Once we recognize that human capital, like technology, needs refreshing, we have to restructure our institutions so people acquire education later in life. We don’t merely need training programs for niche populations or circumstances, expensive and short executive-education programs or brief excursions like TED talks. Instead we need the kind of in-depth education and training people receive routinely at age 13.

In addition, we must recognize that economic upheaval at the macro level means turmoil and instability at the personal level. A lifetime of work will be a lifetime of change, moving between firms, jobs, careers and cities.

Each move has financial and personal costs: It might involve going without a paycheck, looking for new housing, finding a new school district or adjusting to a new vocation. We cannot expect to create a vibrant and flexible overall economy unless we make these shifts as painless as possible. We need a fresh round of policy innovation focused on creating a safety net that gives workers the peace of mind — and the money — to move deftly when circumstances change.

Finally, we can learn from the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s prescient analysis of entrepreneurs. He noted that for new innovations to spread and improve our lives, there will always be creative destruction. For new firms and sectors to arise, some of the old ones must die.

Even if we should be humble in predicting that self-driving vehicles will upend the trucking sector or drone delivery will decimate supermarkets, we can be confident that some creative destruction is coming.

Our current policies — and impulses — are to resist such destruction. If a large manufacturer is set to close, subsidies and other policies kick into action to prevent that shutdown. But while we may save a factory, ultimately we hinder the rise of new technologies; rather than propping up incumbent firms we ought to enable innovation to take its course.

If that idea makes you uneasy, it is probably because our current policies do nothing to protect the most vulnerable from the costs of all this destruction. We resist letting factories close because we worry about what will become of the people who work there. But if we had a social insurance system that allowed workers to move fluidly between jobs, we could comfortably allow firms to follow their natural life and death cycle.