[...] defying the odds is, by definition, improbable. And while it may work as advice in a business world predicated on competition, to fashion a democratic educational policy around the possibility of defying odds makes little sense. If everyone, or even many people, could defy the odds, then casinos would be bankrupt.

[...] Another advantage to employers of treating education or health care as human capital development is that risk in labor markets can be outsourced to employees. Why train someone on the job when they might just leave and take their knowledge elsewhere? Why spend time and money teaching skills that may prove obsolete sooner than you think? And why pay into the health insurance of workers who insist on eating too much junk food on the weekend? Instead, let employees pay for their own college credentials and pursue their own wellness plan. The ideology of human capital asks one to think of nearly every form of social existence in terms of an actuarial calculation.

[...] As Young himself wrote in a 2001 essay deploring his term's enthusiastic adoption by the New Labour government of Tony Blair, that education had become a means of concentrating power. "It is good sense," he wrote, "to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." In short, Blair had missed the point of meritocracy, embracing the ideal of "merit" while forgetting the "aristocracy" part.

[...] NAFTA and American agribusiness are treated not as political circumstances but as metaphorical storms: since "we cannot control the volatile tides of change," they write," we can learn to build better boats." These examples are all part of a long tradition of naturalizing our contemporary political and economic order, treating food shortages and layoffs as if they are acts of nature that can never change. Resilience, once a property of the environment, has become a property of people. And those most vulnerable to the environmental shocks associated with modern capitalism are also responsible for becoming more resilient against them.

If the technology behind the sharing economy is not the source of its dominance, though, what is? "Financialization" may be the most relevant answer. "Finance, at its most basic level," writes the cultural critic Alison Shonkwiler, "is the domain in which value is less likely to be produced than captured and/or extraction, typically by managing a degree of risk." The "financialization" of the ecconomy is the orientation of capital accumulation (i.e., making money from the labor of others) around this extraction of value. Shonkwiler, following critics like David Harvey, argues that financialization is what is really new about the economy of the turn of hte twenty-first century. In the sharing economy, neither homes nor technologies are produced; instead, rents are extracted from assets owned by others. [...]