The postwar growth of welfare-state social transfer programs has dwarfed the earlier pioneering attempts to build comprehensive insurance programs. Social transfers have risen even faster than public education. How did that happen? A lesser part of the answer is a story of the generations that lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War. The greater part of the answer rests on the same broad social forces that were already acting in the half-century after 1880. This chapter re-introduces the three main forces of democracy, demography, income, and other social differences to give a fuller explanation of both the growth and the diversity of the movement toward welfare states.

To highlight how policy behavior has and has not changed since 1880, this chapter follows the same historical forces and same format we just followed in Chapter 16. The fuller postwar data coverage allows us to expand the inquiry, however. We can compare time periods of only three or four years, yielding more dynamic information from a 35-year span than the ten-year stretches could give for the fifty years between 1880 and 1930. Public education expenditures are also conveniently available for the 1962–1981 period, allowing more direct comparison of social budget priorities than for the pre-1930 era, for which we had to be content with counting enrolled student and teachers.

It will turn out that the same three leading actors are at center stage for the postwar era, but with altered behavior and with a fourth now sharing the stage.