In a 2007 paper, Beck argues that in the new social order, traditional classes – and traditional bonds of community — are disappearing. In their place, an alternative social hierarchy has emerged with comparable inequities:

Risk and social inequality — indeed, risk and power — are two sides of the same coin. Risk presumes a decision, therefore a decision maker, and produces a radical asymmetry between those who take, define the risks and profit from them, and those who are assigned to them, who have to suffer the ‘unforeseen side effects’ of the decisions of others, perhaps even pay for them with their lives, without having had the chance to be involved in the decision-making process.

Insofar as individualization has taken hold in the United States, the prospects for collective action on behalf of the poor are dim, at best.

Collective action on behalf of the poor requires a shared belief in the obligation of the state to secure the well-being of the citizenry. That belief has been undermined by what Beck calls the “insourcing” of risk, transferring obligations from the state to the individual. This reallocation of responsibility has been studied from various angles.

In his book “The Great Risk Shift,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, joins the argument by documenting the economic pressures on individuals resulting from the widespread erosion of social insurance. “For decades, Americans and their government upheld a powerful set of ideals that combined a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity,” Hacker writes. “Today that message is starkly different: You are on your own.”

Collective social action, in turn, has been supplanted by a different kind of revolt. David A. Snow , professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, noted that the top priorities of the specific movements associated with individualization – “the feminist movement, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender movements, the black power movement, the disability rights movement, and, most recently, the fat-acceptance movement” – do not lend themselves to broad economic demands on behalf of the less well off.

Instead, Snow wrote in a chapter of the 2013 book “The Future of Social Movement Research,”

concern with distributional inequities and injustices tends to take a back seat to procedural issues and injustices bearing on rights and associated matters of inclusion and exclusion and to group reputational issues.

The most recent example of the populace’s rising up to substantially change the course of legislation was not in support of raising the minimum wage or of making the tax system more progressive. It was the enormous and successful outcry – three million emails to Congress, a petition with 4.5 million signatures, 2.4 million tweets and 10 million calls to members of Congress — over the attempted enactment of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012. Supporters of the net neutrality movement saw free or low-cost access to music and video resources on the Internet threatened by the measure. Their complaints, backed by tech firms whose profits depend on open access to the Internet — Google, Facebook, eBay, Twitter etc. – defeated the bill backed by their commercial adversaries, the music, motion picture and cable industries.

Compare the SOPA protest to the sole organized attempt to challenge the flow of wealth to the top 1 percent and the profits funneled to the finance industry: Occupy Wall Street, which collapsed in less than a year, despite intensive, generally favorable media coverage.

Instead of boosting prospects for the poor and working class, the agenda associated with individualization works in tandem with rapid technological advance, the internationalization of commerce and the demise of the paternalistic or loyalty-based workplace to exacerbate inequality. This agenda has contributed to an upheaval in traditional family structures. And the well educated and the affluent are better equipped to adapt to such upheaval while the less well off and the less well educated bear the brunt of change.