Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age

This can be seen in how conservatives keep on stressing the importance of “ownership” as the best safety net for households[97], the inflating bubble of student loans, or the excessive reliance on consumption driven by credit card debt. With the financial system as the only mechanism for sustaining production and consumption, today’s problem is les

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

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

With the rise of personal computing and networks from the 1970s onwards, entrepreneurship took a new direction. The goal was not to best the Soviet Union at any cost, but to serve the general public, to improve people’s daily lives, to change the consumer’s world for the better. Entrepreneurs have always been key figures in the history of the indus

It’s a new node in a network that over time will create value for the entire community of insurees through aggregated data, behavioral influence, and peer-to-peer work. Overall, the bet is that network effects beat selection effects most of the time.

New value propositions should be to the Entrepreneurial Age what mortgages were to the age of the automobile and mass production.This means not a loan to buy your own house, but rather a loan to make it easier to switch careers in a world where economic security depends on one’s capacity to rebound[445].

As the performance of state-provided services goes down, the day-to-day frustration the state imposes contributes to fueling anger and populism[398]. Thus citizens are eventually moving against the state because they don’t want to pay taxes without receiving any benefits; because they (in some cases, rightfully) see the state as unfair; because the

The Venetian Republic is an illustration of a rare model of power: the thalassocracy, or a state with primarily maritime realms and the means to defend and expand them. History provides us with only a few examples of that combination of political, military, and economic resources, from the Republic of Venice to the Portuguese empire in the fifteent

But from the 1970s onward, power shifted. Households now invested their savings through large and powerful intermediaries such as pension funds and mutual funds. The rules that had been set up to protect individual savers against the greed or incompetence of corporate executives were now leveraged by professional agents with billions of dollars of