The Raging 2020s

How do societies stay stable when technology, markets, and inequality shift faster than the public institutions designed to manage them? In The Raging 2020s, Alec Ross argues that the old social contract—the implicit bargain among citizens, business, and government—has frayed. Over the past half century, we’ve privatized gains and socialized costs: profits flow upward to shareholders and executives, while taxpayers shoulder the burden of decaying infrastructure, public bailouts, and social dislocation.

Ross contends that this imbalance is not just economic but moral. The book opens with a simple morning: your coffee brews thanks to a global network of trade, technology, and public systems—each the result of past collective investments. Yet those foundations are weakening. As governments lose capacity, workers lose leverage, and corporations gain dominance, societies drift toward instability. Ross’s call is direct: we must rewrite the contract for the digital age.

What the Old Bargain Was

In the industrial era, technological revolutions led to new social contracts—the New Deal, labor protections, pensions, and education reforms—built to distribute the gains of progress widely. These were negotiated moments of rebalancing: new roles for business, expanded roles for the state, and stronger rights for workers. But since the 1970s, neoliberal ideology recast corporate purpose around Milton Friedman’s dictum that a company’s sole responsibility is to its shareholders. Everything else—workers, communities, even long-term resilience—became secondary.

This pivot reorganized the flow of value in modern economies. Corporations grew, public investment declined, and political cynicism deepened. Where the New Deal built middle-class mobility, deregulation and financialization hollowed it out. Ross likens our current dissatisfaction to the 1930s: when the bargain cracks, societies either rebuild democratic governance or slide toward authoritarian alternatives. The stakes, in other words, are civilizational.

Privatized Power, Weakened States

The imbalance is clearest when crisis hits. After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico waited weeks for coordinated federal relief, while the nonprofit World Central Kitchen—led by chef José Andrés—delivered hundreds of thousands of meals a day. FEMA floundered; a chef succeeded. This anecdote crystallizes a global pattern: private actors doing the work of the state. Ross warns that efficiency without accountability is not governance. Corporate response may save lives, but it undermines democratic legitimacy when it substitutes for public capacity.

Meanwhile, political gridlock and underfunded bureaucracies have drained state competence. Lobbying and political spending exploded—$3.5 billion annually by 2019—and corporate lawmaking now rivals public deliberation. When governments cannot audit the powerful, regulate monopolies, or invest in infrastructure, you live in a managed democracy, not a responsive one. Ross insists on realism: unless the state reclaims capability, every problem—from inequality to climate change—gets outsourced to the whims of a few powerful firms.

Globalization and the Tax Wormhole

Ross exposes another fracture: the global tax system built for an economy of physical goods, now exploited by digital corporations to shift profits into low-tax havens. He tracks a €3.96 Google ad payment that vanishes into a labyrinth of Irish, Dutch, and Bermudian shells—a legal trick that costs nations hundreds of billions in lost revenue each year. The irony is moral as much as fiscal: doctors and teachers pay more proportionally in tax than trillion-dollar firms moving money across spreadsheets.

These systems thrive on deliberate opacity, from the City of London’s offshore network to American states like Delaware that function as domestic secrecy havens. Developing countries suffer most: Africa loses more to illicit financial flows than it gains in foreign aid. For Ross, taxation is the skeleton key of fairness—how you fund shared goods and rebuild legitimacy. Without global cooperation and transparency, democracy’s fiscal foundation erodes.

Labor Without Leverage

As capital flows borderlessly, work becomes precarious. Unions once forged by sit-down strikes in Flint have been weakened by deindustrialization, automation, and anti-labor policy. Today’s workers drive for Uber, contract for Amazon, or freelance online—with few protections or benefits. Ross doesn’t romanticize the past; instead, he envisions new models: portable benefits, sectoral bargaining, and digital networks like Rideshare Drivers United that organize gig workers across platforms. The lesson: adapt solidarity to new forms of labor, or inequality hardens into class stasis.

The Global Contest of Models

Ross situates these domestic struggles in a global competition of governance systems. China demonstrates a coherent alternative: a techno-authoritarian model merging state direction, corporate power, and massive data surveillance. Its success pressures democracies to prove that open systems can still deliver prosperity and order. The Nordic nations, by contrast, exemplify a rebalanced social contract—flexible markets coupled with universal safety nets—that protects both dynamism and dignity. Africa, with its youthful demographics and contested influence, represents the frontier where these models compete.

In sum, Ross’s argument unfolds as both diagnosis and call to action. He identifies the broken systems—shareholder primacy, tax havens, eroded labor, and state incapacity—and then points toward the tools to fix them: global coordination, ethical capitalism, empowered workers, and high-functioning governments. The challenge to you is moral and strategic at once. The social contract can no longer be assumed; it must be rewritten, deliberately, for an interconnected age.

Ross sees modern capitalism’s skewed outcomes as the predictable result of an ideology: shareholder primacy. After Milton Friedman’s 1962 declaration that profit-maximization is the sole corporate duty, American business rewrote its code. CEO pay tied to stock price became dogma; corporate raiders and private equity flourished; mergers consolidated industries. The five hundred largest U.S. firms now produce two-thirds of GDP—a concentration unseen since the gilded age.

You can see the consequences not only in macro metrics but in everyday suffering. The insulin market—once a triumph of public science, distributed royalty-free—now functions as an oligopoly dominated by three companies. Families like the Corleys pay hundreds each month; others die rationing medication. S&P 500 firms spent $4.3 trillion on share buybacks in a decade rather than on R&D or wages, a financial feedback loop that enriches shareholders and executives even as infrastructure and social mobility collapse.

The Logic Behind the Shift

Why did this ideology take root? Ross points to the intellectual and structural reinforcements: Bork’s narrow antitrust doctrine that redefined competition as price efficiency, deregulation that blurred public accountability, and global capital markets that reward quarterly performance. Governments became cheerleaders for corporate success instead of regulators of it. The result is a hybrid system—capitalism without counterweights—where social costs are externalized as public obligations.

Alternative Models Emerging

A backlash is underway. Scholars like Joseph Stiglitz and movements like the Business Roundtable’s 2019 stakeholder pledge hint at an intellectual reawakening. Patagonia remade its ownership into a trust for environmental stewardship; Goldman Sachs tied IPO eligibility to board diversity; Walmart leveraged supply-chain scale to reduce chemicals and waste. Yet Ross warns that without enforceable metrics—GAAP-like standards for social performance—these experiments risk being cosmetic.

A New Corporate Ethic

If you want firms to behave differently, he insists, you must change incentives. Link executive pay to long-term outcomes such as carbon reduction or wage equity. Tax buybacks like dividends. Embed employee representation on boards. Markets alone cannot measure virtue, but policy can price it. The stakeholder model will remain rhetoric unless you give it the rigor of accounting law. As Ross puts it, moral reformation requires institutional design, not just aspiration.

Ross’s portrait of government capacity is sobering. From FEMA stumbling in Puerto Rico to crumbling water systems and underfunded IRS audits, state erosion is both symptom and cause of democratic fragility. Talent drains to better-paying private roles, leaving bureaucracies brittle. Political polarization produces vetocracy—so many veto points that no actor can fix visible decay. Kludgeocracy, as he calls it, replaces bold governance with patchwork fixes.

Corporate Substitutions

When the public sphere weakens, corporations become substitute governors. Walmart sets environmental standards; Google filters information; José Andrés feeds the hungry. Some do it well, others unevenly. But the deeper danger is subtle: legitimacy migrates from elected institutions to unelected executives. When corporate social initiatives fill civic voids, democracy’s accountability mechanisms shrink. Philanthropy’s theater—Jeff Bezos’s climate fund or Robert Smith’s student-loan gesture—masks structural retreat.

Power and Influence Networks

Ross tracks the growth of a lobbying complex that binds government agendas to corporate profit. Political spending rose from under $100 million in 1975 to billions annually by the 2010s. Citizens United amplified this flow, spawning “shadow lobbyists” who shape policy from think tanks, PR firms, and law consultancies. Combined with data-driven persuasion technologies, these systems entrench private agendas in the public domain. The result is a hybrid sovereignty—state symbols persist, but fiscal and narrative control drift to those who can pay for them.

Restoring Capacity

Rebuilding government strength is neither nostalgic nor utopian in Ross’s view; it’s an emergency measure. He points to Singapore’s competitive civil-service compensation and transparent bureaucracy as a reference, and calls for modern equivalents: digital talent pipelines, empowered regulators, and enforcement budgets scaled to corporate magnitude. Without that, the next crisis—whether climate or cyber—will again reveal that improvisation has replaced capacity, and generosity has replaced governance.

Ross locates much of society’s fragility in the collapse of collective worker power. From the Flint sit-down strike’s victories to Reagan’s 1981 firing of air-traffic controllers, he traces a clear decline. Union membership fell from 35 percent to just over 10 percent by 2019, leaving workers’ share of national income at historic lows. The material and civic consequences are visible: shrinking middle-class towns, rural decline, anger at elites.

New Forms of Work, New Tools for Power

Today’s labor landscape is atomized. Gig, freelance, and platform workers lack the infrastructure for solidarity. Yet new technology also enables new organizing: the Freelancers Union, Rideshare Drivers United, and emerging sectoral models use apps, text campaigns, and data analytics to coordinate distributed workforces. Ross chronicles how digital tools lowered organizing costs, making unionization in the algorithmic age possible again.

Policy Ideas for the 21st-Century Worker

Ross and collaborators such as David Rolf and Nick Hanauer propose “portable benefits” that follow you between jobs—health care, retirement, retraining credits—and shared security systems that spread risk beyond any one employer. Europe’s sectoral bargaining model, where unions negotiate across an entire industry, shows how stability and flexibility can coexist. (Note: Denmark’s “flexicurity” balances easy hiring with generous unemployment and training support.)

A Vision of Modern Solidarity

For Ross, the next labor movement must fuse digital coordination with moral imagination: equity ownership plans, board representation, and civic renewal. Workers must see themselves not just as wage-earners but as co-architects of the system’s fairness. Rebalancing the social contract thus begins not only in policy but in cultural reassertion—that work, not capital alone, creates prosperity.

Ross’s investigation of global finance reads like a detective novel. A €3.96 advertising payment to Google becomes a symbol of the planetary loophole that drains public budgets. Modern tax codes treat digital and multinational conglomerates as fragmented entities—each affiliate in a different place—allowing elaborate profit shifting from high- to low-tax jurisdictions. What sounds like accounting trivia shapes whether states can pay teachers or maintain roads.

How the Offshore System Works

Ross traces the roots to British postwar policy: the City of London turned its remaining territories—Jersey, Cayman, Bermuda—into offshore nodes. Regulators were captured by banks they oversaw; whistleblowers like John Christensen exposed abuse and faced exile. The result is “a perfect environment for political capture,” where complexity shields elite profit. Even the United States, though crusading abroad through FATCA, maintains secrecy onshore via Delaware and Wyoming LLC loopholes.

Consequences for Inequality and Development

Developing countries lose hundreds of billions yearly to illicit outflows, often exceeding foreign aid inflows. Angola’s case illustrates the human toll: billions diverted by elites while citizens struggle in poverty. Offshore finance is not victimless; it is slow violence against public goods. Programs like Tax Inspectors Without Borders show reform’s potential—$100 returned for every $1 of capacity-building aid—but without global transparency these remain small victories.

Toward Fair Tax Architecture

Ross favors structural reform: unitary taxation (treat firms as one global entity) with formulary apportionment, plus a global minimum tax that neutralizes profit shifting. These ideas appear in the OECD’s BEPS 2.0 plan. Combined with automatic information sharing and public registers of ownership, they could restore fiscal sovereignty. Until the U.S. ends hypocrisy—demanding data abroad but shielding secrecy at home—global fairness will remain rhetorical. The tax wormhole is the system’s circulatory leak; close it and you revive the body politic.

The digital revolution has redrawn sovereignty. Private companies build platforms on which states now depend—for communication, commerce, and even warfare. Ross illustrates this through technology’s entanglement with foreign policy: firms accompanying diplomats, AI companies defining defense capabilities, and platforms setting the boundaries of free expression. Power now runs through fiber-optic cables as much as through capitals.

Corporate Roles in Security and Ethics

Episodes like Project Maven reveal tension between innovation and conscience. Google’s refusal to renew its Pentagon AI contract opened doors for Anduril and Rebellion Defense, startups more comfortable aligning with military goals. Ross’s point is not to moralize but to warn: abstention cedes moral ground to actors who may care less about limits. Democracy’s security requires principled engagement from its tech sector—clear lines, public oversight, and shared standards.

China’s Techno-Authoritarian Alternative

Across the Pacific, China demonstrates a deliberate synthesis of state control and corporate capability. National champions like Huawei and SenseTime integrate artificial intelligence into governance and surveillance, exporting these systems worldwide. CloudWalk’s facial recognition in Zimbabwe and Didi’s government-backed defeat of Uber illustrate how data power translates into geopolitical leverage. The model pairs economic opportunity with political obedience—a powerful, exportable blend.

Democratic Countermodels

Ross contrasts this with open societies that still work: the Nordics’ flexicurity, Canada’s social capitalism, and Australia’s universalist pragmatism. Their success lies in trust, inclusion, and fairness. For younger democracies—especially in Africa—the choice is stark: adopt digital authoritarian tools or design home-grown institutions that couple growth with liberty. The frontier of the social contract is no longer national; it is planetary.

Ross concludes that the world’s next great competition is not East vs. West but closed vs. open systems. You live at a hinge moment where technology can entrench inequality or empower dignity. Which outcome prevails depends on whether governments, businesses, and citizens can once again bargain toward the common good.