In the last decades of the Industrial Age, in most developed countries, comprehensive safety nets have been implemented on top of the traditional family secure base. Social security, unemployment benefits… All sorts of safety devices against unfortunate life events.
Then, something strange happened: instead of enticing people to take more risks, releasing creativity and entrepreneurship, these safety nets have entrapped them in a conservative mindset where anything that might put in question their privileges is fought back violently.
In an era where the people that will be successful through the Fourth Revolution will be agile and adaptable, able to take measured risks, this behavior increasingly looks suicidal. And most developed countries today struggle to find the energy and the will to reform their institutions and adapt them to the new global situation.
The most amazing contradiction is that a safety net should, on the contrary, increase the possibilities to take risks: it provides a secure base, hence a higher possibility to go and investigate what is happening in the world. It should provide a last resort protection if one falls during a particularly challenging balancing act, and hence enable these balancing acts to be attempted.
How can we redesign the social safety net institutions we inherited from the Industrial Age to make them a source of risk-taking and entrepreneurship? One suggestion is to make them really a last-resort safety net that intervenes only to prevent a deadly fall; but not a system on which people rely even for minor events; thus, it would avoid having too many people dependent on the protection provided at any moment.
In any case, a deep reform of this Industrial Age institution is required to make it the risk-releasing tool it should always have been.
