Breakthrough: Network Nation: Building American Empowerment

By Helen Aki, Breakthrough Generation Fellow.

Today's highly networked social order requires a new social contract -- that's the conclusion of Breakthrough Senior Fellow Dalton Conley, who just wrote a piece for the New York Times magazine illuminating the challenges involved in creating social policy for a complex modern society. Although many may be calling for a new "New Deal" to shore up current societal insecurities, the social safety nets of the 21st Century may be modeled more on the open source communities of the Wikipedia era than the government programs of the Roosevelt age.

In the 1930s, social hierarchy functioned within what Conley calls the "nesting doll" structure -- one family per child; one breadwinner per family; one employer per breadwinner; each employer rooted in the United States; and all employees citizens- - under which the role of the government was simply to step in whenever one of these well-defined connections broke down. Since then, our society has become highly mobile and fluid: families are rarely static, women work, immigration is common, and employment is less and less likely to be long-term.

Another paternalistic, protective policy like the New Deal can't take care of Americans. As an alternative, Conley proposes:

So perhaps we need to reimagine these nesting dolls and instead think of the social contract along the lines of a computer network or the hub-and-spoke airline network in the U.S. In such "scale free" networks, distance has been collapsed by long links that allow
you to skip between any two points in a couple steps. The government's role is less as a backup provider -- in case one link of the nested chain breaks down -- and more as honest broker and resource hub across groups.

If we embrace the fundamental assumption that all people should possess equal rights, regardless of various identity factors (such as employment, gender, citizenship, or age), then it is true that protective policies cannot rely on universal, top-down approaches.

Instead, a more comprehensive and integrative strategy is necessary. Since such complex logic ranges from difficult to impossible in the hands of a central entity, as proponents of the free market have long recognized, the best solution is to find some coherent way to place responsibility into the hands of the individual.

The value of systems developed and refined by a large base of individuals has already been shown through web-based operations, such as Wikipedia, Google, eBay, Craigslist, and open-source software everywhere. Apple derives some of its success from a thriving community of user feedback and open-source applications. Governmental programs can and should adopt the same sort of responsive flexibility.

It is important to recognize that entities like Wikipedia are incredibly successful once they take root, but they don't emerge spontaneously. They need a conceptual "parent" and a guiding hand. This process, which I think of as "top-down" meeting "bottom-up," is the best way for a central government to cater to a diverse and complicated American populace.

Some of Conley's examples for governmental programs which allocate responsibility to its networked points include:

Health care purchases made by groups of individuals, which a central agency would randomly assemble
Universal investment accounts, set up by the state, for large-scale expenditures, such as college fees, retirement funds, and health-related expenses
Open educational courseware, made public by state-funded universities to be used by all

As a Breakthrough Generation fellow, I've been thinking a lot about the best way for a central authority to facilitate the transition to a society powered by clean energy. The same logic of making "top-down" facilitate the "bottom-up" could work here to create the most effective policy to transform the energy sector. Instead of prescribing a policy from the perspective of experts and government officials, this new energy policy could facilitate the participation of individual energy users, entrepreneurs and innovators--literally, empowering them.

Human development can be seen as a metaphor for the evolution of a society, and parenting as a lesson for policymakers. With complexity comes maturity (hopefully). Caretakers everywhere take note! Instead of Uncle Sam looking after his tidy and manageable constituents, he must take a step back and parent "softly," with his primary role being to encourage them to provide for themselves; to empower, rather than protect.

This is a policy approach that embodies a politics of individual accountability and encourages Americans to take control of their lives. Demanding accountability in the form of policy has the potential to cultivate the ingenuity, dreams and desires of 300 million people. Isn't that what a modern democracy should do?

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