jack

I'm reminded of Ha-Joon Chang's argument about a social safety net: as well as being good and humane and a way of putting money in the economy and all that, it can also be good for business. It's sort of like a worker's equivalent of the bankruptcy laws and limited liability; it lets people take useful risks - retraining, re-skilling, being ambitious - without fearing losing everything. Furthermore, if there's a good safety net, people will be less keen on protectionism as a way of protecting their jobs - Chang asserts that the USA is often more protectionist than much of the EU for precisely this reason.