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Among affluent countries, those with market-liberal regimes (which are also English-speaking) tend to have the highest prevalence of obesity. The impact of cheap, accessible high-energy food is often invoked in explanation. An alternative approach is that overeating is a response to stress, and that competition, uncertainty and inequality make market-liberal societies more stressful. This chapter reports an ecological regression meta-study that pools 96 surveys from 11 countries, using data collected in the years 1994 to 2004. The fast-food ‘shock’ impact is found to work most strongly in market-liberal countries. Economic insecurity, measured in several different ways, is almost twice as powerful, while the impact of inequality is weak.

While conventional wisdom holds that excessive body weight is the product of some combination of a high-calorie diet and a sedentary lifestyle, public health measures aimed at these factors have been met with only limited success. This chapter considers the possibility that obesity might be better understood in terms of the biologist's notion that humans and other animals evolved the ability to store body fat as an optimal response to the presence of starvation risk. Evidence from a broad array of disciplines is consistent with this view, including the neuroendocrinology of energy homeostasis, parallels between human and animal fattening behaviour, the effect of stress on dietary intake, population-level studies of the impact of economic insecurity on body weight and international variation in obesity rates.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of economic insecurity. Economic insecurity can be defined as “the risk of economic loss faced by workers and households as they encounter the unpredictable events of life.” Insecurity is associated with income loss caused by “adverse events” such as unemployment and poor health; the negative impact of these shocks on households depends “on the surrounding institutions that regulate risk.” Indeed, the extent to which workers suffered financial distress from income shocks depended in large part on the social safety net—the existing institutions of public and private assistance. For nineteenth-century England and Wales, the main social welfare institution was the Poor Law, a system of public relief administered and financed at the local level. The Old Poor Law of 1795–1834 was “a welfare state in miniature,” relieving the elderly, widows, children, the sick, the disabled, and the unemployed and underemployed.

This chapter examines how people respond when the issues at stake refer to economic insecurity. It presents the results of a series of experiments in which citizens were randomly assigned to receive requests that mentioned either insecurity issues like education costs and healthcare costs or other issues unrelated to financial constraints that people could be facing in their own lives. The requests all involved real political organizations and the opportunity to donate real time or money to the cause. The organizations themselves ran the gamut from professionally run, national organizations with headquarters in Washington, D.C. to a local nonprofit that provides critical health care services to the community. All of them function at least in part, as prototypical examples of the types of groups that became common following the “advocacy explosion” in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter presents a theory about how people decide to spend money or time on something. It shows the link between being reminded of a personal financial constraint and actual behavior requires stating a theory about how people decide to spend money or time on something. The starting assumption is that there are a significant number of people who find economic insecurity issues to be important political issues. Another starting assumption is that decisions to donate time and money to politics typically do not arise spontaneously but instead upon receipt of a request. With these two assumptions in place, the chapter considers how people decide whether they can spend scarce resources of money or time on politics. It draws upon seminal work in behavioral economics and consumer psychology. Given that this work was originally developed and tested in terms of monetary expenditures, it begins by discussing only monetary donations and later expands this to consider how decisions to spend time are both similar and different.

This chapter considers the prospects for political change in the face of communicative barriers to collective action. It begins to address this question by identifying several of the most well-known historical and recent moments in which there was large-scale mobilization on some economic insecurity issues. This discussion, in concert with the empirical findings in this book, helps clarify the prospects for political action (and policy change) on these issues. The chapter then uses the findings from the book to identify three types of people that are most likely to become active. It also talks about the implications of having this (narrower) set of people active as opposed to the full range of people that find the issues to be important. It concludes by reiterating how self-undermining rhetoric is a broad concept that can apply in many different situations beyond those considered herein.

This chapter argues that the Liberal Welfare Reforms of 1906–11, which created a safety net reducing the economic insecurity associated with industrial capitalism, marked a watershed in the history of British social welfare policy. Their timing is explained by increased middle-class knowledge of workers' insecurity and by the greater willingness of Parliament to act as a result of growing working-class political influence. The chapter then compares British social welfare policies with social policies elsewhere in Western Europe. Britain's welfare reforms did not take place in isolation—several European nations adopted social welfare policies in the decades leading up to 1914. Indeed, Britain was a bit of a latecomer in the adoption of social programs, although it caught up quickly after 1906 and by the eve of the First World War was a leader in social welfare protection.

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Great Recession that followed, insecurity emerged as a central theme in elections across the developed democracies. But what drives feelings of insecurity? In this chapter we show that mass perceptions of economic precariousness are shaped not only by individual- and macro-level economic conditions but by political elites as well. Elites take action to buffer the effects of economic downturn through concrete policy efforts. Politicians and party leaders can also help calm insecure voters through their messages, speeches, and rhetoric. Statistical analyses of CSES data show that the financial crisis has both short-term and long-term effect on individuals’ economic perceptions. Furthermore, feelings of insecurity are shaped by elite cues. Party emphases on welfare concerns serve to moderate the impact of individual risk exposure on perceived insecurity. Chapter implications are twofold. First, a complete understanding of its political effects requires taking into account the effect of the crisis at both stages of development and recovery. And second, what matters for feelings of (in)security is less the magnitude of the crisis but elites’ ability to demonstrate an effective response.

Debt of households has been rising rapidly since 1995. The debt to income ratio of the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution has risen well above 140 percent. The same measure for the top five percent has been stable near 60 percent for 25 years. Low interest rates, easy credit terms, subprime mortgages, and mortgage refinancings have all stimulated consumer borrowing. The housing bubble, nationwide, encouraged consumers to extract cash from their properties. Panel regressions relating per capita household debt to declining income shares by state of the bottom 80 percent show that as income shares decline household debt rises. Economic insecurity objectively measured has been rising. The share of household budgets spent on the necessities of housing, health care and education have risen for all quintiles. Prices of those three have exceeded inflation for 20 years. Stagnant incomes and rising prices for those necessities have lured households to take on more debt to sustain their standard of living.

A key plank of Galbraith’s argument concerning the impact of affluence on contemporary society was the claim that the age-old problem of economic insecurity had all but disappeared as a factor in most people’s lives, especially in the America of his day. Developments since he wrote – particularly since the 1970s – have fatally undermined this bold position, at both the micro level of household and firm and the macro level of the economy at large. This chapter outlines the Galbraithian argument and then analyses the way recent developments have systematically undermined or reversed the forces he pointed to as driving the change to universal security. This discussion allows us to focus on the genesis and outcomes of the continuing trend to greater insecurity that characterizes the twenty-first century looking forward.

This chapter discusses the impact of subjective risk on workers' attitudes, preferences, and behaviors under shared capitalism and whether employee ownership and other forms of worker equity participation be consistent with proper diversification and shared capitalism. The three components of a worker's economic insecurity score are the size of each worker's fixed annual pay, how many multiples each worker's total wealth (minus debt) is relative to that worker's fixed annual pay, and the extent to which each worker perceives they are competitively paid in the firm where they work. It has been demonstrated that as economic insecurity of workers rises, it is associated with worse worker attitudes toward shared capitalism, preferences for variable pay, and behavioral outcomes under shared capitalist arrangements. The level of economic insecurity also influences how well they actually respond to shared capitalist arrangements such as employee ownership in their workplace.

This chapter examines American anxieties about the longstanding foundations of American society and thought. By the 1970s, American society would be buffeted by powerful crosscurrents which reshaped both the nation and the world beyond it. Military, political, economic, and environmental crises unfolded rapidly on top of each other, leaving many citizens uncertain of which to address first and how to do so. In the backwash of defeat in Vietnam and humiliation from the Watergate scandal, and in the midst of inflation and an oil crisis, distrust of government pervaded American society, the loss of confidence in public authority laid the foundation for deregulation and a turn toward the free market, a path that led to growing disparities between rich and poor. At the same time, the more tolerant and individualistic mainstream American culture increasingly rejected old forms of group discrimination and inequality.

This chapter explores the story of the 1942 Beveridge Report and the beginnings of the welfare state. The policies proposed by Beveridge and the 1945–48 legislation were logical extensions of government's expanding role in social welfare policy beginning with the Liberal Welfare Reforms. This does not mean that the importance of the postwar legislation should be downplayed. Because of the adoption of the National Health Service, universal coverage, and equality of treatment, Britain after 1948 deserves to be called a welfare state, while Edwardian and interwar Britain do not. Unfortunately, despite the enthusiasm with which the public greeted the welfare state, the postwar policies did not eliminate economic insecurity.

This chapter describes the interwar expansion of social welfare policies and their role in alleviating economic insecurity in an era of unprecedented unemployment. The social security system established before the war and extended in the 1920s consisted of several independently administered programs—unemployment insurance, sickness and disability insurance, old age pensions, widows' and orphans' insurance, and the Poor Law. This safety net of many colors proved to be quite successful in alleviating poverty and maintaining the well-being of working-class households. The important role played by the safety net is clearly shown in the social surveys undertaken in the 1930s—between one-third and one-half of all working-class families surveyed received social income of some form. While the condition of the working class would have been considerably worse without the safety net, it contained many holes, which led to calls for a restructuring of social policy.

This chapter explores the likely prevalence of hardship in old age for individuals now nearing retirement. We use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study to determine what observable demographic, socioeconomic, and financial factors in late middle age predicted economic hardship in old age for the cohort nearing retirement in the mid-1990s. These findings are then used to predict economic hardship in old age for the cohort nearing retirement age in the mid-2010s. Our analysis suggests that the more recent cohort is likely to realize higher economic insecurity, particularly among men.

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between party strategies and the political be-havior of insiders and outsiders in the labor market, concentrating on the risk that outsiders may become politically alienated and marginalized. Taking the case of Sweden as our guide, we argue that labor market outsiders who perceive that they are being ignored by social de-mocratic parties become more likely to exit politics or to support more radical political alter-natives. We combine an analysis of election campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s with an analy-sis of survey data from the Swedish National Election Studies.