Social acceleration and social investment

Abstract

The starting point for our contribution on the (alleged) crisis of the European social model is David Weisstanner and Klaus Armingeon's (2018) study on the cross-national variation in wage premiums to discuss the temporal dimension of social investment policy-future-oriented policy par excellence. Our guiding propositions are that: (1) "social acceleration", that is, the accelerating pace of change, particularly but not exclusively in technology, tends to complicate and ultimately undermine the assumptions of social investment policy; (2) the result will be increasingly higher inequality. Social investment policies are future-oriented social policies, investing in human capital in the short term to yield a social return in the middle or long term (e.g., early childhood education). Social acceleration causes the temporal outlook of social investment politics to become more short-term. Simultaneously, it contracts the long-term governing capacity, making it increasingly difficult to determine precisely in what kind of skills to invest now, in order to maximize the chance of social return in the future.