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B. A. Searle (2008), Well-Being: In Search of a Good Life? Bristol: The Policy Press. £55.00, pp. 198, hbk.

Lynch’s fact-finding strategy in these chapters is certainly helpful in establishing precise values for the ENSR and in raising additional theoretical puzzles. But it might have been criticised for being overly reliant on aggregate macro-quantitative indicators or, more precisely, ratios between such indicators. Commendably, therefore, the author supplements this early analysis with three rigorous chapter-length studies of family allowances, unemployment benefits and pensions in two countries: Italy and the Netherlands. These case studies, too, are admirably executed, and they provide a wealth of policy detail and historical background to back up the book’s general claims in both cases. Not surprisingly perhaps, the highly patronage-ridden and tax-evading case of Italy is where the theory appears to work best. Italy is placed on one extreme of both Lynch’s empirical scale (third-highest ENSR value) and her theoretical scale (strongly occupationalist/particularistic). Picking the Netherlands as a second case study is somewhat more idiosyncratic, however. The Netherlands resembled Italy until the Second World War, after which a more programmatic model of electoral competition led to more citizenship-based, and less elderly oriented, welfare policies. Today, the Dutch regime is a middle-of-the-pack hybrid on both Lynch’s ENSR scale and on her theoretical continuum. In other words, these two case studies help to illustrate the key role of the second, post-War, juncture in diverging the Dutch from the Italian regime. But they convey little additional information about the origins of the least elderly oriented social policy regimes, as none of these countries – a set including all Scandinavian and all Anglo-Saxon countries except the USA – is covered. For future empirical tests of Lynch’s general theory, quantitative and/or qualitative comparative analyses on the entire OECD sample might therefore be more desirable, and they would be equally feasible. In sum, Julia Lynch has made an unusually creative and insightful contribution to comparative social policy theory. The great virtue of Age in the Welfare State is that it succeeds in answering all three of its major research questions in a robust, systematic and thoughtprovoking way. The book’s main concern, public policy age bias, is of ever-growing relevance to sociologists, political scientists and economists as well, not just because of the accelerated population aging affecting most OECD countries today, but also because such bias is likely to have significant repercussions for variables such as labour market participation, fertility and family planning, voting behaviour, and skills and human capital formation. In addition, this book is highly recommended for anyone interested in the interplay of liberal democracy and public policy, in modes of historical-institutional explanation, and in positive and normative theories of intergenerational justice.