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.

Key takeaways ● The Great Safety Net 1.0 used to be built for and around the corporate world. But now our economy revolves around the networked individual: this is a Copernican revolution. ● With individuals harnessing the power of networks, it’s time to reinvent trade unions. As workers convert to the hunting way of life, bargaining becomes less a

I’m convinced unions played the most critical part in building the middle class in the past age of the automobile and mass production. Now we have to reinvent unions so that workers gain leverage in the current age of ubiquitous computing and networks. Designing policy to do so will be one of the most critical political challenges of the coming dec

Above all, it’s about truly shaping the future. Whatever the outcome of the current administration, many people expect the Democratic Party to strike a determined counter-attack, polarizing the debate on the safety net even more. Instead of looking back at the past with nostalgia, the opportunity that we must all seize together is to imagine a Grea

One of my criticisms concerns the idea that universal basic income would be simpler. It’s true that simplicity exerts a welcome fascination on tech entrepreneurs. After all, entrepreneurship is the art of making things simple. But we shouldn’t forget that the safety net is complex for a reason, namely because it must provide economic security at th

It takes time. Tech companies with an entrepreneurial approach don’t serve large markets yet. As explained by economist James Bessen[508], productivity always slows down at the beginning of a technological revolution: entrepreneurs must experiment with the technology of the day and discover the new markets that it contributes to opening. Then those

It’s easy enough to draw the Great Safety Net 2.0 on the back of a napkin. But once the overall concept becomes clear, the challenge isn’t to build the entire macro mechanism in just one round. Rather it is to invent solutions to an infinity of simple problems in fields as diverse as lifelong training, occupational licensing, housing, transportatio

is true that it is generally difficult to grow larger communities without weakening the bonds that tie everyone together. Public choice theorists have long demonstrated why special interests, when conflicting with the interests of a larger group (such as the entire middle class), tend to win in the end—namely, because it’s easier to organize a smal

It doesn’t mean that governments have no role to play—quite the contrary. But my overall impression is that we’ve witnessed a sharp reversal in who has the capacity to explore, discover, and deliver. In the past, only governments could break the constraints and pull it off at a large scale. Now it looks like governments (at least in the West) are s