From Welfare State to Innovation State
When the new industrial working class began to organize, governments defused the threat of revolution from below by expanding political and social rights, regulating markets, erecting a welfare state, and smoothing the ups and downs of the macroeconomy. Today’s technological revolutions call for a similarly comprehensive reinvention.
PRINCETON – A specter is haunting the world economy – the specter of job-killing technology. How this challenge is met will determine the fate of the world’s market economies and democratic polities, in much the same way that Europe’s response to the rise of the socialist movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped the course of subsequent history.