ABSTRACT
Social insurance, cornerstone of the social democratic state, is more than one hundred years old and is fast being overtaken by the effects of change. Some of those changes, especially in the labour market and including unemployment, are themselves partly the result of social insurance. Others, including breakdown of the traditional family, are not. Either way social insurance cannot stop the resulting poverty. On the contrary, insofar as it adds to unemployment, it has itself become an engine of poverty.
