Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age

All in all, technology doesn’t make jobs irrelevant—far from it, as suggested by the uninterrupted growth of proximity services in expanding urban areas.

But from the 1970s onward, power shifted. Households now invested their savings through large and powerful intermediaries such as pension funds and mutual funds. The rules that had been set up to protect individual savers against the greed or incompetence of corporate executives were now leveraged by professional agents with billions of dollars of

The spread and exploitation of new technologies depends on the construction of relevant networked infrastructure. And bubbles are often the only way to weave the network together before the investments pay off. It’s in the nature of infrastructures to be all or nothing, and bubbles allow capital gains to replace potential dividends as the bits are

For me, this is all a huge disappointment. I was brought to technology by the extraordinary optimism that buoyed the Western world back in the 1990s. And I think it’s become urgent to reconnect with this optimism as threats to our way of life are looming from so many directions. This is as much a challenge for Western governments as it is for the t

Furthermore, if the Great Safety Net 2.0, that of the twenty-first century, is imagined in China rather than in the Western world, Western nations might be the last to embrace it. More likely it will be deployed in other countries, those best capable of leapfrogging, before it’s replicated in Europe and the US (if at all). And as a Great Safety Net

The intermittent nature of today’s careers creates an unprecedented set of problems for social insurance. Such mechanisms that were designed for linear career paths are ill-fitted to respond to the needs of individuals whose working lives have become increasingly diverse, discontinuous and multiform. Because traditional social insurance is often li

When I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, the cardinal value of the middle class was stability. Most people had a fixed place in the world and defined themselves through what they were doing in life. As for today, being part of the middle class looks more like the main character in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike: laboring during the day as a constructi

In the Entrepreneurial Age, it takes focus and clear strategic positioning for certain countries such as the US, China, Israel[300] and Estonia[301] to prosper in an economy driven by the multitude. Meanwhile other countries are still competing in a lesser league because they remain trapped in their focus on legacy industries such as tourism and ag

Today is not about big, pyramidal organizations seeking supply-side economies of scale to mass-produce standardized goods and services for mass consumption. It is about agile, innovative firms obsessed with using technology-driven network effects to produce an exceptional experience at a large scale.

Thanks to cheap steel and a whole set of new institutions, the economy entered a phase of globalization. Capital was also deployed to produce, transport and distribute electricity, a new form of energy that would later lift production and consumption up to an even larger scale.