This chapter begins with the problem of Donald Trump on social media—both the propaganda that led to his election and the companies’ seeming inability to control his supporters while in office—leading up to the January 6 2021 coup attempt. It contextualizes these events in a broader narrative about social media “political bias,” which turns out not to be a problem of bias so much as an effort by politicians to intimidate companies into under-moderating their allies. Such efforts aim to leverage the inability of the companies to exercise self-control in the face of short-term temptations and threats. Platforms, like governments, have problems with internal governance, in which personnel have incentives that diverge from the interests of the overall organization or operate under suboptimal time horizons. In the literature on governments, the tools to mitigate these problems tend to travel under the rubric of “the rule of law.” This chapter defends the idea of dispersing power to independent institutions under the control or at least supervision of diverse groups of employees and nonemployees as a key tool to create a kind of platform rule of law.

What are the underlying challenges that create the climate impasse? This chapter explains why compensation and investments that are supposed to facilitate a clean energy transition face credibility challenges. These challenges arise from various sources, such as today’s government cannot perfectly control what tomorrow’s government does, and uncertainty about whether the government represents the interests of people and communities impacted by policy reforms. Finally, we argue that new industries might be seen as providing few local economic benefits. In light of these challenges, we propose solutions to create credibility and build support for the energy transition.

Chapter 2 presents the (formal) theoretical framework and advances four arguments. First, whether or not majority support for public provision of insurance exists depends on the distribution of information. Second, some insurance is best provided via pay-as-you-go systems, but these involve a difficult time-inconsistency problem that private markets cannot solve. Some social insurance is therefore bound to remain almost entirely within the purview of the state. Third, people’s preferences regarding social insurance are also a function of the availability of private options. If social insurance is the only game in town, even those subsidizing the system will support it, leading to broad cross-class majorities. With private alternatives, the better-off will lower their support for public spending, which erodes the broad support public social policy programs traditionally enjoy. Fourth, parties continue to matter because they represent different risk groups, and we expect that partisan conflicts will extend into new areas, most importantly the regulation of information and how it may be used.