Designing a New Social Contract
Drawing on 15 years at Greater Good Studio, a talk that surfaces how race and class structure society's current contract — and asks who gets to write the next one.
Why we picked this
The argument that a social contract is something designed — with authors, beneficiaries, and people excluded by intent — reframes a policy question as a design problem, and is more unsettling for it.
Most people don’t think of the social contract as something that was deliberately designed. But it was — by someone, for some people, with a particular vision of who belongs and on what terms. This RSA talk draws on fifteen years of experience co-leading Greater Good Studio to surface that act of design and ask what it would take to become intentional authors of the next one, rather than simply governed by someone else’s blueprint.
The talk examines how race and class structure the current contract, surveys efforts to codify a replacement through vehicles like Project 2025, and proposes aging and long-term care as a gateway issue — a domain where the inadequacy of the existing contract is impossible to ignore and where the terms of a new one could be meaningfully contested.
The premise is demanding: that we are not passive recipients of inherited arrangements, but actors in a field of political design. The RSA has spent decades asking these kinds of questions, and the evening format gives them space to land.