Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

by Jane Borden

The propagation of the ideology claiming work is holy and idleness a sin continues because it is convenient to those who profit off of it—who profit by seeing the chronically poor as a resource they can extract. For example, the $11 billion charged in overdraft fees in 2021 by the biggest banks. Those most likely to overdraw their accounts are, of course, those with the least amount of money in the accounts. (The alternative is for funds not to be available.) The 9 percent of customers who carried average balances of less than $350 were responsible for 84 percent of that $11 billion gross profit. Sometimes people were charged overdraft fees on the same account multiple times a day. “The poor were made to pay for their poverty,” writes Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University and author of Poverty, by America.