ABSTRACT
The social and economic foundations of advanced welfare societies have changed significantly since the welfare state’s postwar glory decades from the 1950s to 1970s. Today, the traditional model of predominantly industrial production, a predominantly male labour force, and predominantly stable families with high fertility levels, and a female population predominantly devoted to housework and motherhood simply no longer obtains. Changes in work and family aspirations and in marriage patterns have led to higher divorce rates. The service sector and the knowledge-intensive economy have become predominant, women (including mothers of young children) increasingly work and wish to work. But this is today. Tomorrow is likely to be very different yet again. As the knowledge economy merges with the Second Machine Age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014), the pace of future technological and socio-economic change is likely to be faster still, its scale wider – and its direction only partly known.
