After a long and distinguished career studying inequality in Britain and North America and then the development of publicly funded programs to mitigate economic and social risk, Lindert has now produced a masterly synthesis detailing the scope and effectiveness of social spending programs across the globe—at least for those nations with sufficient data to permit analysis. Making Social Spending Work has three aims, two historical and one squarely in the realm of political economy. The political-economy arguments that propel his quantitative investigation and shape the narrative arc of the book culminate in several chapters offering advice to national policymakers about immigration, pension reform, et al. Such matters are hardly the stuff usually reviewed in these pages. Historians, however, would be remiss to overlook this book. Lindert offers an impressive example of how the methods of the historian, and the historical record itself, might usefully contribute to decision making about the...

You do not currently have access to this content.