What It Means to Bet on Ourselves

To Truly Deliver the General Welfare, We’re Going to Need to Rebalance Power

In a recent column, I laid out an agenda for fighting the wildfire of destabilizing global social, economic, and climate changes that are currently bearing down on us. That agenda has three parts, and they are worth repeating: We need responsive governance from a working constitutional democracy. We need a path to securing the general welfare by shifting power back to ordinary people. And we need strategies for domestic tranquility and the common defense that safeguard the blessings of liberty.

We’ve already tackled responsive governance. Now it’s time to turn to securing the general welfare, which means it’s time to turn to the economy. The general welfare isn’t just about material well-being, however. It’s also about our mental and spiritual health. That’s because when people are subject to arbitrary power, it diminishes their well-being materially and psychologically. Some of the answers to what we need to improve our economy will flow asking some simple questions about our lives: Why and where we are miserable? And what can we do about it?

The core idea is this: We need to rebalance power in the economy. Where power is too concentrated, we need to shift it away from power holders. Where it is too attenuated, we need to build it up. Let this be our guiding insight: The benefits of a productive economy flow in the same direction as the allocation of power in the economy, so the more that power is broadly shared in the economy, the more opportunity and prosperity will be broadly shared.

We need to put this principle to work at the top of the economy — in the tech sector — and also at the bottom — in communities living in poverty.

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The question of how new technologies affect our lives cannot be separated from questions about the economy or our general welfare more broadly. The tech sector is too dominant and pervasive for that. It has become the major driver of national and global economies. Seven of the top ten most valuable companies are tech companies. The combined market value of Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia's makes up approximately 17.5 percent of the total U.S. stock market. As tech goes, so goes the economy, so goes our way of life, so goes how we feel as human beings.

That’s why the first and most important element for getting the general welfare back on track is taking power back from tech companies and putting it into the hands of ordinary people.

We need to claim mastery of our own minds, souls, and habits of attention, and put tech to work for us, fueling an economy that gives us all meaningful and rewarding parts to play. We’ll feel better back in the driver’s seat, and our economic opportunities will get stronger.

In short, we need to declare independence from tech. There are two key steps.

Step 1: Take back our kids. As Jonathan Haidt has powerfully shown, the digital age is destroying the well-being of young people. Tech companies frack their attention, and the resulting harms to mental health are staggering. No silver bullet can reverse this. We need a layered, all-of-the-above approach that includes regulation such as cell phone bans in schools. Age-appropriate design and access. Robust data privacy. Parental empowerment through easy-to-use time caps and dashboards. Cultural shifts like digital sabbaths and teaching digital competence so young people understand how they can be taken advantage of or harmed with digital tools.

And there needs to be a single message communicated consistently to tech companies: Let our children go.

Step 2: Shift power in the economy to the people. In the global landscape, there are currently three paradigms for governing AI: an accelerationist paradigm, an effective altruism paradigm, and a pluralism paradigm. Only the last — pluralism — puts hands in the power of the people. We need to fight the first two paradigms and encourage the third.

In the accelerationist paradigm — think Peter Thiel and Palantir; Elon Musk and Starlink and SpaceX — the goal is to “move fast and break things,” speeding up technological development as much as possible to achieve new solutions to global problems such as labor costs and climate change, while maximally organizing the world around the success of high-IQ individuals. In the accelerationist paradigm, which evokes aspirations like something out of sci fi, the wishes and welfare of ordinary people are outrun by the sheer speed of change: Labor is replaced; the earth is made non-necessary via access to Mars; smart people use tech-fueled genetic selection to produce even smarter babies.

In the effective altruism paradigm — think Sam Altman and OpenAI; Sam Bankman Fried and FTX and Anthropic — there is equally a goal to move fast and break things. But this paradigm also incorporates recognition that replacing human labor with tech will harm masses of humanity, and so the commitment to tech development goes hand in hand with a plan to redistribute the productivity gains that flow to tech companies via universal basic income policies. The masses therefore become ever more dependent — politically and economically — on a shrinking and increasingly wealthy elite.

In the pluralism paradigm — think Audrey Tang in Taiwan — technological development is focused not on overmatching and replacing human intelligence but on complementing and extending the plural kinds of human intelligence with equally plural kinds of machine intelligence. The purpose here is to activate and extend human pluralism for the goods of creativity, innovation, and cultural richness, while fully integrating the broad population into the productive economy. Thus, the pluralism paradigm pursues technology that supports freedom, self-government, and democracy. The state of Pennsylvania’s recent commitment to deploy technology in ways that empower rather than replace humans is an example of this paradigm. So is Utah’s recently passed Digital Choice Act, which places ownership of data in social media platforms back in the hands of users and demands interoperability of platforms, shifting power from tech corporations to citizens and consumers.

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What about empowering communities living in poverty? In addition to wrangling the tech sector into a shape that supports the general welfare, we can take steps to return power to ordinary people. Step 3 of this agenda for the general welfare involves putting more decision-making power and responsibility for fighting poverty in the hands of local communities.

Well, a good example is Maryland’s ENOUGH Initiative — Engaging Neighborhoods, Organizations, Unions, Governments, and Households — which is a first-in-the-nation, place-based anti-poverty program led by the Governor’s Office for Children. This initiative replaces top-down policy blueprints with a process for empowering communities to find solutions. What is distinctive about ENOUGH is that it brings a full range of stakeholders together for joint decision-making about local actions that can be taken to improve the lives of children.

The nuts-and-bolts matter a lot (this is a Renovator theme, you will notice), so stay with me as I get into them a bit:

To participate in ENOUGH, communities complete a needs assessment and asset map, and co-design a “Neighborhood Action Plan” laying out roles, timelines, and accountability measures. Grants then fund approved actions, backed up by coaching and data support from the Governor’s Office for Children. These Neighborhood Action Plans are organized under four pillars, but each one develops its own place-specific mix. Here are the pillars, along with some exemplary policies for each one:

Early learning and schools — Kindergarten-readiness programming; parent coaching such as HIPPY (Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters); supports tied to nearby community schools.

Healthy families and navigation — Maternal supports, substance-use services, and resource/benefits navigation so families can actually access health care, food, and cash/benefit programs.

Economic security and jobs — Youth financial literacy, paid workforce development, small-business support, and pilots to smooth the benefits cliff as parents move into higher-wage work.

Safe and thriving neighborhoods — Homeownership and affordable-housing expansion, food-insecurity initiatives, gun-violence reduction, plus place-based improvements that make daily life safer and easier (transportation, recreation, etc.).

Maryland’s ENOUGH initiative builds on the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone created by Geoffrey Canada. Under ENOUGH, as in the Harlem Children’s Zone, stakeholders in a community are empowered to do holistic success planning for all the kids in that community. That’s the critical, empowering element: It’s by working together across siloes that adults in the community can best see and provide what kids need— all the way from early childhood education to guidance counseling in high school.

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The general welfare isn’t just about a number like GDP. Growth, incomes and productivity matter, for sure. But the general welfare is also about how we feel. Agency is a human need: Having the power to steer our own lives feels better than being subject to the arbitrary whims of others. An important aspect of ideas above for how to rebalance power in the tech sector and anti-poverty efforts is empowering parents to lay a strong foundation for the thriving of their children.

Happily, a productive household is the most powerful building block imaginable for a healthy economy. When we take our kids back from tech, forge an economy that integrates workers instead of pushing them out, and empower people to lay foundations for flourishing in their own communities, we are betting on ourselves — and that is the safest bet there is.

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Enjoy this piece? Catch up on the rest of Danielle Allen’s “America as a Bear in a Trap” series!

• “America as a Bear in a Trap,” Aug. 18

• “A Bear in a Trap, Part 2,” Aug. 21

• “Don’t Be Afraid to Free the Bear,” Aug. 26

• “A Three-Part Agenda To Fight The Wildfire,” Sept. 2

• “Fighting the Wildfire with Upgraded Governance,” Sept. 8