ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concept of social learning. It shows how it might apply to the welfare state in the United States. The discipline of social learning is an empirical inquiry into how societies learn from their mistakes and how they learn to adapt to new realities. Some trends, like advances in technology and the aging of the populations in industrial societies, move in a linear fashion and can easily be tracked. But many trends show discontinuities, often sharp and abrupt. There are several theories for interpreting trends that show discontinuity. The oldest theory is that of cycles. Like the seasons, some human events seem to move in eternal cycles shifting from one extreme to the other and then back again in an endless pattern of repetition. A popular version of the theory of cycles is represented by the image of a pendulum. The Hegelian dialectic is still the most sophisticated theory of trends that change direction.
