Any society can propose a minimal set of circumstances such that persons who are disadvantaged should be compensated. This will lead to policies which equalize opportunities, if not entirely, then at least to a degree.

In the United States, ’welfare‘ and the politics of welfare – cash assistance for families, generally female-headed single-parent families with children – have been treated as a separable realm of policy, and too often as synonymous with all of anti-poverty policy. 

There exists a widespread conviction that pension protection, along with many other social benefits, is slowly being eroded as responsibility for insurance and the associated costs are shifted steadily from government and employers to individual citizens and their family members.

But was there really a ‘golden age’ of pension protection? If so, what are the causes that undermined these guarantees, and what are the policy parameters and defining characteristics that have shaped pension policies during the last couple of decades?

This report is intended to provide both a record and a critical assessment of the third workshop of the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society’s programme on The Social Contract Revisited: The Modern Welfare State. The workshop was held in Oxford on 23^rd to 25^th April 2008.