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Social acceleration and social investment

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The European Social Model under Pressure

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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 – futureoriented 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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aarhus Universitet, Aarhus, Denmark

    Kees van Kersbergen

  2. Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Barbara Vis

Authors
  1. Kees van Kersbergen
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  2. Barbara Vis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kees van Kersbergen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Romana Careja

  2. Department of Political Science, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Patrick Emmenegger

  3. Department of Political Science, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Nathalie Giger

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Kersbergen, K.v., Vis, B. (2020). Social acceleration and social investment. In: Careja, R., Emmenegger, P., Giger, N. (eds) The European Social Model under Pressure. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27043-8_11

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