Social Contract Initiative Description > Roosevelt Home > Roosevelt Challenges > Social Contract Initiative Description
The Roosevelt Institution is engaged in a multi-year project on economic policy in America and the redefinition of the social contract, in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation. Below is the substantive content of the project:
This project is about rethinking and revising America's social contract. That web of relationships was developed during and following the New Deal and over the years it defined the roles and responsibilities of government, employers, and individuals in the economy and in increasing family security. These arrangements no longer reflect global economic conditions or the changing demographic realities of our society.As the policy debate has started to take shape, the next social contract would reallocate risks and responsibilities for the provision of health, income, and retirement security among citizens, employers and the government. While doing so in ways that reward individual responsibility and the kind of entrepreneurial risk-taking that is vital to individual initiative and macroeconomic growth, requires decreasing the economic and health security risks that more and more people now face without insurance or other mechanisms for sharing their costs. How we go about recalibrating the distribution of risk may be as important to growing and strengthening the middle class as it is to the goal of reducing poverty and inequality.
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