Companies, Countries, People – and the Fight for Our Future
The Raging 2020s by Alec Ross is a thought-provoking book that explores the disruptive forces shaping the current decade. He discusses tech advancements, politics, and social change and how they are impacting the world's economic, social, and political landscape.
What’s the one thing that glues together all societies, past and present? It isn’t religion, culture, or written laws, but a social contract.
A social contract encompasses all the written and unwritten rules at play in a society. It’s what balances the rights and powers of citizens, government, and businesses. It outlines which duties belong to each sphere.
A strong social contract enables humanity to live and work together in harmony. But social contracts are always being tested and renegotiated as societies change and new technologies develop. Sometimes, there’s a long pause when a society is still using an old, broken social contract and hasn’t yet come up with one to replace it. Right now, that’s exactly where the United States and other developed nations find themselves.
The key message here is: Social contracts keep societies functioning, but sometimes they break.
The most recent American social contract was developed during the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, when manufacturing boomed and new technologies developed at a breakneck pace. During this time, Western economies transformed from agricultural to industrial societies and the previous social contract became obsolete.
This early stage of industrialization became known as Engels’ Pause, after the Marxist philosopher Friedrich Engels. Engels’ Pause was characterized by inequality and squalor. The social contract hadn’t yet caught up. Benefits like worker’s pensions, antitrust protections, income tax, child-labor laws, and the minimum wage were still years away.
Once societies introduced these improvements, citizens finally began to flourish. An equilibrium was established, balancing the powers of governments, corporations, and individuals.
Developed societies now find themselves in a second Engels’ Pause. After the end of the Cold War, it seemed that capitalism was victorious once and for all. As a result, government went on a deregulation spree, giving businesses greater and greater power, which they’re now abusing.
Companies are free to make irresponsible decisions knowing that the government will always be there to bail them out – with taxpayer money, of course. Multinational corporations are as big as countries, and they often have an outsized influence in geopolitics. Over the last thirty years, inequality has skyrocketed: the top 1 percent have grown $21 trillion richer, while the bottom 50 percent are $900 billion poorer.
These are just a few of the problems caused by the fraying of a social contract that’s in desperate need of mending.
The Raging 2020s (2021) is an autopsy of the American social contract, which once kept companies, governments, and individuals in stable harmony but has since broken down. In particular, it describes how the power of corporations has expanded in recent years while federal might has waned – and how the result is that companies have more control over people’s lives than ever before. We must work to restore the balance and write a new social contract for the modern age.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
