Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age

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

And so today's consumer power is a modern-day Janus. Looking in one direction, it allows consumers to benefit from lower prices and better products in many areas of their lives. But it also looks in the opposite direction as consumers exert pressure and trigger instability on themselves in their guise as workers. As such, consumers fuel an untenabl

Thus state intervention came to be discredited by a value proposition that was no longer aligned with individual aspirations. The laissez-faire approach was never attractive: it deprived the poor and even the middle class of access to affordable essential services. But the interventionist counter-offer ended up looking not that attractive, either:

Another trait of a thalassocracy is that, as always with strategic positioning, trade-offs are essential[297]. Most old thalassocracies mastered the sea because they didn’t have much land to defend. Conversely, most countries with vast swaths of land had a hard time competing on the sea, because they lacked the focus and cohesiveness that made it p

This explains why many young people, after having worked for the French government for the inaugural years of their careers, leave to join the private sector. For them, something has been lost along the way. There was a time when you could make a difference by working for the government. Now it appears the action is taking place elsewhere, far from

Obviously Reich’s influence went way beyond just me. Alongside other authors such as Anthony Giddens[411] and Jeremy Rifkin[412], he was instrumental in crafting the message of a new generation of progressive leaders that the era of the steady, lifelong job was over. In a more global and unstable world, lifelong education was the new key to providi

My interest in that “information superhighway” eventually led me to specialize in technology. From 1996 onwards I studied telecommunications, electronics, and computer science. I was fortunate enough to access the Internet with a broadband connection when most of the world was still stuck with 56k modems.

My view is that such a cooperative model (call it a union, a guild, or a federation) is bound to rise in the future as the most effective way to empower workers in the Entrepreneurial Age. But a paradigm shift is needed in terms of what the goals are and what kind of methods and tools should be used by those trade unions of the Entrepreneurial Age.

One issue with technology is what I have previously called “downward augmentation”: the fact that technology compensates for a lack of skills when executing many tasks. The more technology there is, the less educated you need to be to provide high quality services in a more productive way. For