Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living—the operating system on which we are now running our social software—was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.

Although it launched an era of home ownership as private enterprise, Levittown was itself made possible by a massive government subsidy. Even though a lion’s share of the money ultimately ended up going to the Levitt brothers, without those subsidies the vast majority of residents never would have become home owners on their own. Not that its curre

The problem is that amassing a huge wad of cash and then doling it out through a centralized foundation is structurally biased toward exacerbating corporatism, not reducing it.

The ideal of home ownership was the fruit of a public-relations strategy crafted after World War II—corporate and government leaders alike believed that home owners would have more of a stake in an expanding economy and greater allegiance to free-market values than renters. Functionally, though, it led to a self-perpetuating cycle: The more that we

as originally pointed out by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is that by removing something from its original context or setting, we kill the sense of awe that we might attach to its uniqueness. Great works of art were once intrinsically a part of their settings.

We need to understand how this happened—how we came to live for and through a business scheme. We must recount the story of how life itself became corporatized, and figure out what——if anything—we are to do about it.

We cannot market our way out of corporatism.

Behavioral finance is the study of the way people consistently act against their own best financial interests, as well as how to exploit these psychological weaknesses when peddling questionable securities and products. These are proven behaviors with industry-accepted names like “money illusion bias,” “loss aversion theory,” “irrationality bias,”

While Godey’s Lady’s Book and the “domestic science” texts of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Beecher created the mythology of woman as queen of the house and competent homemaker, other writings depicted an equally compelling role for men to fill, utterly dependent on the attainment of a private home. Walt Whitman wrote, “A man is not a whole o