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 economyand 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 thesocial 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.

Part 1: Introduction; 1 Anton Hemerijck: Social Investment and its Critics; Part 2: Limits to Social Investment; 2 Brian Nolan: Social Investment: the Thin Line Between Evidence Based Research and Political Advocacy; 3 Jean-Claude Barbier: 'Social Investment': With or Against Social Protection?; 4 Chiara Saraceno: Family Relationships and Gender Equality in the Social Investment Discourse: A Too Reduced View?; 5 Giuliano Bonoli, Bea Cantillon, and Wim Van Lancker: Social Investment and the Matthew Effect: Limits to a Strategy; 6 Daniel Mertens: The 'New Welfare State' Under Fiscal Strain: Austerity Gridlocks and the Privatization of Risk; Part 3: Social Investment Endowment and Extensions; 7 Lane Kenworthy: Enabling Social Policy; 8 Anne Wren: Social Investment and the Service Economy Trilemma; 9 Gunther Schmid: Towards Employment Insurance?; 10 Margarita Leon: Social Investment and Childcare Expansion: A Perfect Match?; 11 Verena Drabing and Moira Nelson: Addressing Human Capital Risks and the Role of Institutional Complementarities; 12 Charles Sabel, Jonathan Zeitlin, and Sigrid Quack: Capacitating Services and the Bottom-Up Approach to Social Investment; 13 Nathalie Morel and Joakim Palme: A Normative Foundation for the Social Investment Approach?; Part 4: Social Investment Assessment: Conceptualization and Methods; 14 Brian Burgoon: Practical Pluralism in the Empirical Study of Social Investment: Examples from Active Labor Market Policy; 15 Iain Begg: Social Investment and its Discount Rate; 16 Johan De Deken: Conceptualising and Measuring Social Investment; 17 Gerlinde Verbist: Measuring Social Investment Returns: Do Publicly Provided Services Enhance Social Inclusion?; Part 5: Comparative Social Investment Experience; 18 Jane Jenson: Developing and Spreading a Social Investment Perspective: The World Bank and the OECD Compared; 19 Kees van Kersbergen and Jonas Kraft: De-Universalization and Selective Social Investment in Scandinavia?; 20 Martin Seeleib-Kaiser: The Truncated German Social Investment Turn; 21 Menno Soentken, Franca van Hooren and Deborah Rice: The Impact of Social Investment Reforms on Income and Activation in the Netherlands; 22 Rory O'Donnell and Damian Thomas: Ireland: the Evolving Tensions Between Austerity, Welfare Expansion and Targeted Social Investment; 23 Alain Noel: Social Investment in a Federal Welfare State: The Quebec Experience; 24 Timo Fleckenstein and Soohyun Christine Lee: A Social Investment Turn in East Asia? South Korea in Comparative Perspective; 25 Johan Sandberg and Moira Nelson: Social Investment in Latin America; 26 Yuri Kazepov and Costanzo Ranci: Why No Social Investment in Italy: Timing, Austerity, and Macro-level Matthew Effects; Part 6: EU Social Investment Advocacy; 27 Evelyn Astor, Lieve Fransen, Marc Vothknecht: Social Investment for a Cohesive and Competitive European Union; 28 Sonja Bekker: Can European Socio-Economic Governance be Social Investment Proof?; 29 Frank Vandenbroucke: Social Investment as a Policy Platform: A European Argument; 30 Maurizio Ferrera: Accelerator or Brake? The EU and the Difficult Politics of Social Investment; Part 7: The Politics of Social Investment; 31 Silja Hausermann and Bruno Palier: The Politics of Social Investment: Policy Legacies and Class Coalitions; 32 John Myles: Three Challenges for the Social Investment Strategy: Investing in the Future, Taxes, and the Millennials; 33 Marius R. Busemeyer: Public Opinion and the Politics of Social Investment; 34 Colin Crouch: Social Investment, Social Democracy, Neoliberalism, and Xenophobia; Part 8: Conclusion; 35 Anton Hemerijck: The Uses of Affordable Social Investment