This book pretty much puts into succinct and powerful terms what I've been struggling to wrap my head around my whole life: what led to the destruction of the social safety net in the US+UK, and how can we stop this destruction or at least minimize its extent? This book, along with Neil Postman's "Technopoly" that I read concurrently, makes an incredibly strong case for the idea that technological and economic progress in and of itself is insufficient for true human progress, and can in fact be antithetical to human progress without some actual worthwhile social/moral goals guiding its direction. All in all, it's probably the clearest book I've read giving historical context to why we cannot allow free market ideology to guide our decisions as a polity.