Chronicles In December, Skype, a new software which directly translates calls between English and Spanish. The news captures the two revolutions that the world is currently experiencing: globalization and digitization.
It is, as the Liberal critic Johan Norberg writes in the new book “Live and Let Die” (Hydra publishers), a development that make people’s lives richer. Trade and new production methods make goods cheaper. At the same network digitization people together in ways that were previously impossible.
It’s so new ideas are born, businesses started and we get the chance to cultivate interests, whether it’s about home brewing, steampunk jewelry or geocaching, together with others. It will be a richer, funnier and better society.
Meanwhile, the societal challenges, while much of what we take for granted demolished. It will set the policy to the test.
The political starting point must be to recognize and facilitate change. There are few reasons to protect companies that are challenged by new technologies and business ideas. Whether it’s old industrial giants who can not keep up with developments or, as happens in many parts of the world, dysfunctional taxi industries that face competition from the mobile app-based taxi service Uber.
However, there is every reason to protect individuals people from the negative impact that a rapid transformation of the economy with it.
In the international debate include, for example, a growing concern for what happens when both qualified and unqualified jobs can be handled by robots, which is Google’s attempt to driverless cars is a prime example. Earlier created the prosperity of the company with tens of thousands of employees, who were part of it by relatively high wages. In the digital economy can unimagined riches contrast is created in company with a few employees. The risk is that it leads to greatly increased inequality.
There have been, for example, the Economist magazine – hardly a bastion of left – to talk about basic income, or a citizen, as a possible reform. It goes against the ideals of Swedish politics, but could be a way to encourage entrepreneurship as well as a method to allocate a growing prosperity, when the direct link between wealth creation and the great majority wage labor declines.
Meanwhile, we know hardly anything about what jobs will be available in the future. Very few of the jobs that exist today were 100 years ago. And the same will of course happen again.
The Industrial Revolution transformed the society and brought with him the forerunner of the modern welfare states. In the same way, we must now ask ourselves what political solutions needed for people to fully benefit from the progress that globalization and digitization makes possible.
Svend Dahl
political scientists,
The head of the Liberal News Agency
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