Day after day, almost all of politics and media is dead set on bludgeoning your brain with one counterintuitive idea: that you can’t make the world a better place, and you shouldn’t even try, because the obvious solutions to people’s miseries would actually just make everything worse.

You hear it all the time. You can’t do a rent freeze, because it will make more people homeless. You can’t pay minimum wage workers more, because it will actually put more people out of work. We can’t move to a four-day workweek, because it will destroy the economy. We can’t have universal health care, because it will make the quality of health care worse.

This is all wrong. But you don’t need to decipher arcane economic models, read scores of academic studies, or even consult a small army of experts to know it’s wrong. You can be sure it is because these apocalyptic predictions are what the forces of greed — big business, right-wing politicians, and the corporate press loyal to both — have always made about any attempt to improve the lives of people who work for a living, going back more than a century.