According to Anthony Giddens, the state of social investment was to be the third way between neoliberalism and the post-war welfare state, the quintessence of a future-oriented approach in which the state becomes an entrepreneur. In this concept, state expenditures are perceived as a form of investment in human capital and understood as positive prosperity. The implementation of the state of social investment entails the phenomenon of citizenship of responsible risk recipients. In the literature on social investments, the reflection is repeated that this model is the result of the need to respond to the radically changed economic and social order, including the challenges of a globalized knowledge-based economy. The model encourages active participation in the search for solutions for social structural changes, such as aging population, changing the family model or the labour market. Despite the fact that the social investment model is based on the free market perceived as the most suitable for the organisation of societies, this is no longer the so-called inexorable market. It emphasizes the need for government intervention and targeting market forces to improve both economic and social performance. The aim of the article is to verify the thesis about the investment paradigm of social policy between free-market mechanisms and the welfare state, two extremely different interpretations of contemporary socioeconomic reality.