This book explains why the U.S. welfare state does less than other Western welfare states to help people in need. Combining a state-of-the-art account of recent research on how political institutions, class politics, and racial divisions shape public policy with a close analysis of four periods of welfare state expansion and contraction, Noble shows how deeply-rooted structural, institutional, and organizational factors limit the possibilities for change, and suggests what social reformers might do about it.

Charles Noble is Professor of Political Science at California State University at Long Beach. He is the author of Liberalism at Work: The Rise and Fall of OSHA, (1989).