It was a cousin of the preexisting American economic fable, that we were a society where practically everybody was middle class, a fantasy that still felt plausible, just barely. And Americans’ founding attraction to the excitingly untrue had been growing like mad since the 1960s. The early 1980s were thus an ideal moment for selling this new fantasy of painless big change in the political economy—that the experts had finally figured out a way to have no losers at all and no fights over deciding who gets how much.*2
