(Page 9 of 54) - Backing into the Future: Reconceiving Policy Reform as Intertemporal Choice authored by Jacobs, Alan.

according to a range of potential criteria, such as age, income, disability, or medical need.

most, analysts have noted that social insurance schemes may entail intertemporal tradeoffs for

individuals – for instance, paying in while working for benefits in retirement – but have not

attended to the ways in which choices of financing methods can involve aggregate intertemporal

tradeoffs for societies.

While the welfare-state literature primarily focuses on the allocation of a fixed economic

pie, other fields of political-economic inquiry have viewed policy as also having important effects

on the size of the pie itself.

One strand of literature, for instance, has debated the effects of some

combination of wage-bargaining structure, central-bank independence, and government

partisanship on broad economic outcomes.

Another has focused on how alternative economic

Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s influential work, for instance, distinguishes among types of welfare capitalism

by the degree to which they decommodify labor, detaching individuals’ survival prospects from
participation in the labor market, and the degree to which they reinforce or counteract the social
stratification engendered by markets. Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism,
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). Another classic volume on welfare-state origins in
Western Europe and North America provides a typical definition of the variation of interest. The editors
divide the variation among welfare states into two dimensions: the degree of equality and the degree of
economic security that programs provide. Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer, eds., The Development
of Welfare States in Europe and America, (New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Books, 1981). The most
powerful challenges to Esping-Andersen’s typology have drawn our attention to important axes of
distribution of social rights and resource claims – especially gender lines – that traditional class-based
models ignored, but they remain equally focused on processes of allocation across groups. Ann Shola
Orloff, "Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and
Welfare States," American Sociological Review 58, no. 3 (1993); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and
Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1992).

A focus on matters of allocation has also been central to more mainstream political-economy work.

Debates over trade openness, for instance, have paid close attention to its distributive effects. See the
review of the trade literature and the research agenda put forward in James E. Alt et al., "The Political
Economy of International Trade: Enduring Puzzles and an Agenda for Inquiry," Comparative Political
Studies 29, no. 6 (1996). See also Jeffry Frieden, "Invested Interests: National Economic Policies in a
World of Global Finance," International Organization 45, no. 4 (1991); Ronald Rogowski, "Political
Cleavages and Changing Exposure to Trade," American Political Science Review 81, no. 4 (1987). The
study of taxation has largely been focused on its incidence, Sven Steinmo, Taxation and Democracy:
Swedish, British, and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State, (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993). See also Carolyn Weber and Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the
Western World, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). More recently, see Sven Steinmo and Duane
Swank, "The New Political Economy of Taxation in Advanced Capitalist Democracies," American Journal
of Political Science 46, no. 3 (2002). One important exception is Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Levi views tax policy choices, in part, as a tradeoff
between current and future revenue maximization.

Lars Calmfors and John Driffill, "Bargaining Structure, Corporatism and Macroeconomic Performance,"

Economic Policy 6, no. April (1988); David R. Cameron, "Social Democracy, Corporatism, Labour