When that happens it weakens the bonds of solidarity and in the long run erodes the "emotional citizenship" required to sustain welfare states.
Wherever you look, the bio-physical underpinnings of sustained human welfare and economic growth are becoming more fragile – whether it is climate change, ecosystem meltdown or the build-up of waste.
In the realm of ideas, all of these rationales today command new attention because of some very contemporary fears about new-wave automation and the apparent unravelling of the old social contract that used to sustain the welfare state, in the days before Benefit Street.
Recent work by Llavador, Roemer and Silvestre challenges the utilitarian assumption, and argues that sustaining human welfare at the highest possible level forever, or sustaining the growth rate of human welfare (at a fixed exogenous growth rate), are more attractive ethical choices.
They will have no realistic proposal to reduce the debt or sustain the welfare state.
Yet Sweden never quite became just another country coping with globalisation and trying to sustain a welfare state and a national manufacturing base at a time when resources were shrinking.
The first was the Gaitskellite wave where he argued, in broad agreement with Macmillan, that you could rely upon full employment and it could sustain the welfare state without socialism.
The combined economies could be more dynamic and better able to sustain high welfare and living standards.In this section A step too far Pasok and its discontents Labour pains Love in a cold climate Life under Yanukovich And for my next trick A grim tale of judges and politicians ReprintsIf Nordic union is such a good idea, why has it not already happened?
On Tuesday, for example, Andrews suggested: "We've got to ensure in the future that we're able to sustain the welfare system, otherwise we'll find ourselves in 10 or 15 years time in the situation that some of the countries in Europe are in".
How do we in today's Europe nurture a sense of national belonging - and a sense of a collective "we" strong enough to sustain generous welfare states - that is compatible not only with mass immigration but also with the postmodern individualism that has been an even more striking feature of recent decades?
In Kymlicka's words, it 'can operate to stabilize democracy and to build and sustain redistributive welfare states' (Kymlicka, p. 6).
