In the United States, Great Britain, Western Europe, and almost everywhere else in the developed world except Switzerland and Japan, a massive bureaucratic apparatus of state welfare has been built up since the Second World War. It has proven to be costly, inefficient, and grossly counterproductive. Everywhere, governments are desperately seeking ways to reduce the size of state welfare. Efficiency, particularly in education and health care, must be improved. Above all, an alternative is urgently needed to the inherited cradle to grave welfare approach, which multiplies unemployment, generates dependency, and creates a fractious underclass.

Self-Reliance has been written by four leading experts on welfare and social policy. Using British experience as a case study, they analyse the failings of state welfare and offer detailed proposals for reform. Specific parallels with the American situation, and implications for United States social policy, are examined in a special opening chapter by the Editor.

Professor Marsland's main chapter, "Liberating Welfare", itemises the damage done by the British welfare state to economy and the moral character of the British people. Eamonn Butler describes the radical cultural transformations required to make welfare systems work effectively. Madsen Pirie outlines a programme of systematic privatisation through which welfare provisions could become as efficient and flexible as a dynamic, modern free market society requires. Finally, Michael Bell gives a cost-benefit plan for turning over pension systems to independent suppliers, improving provision at reduced cost.

The key significance of this work for policy personnel and economists is that the authors argue for a structure that can rise gradually from the system that already exists. They propose how this can be done in spite of the likely cash limits. They offer a bold and ambitious challenge to a conventional welfare thinking that has so visibly and lamentably failed to achieve its aims.

Iti Saflaia

Self-Reliance: Reforming Welfare in Advanced Societies is available from Plymbridge Distributors Ltd, Estover, Plymouth, PL6 7PZ. All major credit cards accepted.