Fewer than 1 out of 100 Tyee readers enable everyone else to read us. Be a hero. Join the 1%! “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.” When American activist and social worker Jane Addams wrote these words in 1893, the world was in the heyday of its first run with free-market capitalism and liberalism. Ideas about the “common good” were not popular in the mainstream. The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries had paved the way for a cultural shift away from local economies and communal dependence. In Europe and North America, society’s focus was on mechanization, large-scale growth and a bootstraps-and-grit ethic that dictated an “every person for themselves” approach to life and work.