Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age

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

Ballooning student loans in the US are a sign of the current system's inability to meet today's challenges. Investing heavily in initial training is relevant if the goal is to settle in one particular profession. But it is poor preparation for a career during which an individual will frequently switch jobs. In addition, entering one’s working life

This virtuous circle of supply-side economies of scale and network effects explains why tech companies so easily challenge our understanding of corporate strategy. Their increasing returns to scale, a byproduct of the technology they masterfully exploit, is their true competitive advantage. With increasing returns, those companies’ large scale is s

Finally, capital is becoming a commodity. The current discussions between economists about the “global savings glut” reveal that there is too much capital to invest and too few opportunities to secure sizeable returns[173]. This may come as a surprise for entrepreneurs who rack their brains in vain trying to pitch investors who refuse to deploy cap

Entrepreneurs always play a key role in the installation period of a technological revolution. They’re the ones who seize technology as an opportunity to discover new models. This is why, according to Carlota Perez, “all installation periods are led by finance and free markets as innovation focuses on setting up the new infrastructure, letting mark

This grip of voice and exit, explained in Albert O. Hirschman’s famous framework[70], proved particularly powerful. Workers’ bargaining power led to higher wages which, in turn, led to more tax revenue to bankroll social insurance regimes and a more widespread access to capital on financial markets—all of which improved the workers’ bargaining powe

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.

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

Many industries have become battlefields because the transition to the Entrepreneurial Age has pitted licensed professionals against startups allied with the multitude and harnessing the power of amateurs workers. But professionals shouldn’t be waging a war against such a coalition[427]. Winning it would come with too high a cost for society in the