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Maximising output creates psychological stress as a negative externality. Focusing on bellweather indicators of economic performance while disregarding its effect on work-life balance, on income distribution, on insecurity, or the quality of life creates stress-ors that harm the human biological system. Stress in the US has been generated by debilitating poverty, financial insecurity, the highest level of inequality among rich countries, meager social safety nets that might have mitigated the turbulence of adjusting to the new knowledge economy, and the downward social mobility of millions disadvantaged by globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The income of those who attacked the U.S. Congress on January 6, 2021 and were subsequently arrested is estimated for the first time using the annual per-capita income in the neighborhood of their residence as a proxy measure. Contrary to common wisdom, we find that two groups were conspicuously underrepresented from this subset of the insurrectionists (N = 933): the utterly poor (whose estimated per- capita income was below $15 K), as well as those whose estimated annual per-capita income was above $50 K per annum. Fully 83.3 % of the arrestees resided in areas with a (five-year average) annual per capita income between $20 K and $50 K (in 2020 prices). This finding dovetails with the argument that the right-wing populist movement in the U.S. is driven largely by the struggling lower-middle class who have been left behind by the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy. The public policy implications point to the amelioration of this distributional deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]