package. A number of analysts argued at the time that given the context — very severe downturn, interest rates already near zero, steep drop in home and stock asset values — the package was too small. Though the stimulus has helped (CBO, Blinder and Zandi), the pessimists appear to have been right: the economic recovery is languishing.

It looks very unlikely that there will be a second stimulus. This isn’t surprising. An initial stimulus that is insufficiently large risks creating (at least) three kinds of political trap:

1. Debt worry. From a post I wrote in January 2009:

Our experience in the 1930s and Japan’s in the 1990s … teach that if early stimulus efforts are too modest, they create a political trap: concern about the government debt produced by the earlier stimulus packages grows, which heightens opposition to further stimulus.

2. Perception that insufficient = ineffective. Here’s Paul Krugman in March of 2009:

Sooner or later the administration will realize that more must be done. But when it comes back for more money, will Congress go along?

Here’s the picture that scares me: It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed.

But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed…. And as a result, the recession rages on, unchecked.

3. The party-in-power’s need for an optimistic message in election season. Mark Thoma:

The administration joined in pushing the “we are poised for recovery” line because it seemed like good politics and good economics to try to create a sense of optimism. When the economy did start to recover, they could build upon this story of how the stimulus package saved the day.

But what if the economy, and employment in particular, didn’t start to recover before the election, what then? The administration suddenly finds itself in a predicament. There’s not enough time before the election to actually implement a new stimulus program and expect to see results, so they are stuck with the economy they have, an economy they promised would be boosted by the stimulus programs (…).

So the administration has little choice but to argue that the stimulus programs that it put into place have set the stage for the economy to recover, and, in fact, that recovery is already underway.

James Surowiecki:

At the same time that the rich have been pulling away from the middle class, the very rich have been pulling away from the pretty rich, and the very, very rich have been pulling away from the very rich.

The current debate over taxes takes none of this into account…. Our system sets the top bracket at three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, with a tax rate of thirty-five per cent…. This means that someone making two hundred thousand dollars a year and someone making two hundred million dollars a year pay at similar tax rates….

This makes no sense — there’s a yawning chasm between the professional and the plutocratic classes, and the tax system should reflect that. A better tax system would have more brackets, so that the super-rich pay higher rates. (The most obvious bracket to add would be a higher rate at a million dollars a year, but there’s no reason to stop there.) This would make the system fairer, since it would reflect the real stratification among high-income earners. A few extra brackets at the top could also bring in tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue.

From Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (longer version here):

Who stands to gain the most if Congress extends the middle-class [but not the top-end] Bush tax cuts: a middle-income worker or a millionaire? The millionaire….

The income tax operates as a staircase, not an elevator, so people who make $1 million a year don’t go directly to the top “floor” (i.e., to the top marginal tax rate, currently 35 percent) but instead take the “stairs,” paying tax on the first increment of taxable income at the bottom rate of 10 percent, paying tax on the next increment at 15 percent, and so on until reaching the top rate.

As a result, the 2001 tax law’s reductions in the lower tax brackets benefit not only middle-income people whose incomes fall into those lower brackets, but also people in the very highest brackets.

In fact, a family making more than $1 million will receive more than five times the tax cut benefit, in dollar terms, as a middle-class family making $50,000 to $75,000, if Congress extends the middle-class [but not the top-end] tax cuts.

From the New York Times:

If the president gets his way, in 2011 the top two income tax rates — now 33 percent and 35 percent — would revert to the levels before the Bush administration, 36 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively…. Republicans … say Mr. Obama is about to spring a big tax increase on many small-business owners who file their taxes as individuals. Analyses from the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization, show that less than 3 percent of filers with small-business income pay at the top two income tax rates, and many of those are doctors and lawyers in partnerships.

More on this from Howard Gleckman.

Read Dylan Matthews, Paul Krugman, and perhaps also this.

In the current issue of Politics and Society, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer a political explanation of the top-heavy rise in income inequality in the U.S. in recent decades. Their piece is followed by six commentaries and a response from Hacker and Pierson. The full set of papers is available online for a little while.

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, “Winner-take-all politics: public policy, political organization, and the precipitous rise of top incomes in the United States”

Fred Block and Frances Fox Piven, “Deja vu, all over again”

Andrea Brandolini, “Political economy and the mechanics of politics”

Andrea Louise Campbell, “The public’s role in winner-take-all politics”

Neil Fligstein, “Politics, the reorganization of the economy, and income inequality, 1980-2009”

Lawrence Jacobs, “Democracy and capitalism: structure, agency, and organized combat”

Lane Kenworthy, “Business political capacity and the top-heavy rise in income inequality: how large an impact?”

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, “Winner-take-all politics and political science: a response”

Here’s a summary of the lead article:

The dramatic rise in inequality in the United States over the past generation has occasioned considerable attention from economists, but strikingly little from students of American politics. This has started to change: in recent years, a small but growing body of political science research on rising inequality has challenged standard economic accounts that emphasize apolitical processes of economic change. For all the sophistication of this new scholarship, however, it too fails to provide a compelling account of the political sources and effects of rising inequality. In particular, these studies share with dominant economic accounts three weaknesses: (1) they downplay the distinctive feature of American inequality — namely, the extreme concentration of income gains at the top of the economic ladder; (2) they miss the profound role of government policy in creating this “winner-take-all” pattern; and (3) they give little attention or weight to the dramatic long-term transformation of the organizational landscape of American politics that lies behind these changes in policy. These weaknesses are interrelated, stemming ultimately from a conception of politics that emphasizes the sway (or lack thereof) of the “median voter” in electoral politics, rather than the influence of organized interests in the process of policy making. A perspective centered on organizational and policy change — one that identifies the major policy shifts that have bolstered the economic standing of those at the top and then links those shifts to concrete organizational efforts by resourceful private interests — fares much better at explaining why the American political economy has become distinctively winner-take-all.