Risk Trust and Welfare

Theoretical discussion and empirical evidence on the way people think about, and cope with, the risks and uncertainties of late 1990s life are collected here. The national surveys cover areas ranging from lone parenthood to medicine, from house purchase to long term care, from personal finance to the welfare state. People's confidence in their capacity to cope with uncertainty is closely related to social class, gender and access to support networks. Policies that assume that people are self interested rational actors are likely to produce unsatisfactory results and to damage the essential social capital of trust.