FIRST DRAFT do not quote without authors permissions Welfare systems and social services during the systemic crisis of cognitive capitalism. Some further reflections

The purpose of this article is to show that, contrary to neoliberal belief, social welfare services and spending cannot be regarded as a cost whose funding should depend on wealth created by the private sector. Social welfare services and spending should be instead recognised as the driving force behind a development dynamics based on knowledge-intensive production and behind an economy whose main productive force is the intellectual quality of the labour force. In the first part, we shall briefly present a not ideological way to represent the relationship between public debt and private debt. In the second part, we shall present a series of stylised facts which highlight in macroeconomic and social terms the key role played by welfare state institutions in the genesis, development and reproduction of a knowledge-based economy (KBE). In the third part, these general considerations will be corroborated and explained through an international comparison between the Nordic welfare model and the neoliberal or Anglo-Saxon welfare model. This comparison reveals a strong positive correlation between the level of development of welfare state institutions and that of a knowledge-based economy while teaching us another crucial lesson for welfare policy: a low level of social and gender inequalities is an eminently favourable factor for the adoption of more advanced forms of work organisation and for the competitive ability of the economic system.