After a long and distinguished career studying inequality in Britain and North America and then the development of publicly funded programs to mitigate economic and social risk, Lindert has now produced a masterly synthesis detailing the scope and effectiveness of social spending programs across the globe—at least for those nations with sufficient data to permit analysis. Making Social Spending Work has three aims, two historical and one squarely in the realm of political economy. The political-economy arguments that propel his quantitative investigation and shape the narrative arc of the book culminate in several chapters offering advice to national policymakers about immigration, pension reform, et al. Such matters are hardly the stuff usually reviewed in these pages. Historians, however, would be remiss to overlook this book. Lindert offers an impressive example of how the methods of the historian, and the historical record itself, might usefully contribute to decision making about the enormously complex, and politically fraught, issues concerning the allocation of, and payment for, risk-smoothing schemes of many kinds. To put it succinctly, history is Lindert’s guide for thinking about what types of social investment are worth making, who should pay for them, and who should reap the rewards.Lindert begins by documenting a dizzying array of data about the “long rise” of social spending programs, from their modest beginnings as poor relief in northwest Europe in the early modern period to their contemporary global advance. He asks why tax-sponsored spending on public welfare and human-capital investments took so long to emerge in a world characterized by high risk and considerable under-investment in human capacity. His answer centers squarely on two factors: (1) the slowness with which many parts of the world developed the fiscal capacity to engage in social spending or redistribution schemes and (2) the lack of political will to either pay for public education or build social safety nets. Though not identical in every case, the record certainly suggests that the expansion of public spending largely followed the increasing popularization of the vote. The proliferation of middle-class voters across the nineteenth century contributed to a greater willingness to provide public education, especially in the former British colonies of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. A greater commitment to support for the poor followed only after “lower-income groups themselves were given a voice, in the early 20th c. (41).”Lindert’s finding that almost every nation has systematically under-invested in early education relative to the high gains historically demonstrated by doing so is consistent with his claim that political will is often the bottleneck. After all, no matter how broadly the franchise might extend, it never encompasses the young. Indeed, after early gains in social spending—aligned with extensions of the franchise—throughout the course of the nineteenth century, Lindert observes “a long mission shift in social spending, toward support for the powerful and the elderly, at the expense of assisting the young and the poor (13).” He laments, convincingly, that this mission shift has largely been responsible for limiting the extent of pro-growth and pro-equality benefits of social spending.To reach this conclusion, Lindert not only assembles data to describe the global trajectory of social spending—by total, by share of public expenditure, and by program category; he also investigates the economic impact of such spending on growth (measured exclusively as gdp), educational attainment, work effort, and within-country distributional outcomes. The section dedicated to assessing the effect of social-spending programs may be the shortest of the book, but it is also the book’s true heart. Policymakers and members of the public alike hold strong convictions about such effects, ranging from those who perceive public spending as supplanting more productive economic activity to those who view social support as both a moral obligation and an economic necessity for prosperity and growth. Clearly, Lindert has his own priorities, likely propelling him into this line of research. Nonetheless, he asks that we give serious weight to what the historical record can tell us before committing to one policy prescription over another.In short, his analysis finds “no negative relationship, and arguably a positive relationship, between the size of overall government and either the level or the growth of GDP (159).” Although we might quibble about his exclusive reliance on gdp as the sole metric for assessing economic performance and for comparing nations, the broad consistency between that metric and achievements in education and health offers reassurance that his exercise is not fatally flawed. Likewise, to his credit, when wrestling with the thorny problem of distilling causal forces mostly from data correlations, he admits that for some issues, correlations are likely to be the best evidence available. What he can show robustly is that substantial social spending has not been correlated with either poor performance or slow growth.Given that the burdens of dependency and economic risk were realities long before the Industrial Revolution or the expansion of global markets in the modern era (4), Lindert, like many other historians, asks Why did the emergence of publicly organized and collectively defrayed investments in education, health, and consumption smoothing take so long? The impact that such programs, once instituted, had on a variety of important outcomes is equally of interest. What we should do with that information may not typically be the concern of historians per se, but it calls out for everyone’s attention more broadly. Lindert’s book offers a comprehensive account of the growth in social spending throughout the last two centuries in many parts of the world, what nutured it, what waylaid it, and how it changed lives, most often for the better.