When we shrink the welfare state because we expect the worst from people, we end up hurting ourselves and those we care about, creating a vicious cycle that stokes desperation and division.

The command to live life according to market priorities is so persuasive precisely because it is coupled with threats—threats of unemployment, destitution, shame, loss of status, and respect.

unlike greed, which afflicts specific individuals, market forces impact us all, touching and moulding even the most intimate facets of our lives.

We work hard, shop hard, hustle, get credentialed, scrimp and save, invest, diet, self-medicate, meditate, exercise, exfoliate. Like the Stoics before us, we engage in self-care, hoping it might help us one day care less.

Before the wage earner could emerge as our society’s paradigmatic subject, a condition historian Michael Denning calls “wagelessness” had to be imposed. “Capitalism,” Denning writes, “begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living.”24 In other words, it begins with manufactured insecurity—insecurity in its new modern

you do not have to be at rock bottom to feel insecure, because insecurity results as much from expectation as from deprivation.

The aim was to “increase the number of hands for labour, by removing the means of subsisting in idleness,” as one outspoken proprietor put it.

When the Pew Charitable Trusts conducted a poll asking if people would prefer financial stability to upward mobility, more than nine out of ten respondents said they would eagerly abandon the pursuit of wealth for security.

The hazard, in other words, comes from the possibility that millions of people might be less stressed-out and more free.