In the late 1960s, as a doctoral student at Cornell University, I read Vladimir Rys's pioneering seminal essay published in 1964 on the application of macro-sociological factor analysis to social security and it significantly influenced my future research and career. Under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council, in the summer of 1976, I took 20 doctoral students, half from the US and half from Latin America, to an Inter-American training seminar held in Mexico City on the application of social sciences techniques to social security. Rys's analysis of internal and external variables influencing the inception and evolution of social security, which at the time had generated an international debate, was a central topic of stimulating discussions in the said seminar. My first book on social security published in the US was inspired by Rys. Relying on his analysis of pressure groups and the role of the state in social security inception, I developed a taxonomy for Latin America to show how multiple social insurance funds segmented along occupational lines had induced stratification, and used Rys's factor analysis to measure the resulting social security inequality in the region (Mesa-Lago, 1978). And now we are members of the Editorial Consultant Board of the International Social Security Review. Four decades after our first virtual encounter, he continues to be a master in the field and it is an honour to write this foreword to his book Reinventing Social Security Worldwide: Back to Essentials.

The book is an excellent, sophisticated and well-integrated compendium of many important topics in the field, a useful review of the literature, an update of the author's previous contribution on the application of macro-sociological factor analysis to social security, and a proposal for reinventing social security in order to save it. Rys's main thesis and goal is to ‘preserve social insurance as the basic social security technique, conceived in its original form as a contract between the individual and society’ (p 2), by reinforcing this tool of social protection, adapting it to current needs and financial-political possibilities, and using it to confront the adverse social effects of the current global economic crisis.