Over the past generation, the economic risks American families face have increased substantially. Yet public programs have largely failed to adapt to these new and newly intensified risks, and private workplace benefits have eroded. As a result, Americans increasingly find themselves on an economic tightrope, without an adequate safety net if, as is ever more likely, they lose their footing. This tightrope both creates anxiety about the future and causes hardship when families do lose their balance. But importantly, it also threatens opportunity by making it more difficult for families to feel sufficiently secure to look confidently toward the future and make the risky investments -- in skills, education, and assets -- necessary to prosper in a highly dynamic and uncertain economy.

In response to these worrisome trends, I call for a "security and opportunity society" -- a vision that is starkly opposed to the ideal of an "ownership society" outlined by leading conservative critics of the welfare state. The premise of the conservative ownership society is that we can be free to pursue the opportunities in our lives only if we do not share risks with others -- if, for example -- we have an individual Social Security account from which we alone benefit in retirement, or a personal Health Savings Account that allows us to finance routine health expenses solely on our own. A security and opportunity society, by contrast, is based on a very different premise: that we are most capable of fully participating in out economy and our society, and most capable of taking risks and looking toward our future when we have a basic foundation of financial security. In this view, economic security is not at odds with economic opportunity; it is the cornerstone. Restoring a measure of economic security in the United States today is the key to transforming the nation's greatest wealth and productivity into an engine for broad-based prosperity and opportunity in a more uncertain economic world.

For the full text of this article, please download the PDF version below. Hacker's piece is part of of a collection of essays on the topic of increasing Americans' economic opportunity and security that appeared in this issue of the Harvard Law and Policy Review. An article by Whitehead Senior Fellow Michael Lind is also part of that collection.