Introducing the "Great Safety Net"

European Straits #55

Dear all,

I’m closing in on completing my manuscript, which is currently under review by a few friends and will then enter the editing and design phase.

As always in such cases, it is near the end, as a result of the painful process of writing, that the main concepts and angles emerge from the murky depths of the author’s confused thinking. And so I’m now converging towards the book’s overarching concept, which I’ve named the “Greater Safety Net”.

The central question of the book is this: Where do economic security and prosperity come from? I believe they don’t come from a single magic-bullet mechanism (hello, !), but rather from a complex macro mechanism that goes way beyond the narrow definition of the safety net (e.g. the welfare state). This ‘Greater Safety Net’ always includes three major components.

Its foundational pillar is social insurance: programs designed to cover certain critical risks to which individuals are exposed, such as old age, illness, and unemployment. The first suc…