The case for Danish welfare

APAPER PUBLISHED by three economists in early 2015 came to a hard-nosed conclusion. It looked at what had caused a surge in employment in America over the previous year. The jobs boom coincided with a cold-hearted Republican reform to make unemployment benefits less generous. The authors demonstrated, convincingly, that the one had caused the other, with the benefit cut leading to the creation of 1.8m extra jobs in 2014—about two-thirds of the total.