The Risk Shift, Revisited

Jared Bernstein:

The risk shift, revisited: Back in the late 2000s, two authors — the economics journalist Peter Gosselin and the political scientist Jacob Hacker — wrote books documenting what they both called “the risk shift.” The idea was that policy and social norms had changed in ways that shifted economic risk — invoked by retirement, illness, job stability and loss of income — from government and firms to individuals and families. The result was greater inequality and worse: greater insecurity among the many people on the wrong side of the risk shift. ...

Which begs the question: how could a significant (albeit minority) share of the electorate that’s increasingly exposed to and suffering from the long risk shift possibly elect leaders that threaten to exacerbate and hasten the shift? ...