With even nursing at risk of becoming an on-call gig-working Uber-like profession, the model could bring about the end of employment and become the main way of organizing labor in the new economy, thinks Sundararajan. But problems arise when casual side hustles turn into full-time gigs. We have “painstakingly” built a system of worker protections, minimum wages, regulations and pension schemes that “transformed full-time employment from something that was pretty reprehensible 100 years ago to something that looks pretty good in many countries today,” says Sundararajan. How will a crowd-based economy look after its workers?

My main goal is to convince people that federalism, which most people associate with conservatism, doesn’t have a political valence. Progressives have long ignored the many democratic benefits associated with federalism and localism because they associate decentralization with racism and parochialism. They look to the national government to protect racial minorities and dissenters. But this is not your father’s federalism. Because minorities can rule at the local level, states and local governments have become sites for empowering racial minorities and dissenters, the very groups that progressives believe have the most to fear from decentralization.

The emerging fields of embodied and enactive cognition have started to take dialogic models of the self more seriously. But for the most part, scientific psychology is only too willing to adopt individualistic Cartesian assumptions that cut away the webbing that ties the self to others. There is a Zulu phrase, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, which means ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ This is a richer and better account, I think, than ‘I think, therefore I am.’