Argentina has not been able to lower its poverty rates for a decade. This decade has also been characterised by a lack of economic growth and stagnation of formal employment. Faced with this adverse context, successive governments have sought to increase social investment to make up for the insufficient creation of genuine employment and to contain the population in the face of the harmful effects of economic stagnation and inflation, but in recent years Argentina’s social investment has not played a transformative role. While it has fulfilled the central function of social containment, it has not been very effective in honouring another essential pillar of Argentine society: upward social mobility. We are convinced that significant social investment is a necessary but not sufficient goal, and that the challenge ahead is not to cut it but to redesign it to improve its quality, efficiency and equity. This spirit informs the present series of papers, which aims to understand the evolution and composition of social investment over the last 20 years to inform possible changes in social policies.