The oldest and simplest justification for government is as protector: protecting citizens from violence.

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan describes a globe of unrelenting insecurity without a authorities to provide the safety of law and order, protecting citizens from each other and from strange foes. The horrors of little or no regime to provide that function are on global display in the world's many fragile states and substantially ungoverned regions. And indeed, when the anarchy of war and disorder mounts too high, citizens will cull fifty-fifty despotic and fanatic governments, such as the Taliban and ISIS, over the depredations of warring bands.

The idea of regime every bit protector requires taxes to fund, train and equip an army and a police force; to build courts and jails; and to elect or appoint the officials to pass and implement the laws citizens must non break. Regarding foreign threats, regime as protector requires the ability to meet and care for with other governments besides as to fight them. This minimalist view of regime is clearly on display in the early days of the American Republic, comprised of the President, Congress, Supreme Court and departments of Treasury, State of war, State and Justice.

Protect and provide

The concept of government equally provider comes next: regime as provider of appurtenances and services that individuals cannot provide individually for themselves. Government in this conception is the solution to collective action problems, the medium through which citizens create public appurtenances that benefit everyone, but that are also subject to costless-rider problems without some collective coercion.

The basic economic infrastructure of homo connectivity falls into this category: the ways of physical travel, such every bit roads, bridges and ports of all kinds, and increasingly the means of virtual travel, such as broadband. All of this infrastructure can be, and typically initially is, provided by private entrepreneurs who meet an opportunity to build a road, say, and charge users a toll, but the majuscule necessary is so bang-up and the public benefit so obvious that ultimately the government takes over.

A more expansive concept of authorities as provider is the social welfare country: government tin cushion the inability of citizens to provide for themselves, particularly in the vulnerable weather condition of youth, old age, sickness, disability and unemployment due to economic forces beyond their command. Every bit the welfare state has evolved, its critics take come to see it more equally a protector from the harsh results of commercialism, or perhaps equally a ways of protecting the wealthy from the political rage of the dispossessed. At its best, however, it is providing an infrastructure of intendance to enable citizens to flourish socially and economically in the aforementioned way that an infrastructure of competition does. It provides a social security that enables citizens to create their ain economical security.

The hereafter of government builds on these foundations of protecting and providing. Authorities will proceed to protect citizens from violence and from the worst vicissitudes of life. Regime will go on to provide public appurtenances, at a level necessary to ensure a globally competitive economy and a well-performance order. But wherever possible, authorities should invest in citizen capabilities to enable them to provide for themselves in rapidly and continually irresolute circumstances.

Non surprisingly, this vision of government every bit investor comes from a deeply entrepreneurial culture. Technology reporter Gregory Ferenstein has polled leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and concluded that they "want the government to exist an investor in citizens, rather than as a protector from commercialism. They want the authorities to heavily fund education, encourage more active citizenship, pursue binding international trade alliances and open borders to all immigrants." In the words of Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt: "The combination of innovation, empowerment and creativity volition exist our solution."

This celebration of human chapters is a welcome antidote to widespread pessimism about the capacity of government to meet current national and global economic, security, demographic and environmental challenges. Put into practice, however, government every bit investor will mean more simply funding schools and opening borders. If government is to assume that in the chief citizens tin solve themselves more efficiently and effectively than regime can provide for them, information technology will accept to invest not simply in the cultivation of citizen capabilities, but also in the provision of the resource and infrastructure to allow citizens to succeed at scale.

Invest in talent

The most important priority of authorities as investor is indeed education, but educational activity cradle-to-grave. The commencement five years are specially essential, as the brain evolution in those years determines how well children will exist able to learn and process what they acquire for the rest of their lives. The government will thus take to invest in an entire infrastructure of child evolution from pregnancy through the beginning of formal schooling, including child nutrition and health, parenting classes, home visits and developmentally appropriate early pedagogy programmes. The teenage years are another period of brain evolution where special programmes, coaching and family support are probable to be needed. Investment in educational activity will fall on barren ground if brains are non capable of receiving and absorbing it. Moreover, meaningful opportunities for continuing education must exist available to citizens over the course of their lives, equally jobs change chop-chop and the acquisition of noesis accelerates.

Even well-educated citizens, however, cannot live upward to their full potential equally creative thinkers and makers unless they take resource to work with. Futurists and business organisation consultants John Hagel III, John Seeley Brown and Lang Davison debate in The Ability of Pull that successful enterprises no longer design a product according to abstruse specifications and push information technology out to customers, but rather provide a platform where individuals can find what they demand and connect to whom they need to be successful. If government actually wishes to invest in citizen talent, it volition accept to provide the same kind of "product" – platforms where citizens tin can shop intelligently and efficiently for everything from wellness insurance to educational opportunities to business licenses and potential concern partners. Those platforms cannot simply be massive data dumps; they must be curated, designed and continually updated for a successful client/citizens experience.

Finally, regime as investor will have to find a way to be anti-calibration. The normal venture capitalist arroyo to investment is to look nine ventures to fail and 1 to accept off and scale upwards. For government, however, more small initiatives that appoint more citizens productively and happily are meliorate than a few large ones. Multiple family restaurants in multiple towns are better than a few large national chains. Woven all together, citizen-enterprise in every conceivable area tin can create a web of national economic enterprise and at least a expert office of a social condom internet. Only government is likely to take to do the weaving.

A government that believes in the talent and potential of its citizens and devote a large portion of its tax revenues to investing in its citizens to assistance them reach that potential is an attractive vision. It avoids the slowness and hierarchy of direct government provision of services, although efficient government units can certainly compete. It recognizes that citizens are quicker and more than creative at responding to change and coming up with new solutions.

But government investment volition accept to recognize and accost the irresolute needs of citizens over their entire lifetimes, provide platforms to assistance them get the resource and brand the connections they demand, and see a whole set of public goods created by the sum of their deliberately many parts.