Podcast - Social Invention, Progress & Trump

Here is my very first podcast:

Social Invention, Progress & Trump, one in a series of Fourth Economy podcasts.

"History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions."

- Voltaire

The simple argument is that it is a struggle to understand politics and policy today without understanding social invention. A wave of social invention is simultaneously creating new opportunities and threatening old identities. Among the major points made in the podcast:

1. Social inventions like banks and nation-states are as important to progress as technological or product inventions like steam engines and computers.
2. 100 years ago the rate of product invention accelerated. Now, the rate of social invention (e.g., the EU, NAFTA, Uber-like employment, same-sex marriages) is accelerating.
3. Progress in the West has come from treating social inventions like tools rather than as either sacred or disposable.
4. The three major social inventions and reinventions that resulted in freedom of religion, democracy, and the American Dream (essentially the democratization of financial markets) inform us as to what strategies and measures result in successful social invention.