This book represents an unusual collaboration between a philosopher, a political scientist, an economist and a sociologist. The preoccupation we share is with the central question, ‘What are the best institutional arrangements for promoting each of a variety of social, political and moral values which the welfare state has historically been supposed to serve?’

Investigating that in the way we have done was made possible, however, only by the painstaking work of many others who have, over the past decade and more, conducted on-going socio-economic household panel studies in the three countries we study. We should like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to their incalculable contribution to the social sciences generally. Our small study, purely parasitic upon their vast labours, merely serves as a sample of the treasure trove that waits to be discovered within those larger data sets.

Others before us – in a distinguished line running from Richard Titmuss to Gøsta Esping-Andersen – have theoretically and empirically elaborated the view that there are three distinct worlds of welfare capitalism. It is our aim to use the evidence from those panel studies to help us discover what life is ‘really like’ in each of those three worlds. The panel data are by their nature limited to a few hundred pre-coded items bearing primarily on people's socio-economic circumstances. Clearly, there are myriad aspects to life that cannot be captured by such cold statistics.