The Future of the Welfare State

The world is always in flux, of course, but sometimes it changes so profoundly as to render us ‘immigrants in our own land’ – in the phrase of Margaret Mead – living in a world our parents never knew. The past four decades have seen the diffusion of radically new technologies, processes of economic and cultural globalisation, and a shift toward employment in services transformative of people’s lives. In 1975, the personal computer had not yet been invented, developing economies produced less than a third of the world’s output, and more than a third of workers in the OECD were employed in manufacturing. Today, the average American spends 23 hours a week on the internet; developing economies account for more than half of global production; and barely a fifth of the OECD labour force works in manufacturing.

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