Lane Kenworthy hopes to send the nation down the path toward a social-democratic state. Such a state, not unlike the ones in Scandinavia, will allow more people to escape from poverty. It will expand government tax receipts to create larger and more inclusive social programs. Kenworthy suggests, among many other things, universal health insurance, paid parental leave, expanded access to unemployment compensation, an increase in the statutory minimum wage, an increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit level, and, even more ambitiously, making the government the employer of last resort.

This book provides a primer on how to reach those results. It contains a series of ingenious arguments showing that social democracy and the American political tradition are not incompatible. While following its own historical path and respecting its own traditions, America will ultimately produce an “array of social programs” that “will increasingly come to resemble those of the Nordic countries” (p. 8). The object of the book, therefore, is to offer “an evidence-based case for the desirability and feasibility of an expanded government role in providing economic security, enhancing opportunity, and ensuring rising living standards in the United States” (p. 15).

Kenworthy writes in the straightforward, easy-to-grasp manner of someone trying to reach a large audience. The simplicity is, however, only surface deep. In fact, he is more of an academic social scientist than he is a pamphleteer. He delves deeply into Gøsta Esping–Andersen’s work on the international aspects of welfare capitalism and, in general, pays close attention to the literature on the comparative welfare state. He employs sophisticated quantitative techniques to display his data. To illustrate that government revenues have grown at about the same rate as the gross domestic product per capita and, hence, to show that increasing tax rates do not necessarily impede economic growth, Kenworthy provides a figure that contains two graphs. They show a steady pattern of growth of government revenues and gross domestic product per capita over time. The construction of these graphs, with their simple message, is far from straightforward. Government revenues come from all levels of government, and the line that he fits to the government revenue data is a “loess curve.” GDP per capita is expressed as a “natural log of inflation-adjusted GDP per capita.” The line that he fits to GDP per capita is “a linear regression line” that represents “a constant rate of economic growth” (all quotations p. 83).

In other words, unlike many of his colleagues, Kenworthy is content to sacrifice his method to his message, even though he more than holds his own as a methodologist.

The book looks at big changes over long periods of time. Although it was written before the election of Donald Trump, the results of the 2016 election cast the book in a slightly different light. At least on the surface level, a social-democratic state appears as elusive as ever. Kenworthy urges us to focus on the long run. Of course, elections do matter in the short run and maybe even in the long run. For example, the author points to Medicaid as an enduring social program that has enjoyed considerable expansion in the last 30 years. The growth of Medicaid indicates America’s fundamental willingness to accept expanding social-welfare programs. Maybe so, but in the short run the program faces considerable pressure from the Republican Congress and the White House to change its basic design and become a more permissive state-run program of health insurance for the indigent. That short-run change might have permanent effects and make Medicaid a stop along the road to a more conservative, more market-oriented America, rather than a social democracy.

In general, Kenworthy proposes a long list of reforms that would bring America closer to a social-democratic state. He is more interested in showing that such programs are not antithetical to American tradition than he is in specifying the details of those programs. But sometimes those details matter, as in his recommendation of a universal health insurance program based loosely on Medicare. Such a suggestion begs many public policy questions. Should the new health insurance law more closely resemble Medicare as it was passed in 1965, or the quite different program passed in 2004 to provide Medicare beneficiaries with prescription drug coverage? These sorts of questions go to the very nature of the American welfare state and, at least in my opinion, demand some attention.

Despite his insistence on a long-run perspective and desire to not get bogged down in policy details, Kenworthy has little trouble accepting the historical judgments that Americans appear to have made. The labor union movement, he admits, is currently moribund, but he parts company with other progressives who believe we must somehow reverse this outcome. Unions, like steel mills, are not poised to make a recovery anytime soon. He sees little possibility of a guaranteed annual income but accepts the utility of the programs we have, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and Social Security. He keeps wishful thinking to a minimum and spends as much time debunking proposals from the Left as he does critiquing arguments from the Right.

Still, accepting Kenworthy’s arguments requires a certain suspension of disbelief in the age of Donald Trump and Paul Ryan. One has to believe that long-term trends outweigh short-term variations and that, as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama believed and Kenworthy quotes in the front matter of the book, the “moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.” For people who share that belief, Social Democratic America makes an indispensible contribution to the social policy literature.