ABSTRACT
Security for individuals rests on three pillars or as is sometimes said three legs of a stool. These are family, insurance and government. The weakness of the family in providing security is that it is too small, too susceptible to dissolution and reshaping, and in American society, too committed to a sense of obligation based on affection to guarantee long-term security. Programs like universal basic income support the goals of individualism and security, without assuming fixed group affiliations. The shifting of domestic partners and domestic arrangements is another signal of this attitude toward reinvention. The welfare states of Europe decide that their traditional approaches are too expensive to be sustained. Individuals may have identities that are fluid, so that membership becomes a complex question. Utopian thinking on poverty and state continues, of course, and some of it concerns the pillars of security.
