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This volume provides the first study of the welfare state, under the new post-crisis austerity context and associated crisis management politics, to take stock of the limits and potential of social investment.

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The Uses of Social Investment provides the first study of the welfare state, under the new post-crisis austerity context and associated crisis management politics, to take stock of the limits and potential of social investment. It surveys the emergence, diffusion, limits, merits, and politics of social investment as the welfare policy paradigm for the 21st century, seen through the lens of the life-course contingencies of the competitive knowledge economy
and modern family-hood.

Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, the volume revisits the intellectual roots and normative foundations of social investment, surveys the criticisms that have leveled against the social investment perspective in theory and policy practice, and presents empirical evidence of social investment progress together with novel research methodologies for assessing socioeconomic ´rates of return´ on social investment. Given the progressive, admittedly uneven, diffusion of the
social investment policy priorities across the globe, the volume seeks to address the pressing political question as to whether the social investment turn is able to withstand the fiscal austerity backlash that has re-emerged in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

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[The book] is an open, honest debate about the difficulties of reforming the welfare state to deal with new risks posed by demographic and economic changes of the 21st century, and find a path between the two worse alternatives of knee-jerk austerity and the rising spectre of welfare chauvinism Vera Scépanovi, Transfer

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Anton Hemerijck is Professor of Political Science, European University Institute, Florence, and Centennial Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

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