Open Source Social Contract
I concluded a recent post with this: “I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that the new economy and the old safety net system are seriously out of whack. Pensions, Medicare and Social Security? Please.”
In the Times Sunday Magazine, Dalton Conley addresses this very issue with an interesting thought: forget a New New Deal, reimagine the “social contract along the lines of a computer network or the bug-and-spoke airline network.” He provides a number of examples of how this might work, such as the how the “feds could mandate that any institutions of higher education that receive government dollars must make their research and course materials available online in an open-source format free of charge.” That’s just one of many intriguing ideas he throws out there for Obama to chew on.