Sublime

Those that thrive will have figured out how to make governments manage “free” goods in ways that are both sustainable and equitable.

Sovereignty will be commercialized rather than predatory. Governments will be obliged by the force of competition to set policies to appeal to those of their customers who make the greatest contributions to economic well-being, not to those who contribute little or whose economic contributions are negative.

after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs.

It is dangerous to trust our future to market forces, because these forces do what’s good for the market rather than what’s good for humankind or for the world. The hand of the market is blind as well as invisible, and left to its own devices it may fail to do anything at all about the threat of global warming or the dangerous potential of artifici

The neoliberal reforms we have witnessed over the past decades are no doubt pernicious. The downfall of the welfare state, however, is due not only to neoliberal ideology but also to the general reliance on the generation of capital wealth, which makes the welfare state hostage to economic crises.

The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the less government does, the less it takes risks and manages, the less capacity it develops and the more boring it is to work for.

In our judgment, the opposite is happening today. Information technology is raising earnings opportunities for the skilled and undermining institutions that operate at a large scale, including the nation-state.

Rather than aiming to predict and control the economy’s behaviour, says Eric Beinhocker, a leading thinker in this field, economists should ‘think of policy as an adapting portfolio of experiments that helps to shape the evolution of the economy and society over time’. It’s an approach that aims to mimic the process of natural selection, often summ