Fear of the New

There has been a huge amount of technological advancement in the past 20 years. The growth of the internet has made it drastically easier to transmit and receive information. Smart phones push this even further by giving people access in the palm of their hand anywhere, not just at a computer terminal.

Following this change, many business models have been upended. Advertising used to depend heavily on the reach of newspapers. It was hard to get the attention of a large number of people any other way. However, with the internet, it's much easier to target specific audiences. Data mining of searches can determine what kinds of ads a particular person will respond to. Combine that with the fact that it's much easier and cheaper to consume news over the internet than in a physical sheet of paper, and you get a floundering newspaper industry.

While this is a boon for consumers of news, it's a huge negative for people in the business. If you could get your news form the New York Times about world events, why would you bother bother reading the local Podunk Paper for worse content? If you could reach people everywhere with Google, why would you advertise in the New York Times?

The quickly changing face of business has many sectors of the economy struggling to keep up. People are afraid that their livelihoods are in danger. And rightly so. If change is unpredictable, who knows whose jobs are on the line? And when change happens quickly, there's not a lot of time to plan for sudden career changes.

All this shows that if we want to have an economy with new ideas as well as protect people from market forces outside of their control, we need to have a strong social safety net. That way changing conditions in the economy won't run the risk of throwing people into destitution due to bad luck.  Hopefully people will be able to evaluate different ways of doing things without worrying about a life of poverty.