Money is the Devil's Lettuce: a scientific analysis on philanthropy

I. The broken promise

In 2012, a graduate student named Celeste Kidd sat down across a small table from a four-year-old at the University of Rochester and handed the child an art project. The child had a paper cup to decorate and a small set of used crayons to do it with. Kidd told the child that if they waited, she would go and get a bigger, better set of art supplies. Then she left the room. For half of the twenty-eight children in her study, Kidd came back with the new supplies, just as she had said she would. For the other half, she came back with nothing, said she was sorry, and explained that there were no other supplies after all. The same thing happened a second time with a set of stickers. Then Kidd set a single marshmallow on the table and made the oldest offer in American psychology. The child could eat the marshmallow now, or wait until she came back and have two.

The children whose grown-up had kept her promises waited about twelve minutes. The children whose grown-up had broken her promises waited about three. Kidd and her advisers, Holly Palmeri and Richard Aslin, called the paper "Rational Snacking," and the title carried the whole finding. The children who ate early had just watched an adult fail to deliver twice, and they acted on what they had seen.

The marshmallow test that Kidd was answering began in the late 1960s, at the nursery school on Stanford University's campus, where the psychologist Walter Mischel and his colleagues offered preschoolers a treat now or two treats later. Years afterward, Mischel's team followed up with some of those children and reported that the ones who had waited longer at four tended to have higher SAT scores and better ratings from their parents as teenagers. The result traveled far beyond the lab. It turned up in parenting books, business seminars, and school-reform plans, and it settled into the culture as a lesson about character. Children who can wait will succeed, the lesson said, and children should be taught to wait.

The lesson rested on a small group of children, most of them the sons and daughters of Stanford professors and graduate students, and the research since then has pulled it back toward the children's lives. In 2016, Laura Michaelson and Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado found that preschoolers did not even need to be let down themselves. Children who simply watched an adult lie to another person waited less for a treat that the same adult promised them. In 2018, Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan, and Haonan Quan studied about nine hundred children from a national study with far more varied backgrounds. Waiting at four still lined up with school achievement at fifteen, but the link was about half as strong as the original reports, and when the researchers accounted for family background, early thinking skills, and home life, about two thirds of what was left went away. Much of what the marshmallow measured was the household each child went home to.

I have spent twenty-five years in Indianapolis working with neighbors, grantmakers, churches, and city agencies, and I have heard some version of the marshmallow lesson in nearly every room. It usually arrives as advice to people with very little money, and it usually comes from people with enough. It tells them to save, to wait, and to hope. Kidd's children suggest a different reading of the people who eat now. They are often reading their world correctly.

This essay follows a provocation I have not been able to put down. Hope is the devil's tool. It is a hard sentence to say out loud, because hope is what we offer the sick, the grieving, and the poor, and it has carried my own people and my neighbors through things I would not wish on anyone. I mean it as a metaphor and a question. Each time hope shows up in this story, the question is the same. Who is asking people to wait, what are they waiting for, and who holds the thing they were promised?

II. Breakfast for jays

In 2007, Caroline Raby and Nicola Clayton at the University of Cambridge kept eight western scrub-jays in a row of three small rooms. Some mornings a jay woke up in a room where breakfast was served, and other mornings it woke up in a room where no breakfast came at all. After six days, the researchers gave the jays pine nuts one evening and let them hide the nuts wherever they liked. The jays were not hungry that evening, and they hid about three times as many nuts in the room where breakfast never came.

The jays have company. Clark's nutcrackers, birds of the western mountains, bury tens of thousands of pine seeds each fall and dig many of them up months later from under the snow. In 2006, Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig watched bonobos and orangutans choose a tool, carry it out of a room, and bring it back an hour later, and in one version fourteen hours later, to get food out of a puzzle box. In 2017, Can Kabadayi and Mathias Osvath at Lund University found that ravens would pass up a small treat in front of them for a tool or a trading token, keep it, and use it to earn a better reward as much as seventeen hours later.

The cuttlefish may be the most surprising of them all. In 2021, Alexandra Schnell and her colleagues gave cuttlefish their own marshmallow test. A piece of king prawn sat behind one door, ready to eat, and a live grass shrimp, which cuttlefish like better, sat behind a second door that would open later. The cuttlefish waited for the shrimp for fifty seconds to more than two minutes, and the ones that waited longest learned fastest on a separate task. A cuttlefish lives alone and usually dies before it turns two. It has no bank, no Sunday school, and no grandmother telling it to put something away for a rainy day, and it still waits for the better shrimp. Schnell's team thinks the patience comes from the way cuttlefish hunt, sitting still in camouflage until the right moment to strike.

People have been doing this for a very long time. About 11,300 years ago, at a place now called Dhra', near the Dead Sea in Jordan, villagers built round mud granaries with floors raised on stones and wooden beams, so air could move under the grain and mice could not get in. They filled the granaries with wild barley, a thousand years before anyone in that valley planted a tamed crop. The archaeologists Ian Kuijt, of the University of Notre Dame, and Bill Finlayson found the granaries standing between the houses, in shared space, where the whole village could reach them. Over the next fifteen hundred years, storage in that part of the world moved inside the houses, and later into rooms built only for storing. Kuijt reads that move as an early change in who owned the food.

The scientists who study these animals are careful, and their care matters to my argument. In 2007, the psychologists Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis argued that picturing yourself inside a future scene may belong to humans alone, and that learning and instinct explain much of what animals do. Researchers still argue about whether a jay pictures tomorrow morning or has learned that one room goes with an empty stomach. What they can watch is the caching, the carrying, and the waiting. What they cannot watch is how any of it feels from the inside.

One experiment comes close. In 2004, Emma Harding, Elizabeth Paul, and Michael Mendl at the University of Bristol taught rats to press a lever when they heard one tone, which brought food, and to hold back when they heard another, which brought an unpleasant noise. Then they played tones in between that could mean either. Rats that had been living in unpredictable housing, with their cages and routines changed around them, were slower to treat the in-between tones as good news. Later studies found that rats who had been tickled by a friendly hand leaned the other way. The researchers do not claim that a rat feels hope the way a person does. They use the pattern as a sign of mood. The rats in Bristol and the children in Rochester did the same thing. Each of them expected good things in proportion to how reliable their world had been.

The jays, the cuttlefish, and the villagers at Dhra' all prepared for hunger before they felt it. Saving is as old as hunger, and we share it with birds. Anyone who wants to call saving unnatural has to get past the jay first. The granaries at Dhra' carry a second lesson too. Soon after people learned to store food, they began deciding who held the store and who had to ask for it.

III. Barns

In Sunday schools and sermons, the story of Joseph is usually told as a story about good planning. Joseph reads Pharaoh's dream, sees seven fat years and seven lean ones coming, and fills the royal storehouses with grain while times are good. When the famine comes, Egypt has bread. The part that usually goes unread is Genesis 47. The hungry people came to Pharaoh's storehouses and paid for grain with their money. When the money ran out, they paid with their livestock. When the livestock ran out, they paid with their land. When the land was gone, they offered their own bodies and told Joseph they would be Pharaoh's servants. The same barns that kept a nation alive turned its people into property.

Two books later, in Exodus 16, God feeds the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, and the rule is to gather enough for one day. Some people kept extra overnight anyway, and in the King James wording it "bred worms, and stank." On the sixth day the people gathered a double portion for the Sabbath, and that stored food stayed good. In Luke 12, Jesus tells about a rich farmer whose harvest is so big that he tears down his barns and builds bigger ones, so he can take his ease for years. The farmer dies that same night with the barns full.

Joseph, the people in the wilderness, and the rich farmer all stored food. Joseph's storehouse fed a nation until one man held the key and everyone else had to come and ask. The manna kept when people stored it for rest and rotted when they stored it out of fear that tomorrow's bread would not come. The rich farmer's barns kept growing past any use. Read together, these stories draw a line between storing and hoarding, and the line runs through the question of who controls the store and what the store is for.

The word savings covers all of this and more. Storage is putting aside food, seed, tools, or money for a later need, the way a jay hides pine nuts or a grandmother cans tomatoes in August. Banking is handing your stored money to an institution that promises to give it back, usually with interest, and lends it to other people in the meantime. Hoarding is holding far more than you need while your neighbors go without. The anthropologist David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, shows how credit and money have been bound up with kings, temples, and war since ancient Mesopotamia, and how often the words for debt and sin have run together.

The American version of the saving sermon has a famous author. In 1758, Benjamin Franklin gathered the sayings of his Poor Richard into a short piece called "The Way to Wealth," full of advice about thrift, hard work, and patience, and it was printed hundreds of times. In 1905, the German sociologist Max Weber argued that the Puritan habit of disciplined work and plain living, done as a sign of God's favor, helped build the mindset of modern capitalism. Historians still argue about how far Weber was right. By the 1800s, though, thrift had become a public virtue, and it was preached hardest to working people. In 1967, the English historian E. P. Thompson described how factory owners, preachers, and schoolmasters spent generations teaching workers to live by the clock, to arrive on time, and to put off their pleasures until Saturday pay. They did it with bells, fines, and Sunday schools. Delayed gratification, in Thompson's telling, was trained into working people by the people who needed them at the machines.

IV. The passbook

In the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, there is a small deposit book that belonged to a woman named Mary Jane Johnson of Augusta, Georgia. Her bank was the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, which Congress chartered on March 3, 1865, as the Civil War was ending. The bank was created for people who had just come out of slavery, and the white reformers behind it wanted freedpeople to learn the habit of saving. Freedpeople did not need the lesson. They saved, and they kept saving, and the bank opened branches across the South to hold their money.

The men who ran the bank did not keep their end of the promise. Its white trustees moved deposits out of safe government bonds and into risky loans, fraud spread through its management, and the Panic of 1873 hit it hard. In March 1874, with the bank failing, the trustees made Frederick Douglass its president. Douglass put his own money into the bank to steady it. Within a few months he understood what he had been handed, and he asked Congress to close it. On June 29, 1874, the Freedman's Bank shut its doors owing $2,993,790.68 to 61,144 depositors.

Many of those depositors believed the government stood behind the bank, because Congress had chartered it and the Freedmen's Bureau had promoted it. Congress refused to pay them back. Over the following years, about half of the depositors got back about half of what they had put in. The rest lost everything. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that more years of slavery could hardly have done more to "throttle the thrift of the freedmen" than that bank's failure did.

Mary Jane Johnson and tens of thousands of other freedpeople did exactly what they were told to do. They worked, they waited, and they put their money away for a better future, and an institution chartered by their own government lost it. That is the first place in this story where hope and saving meet a broken promise at full size.

The legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran follows the same pattern through Jim Crow and redlining in The Color of Money. She shows that Black Americans were told again and again to save their way to equality, while they were denied the loans, the land, and the rising home values that make savings grow. The people most praised for thrift were the people whose savings the system protected. The people most lectured about thrift were the people whose savings the system kept losing.

The depositors did not go quiet. They and their children petitioned Congress for their money for decades, and members of Congress introduced bills to repay them again and again from the 1880s into the twentieth century. Their hope took the form of a claim made in public.

V. Two thousand dollars

Supplemental Security Income, known as SSI, is the monthly federal check for very poor Americans who are elderly, blind, or disabled. To keep it, a single person can own no more than $2,000 in savings and other countable assets, and a married couple no more than $3,000. Congress set those limits in the 1980s, they took effect in 1989, and they have never been raised. In 2026, the largest federal SSI check for one person is $994 a month. A disabled woman who puts a little away each month for a new furnace, a used car, or her own funeral can cross the line without knowing it, lose her check, and in most states lose the health coverage that comes with it. Reporters have found people who were billed for tens of thousands of dollars in past benefits because a small life-insurance policy pushed them over the limit.

In 1995, the economists R. Glenn Hubbard, Jonathan Skinner, and Stephen Zeldes showed that rules like this give poor families a strong and sensible reason to save less. The country tells the disabled woman to save for a rainy day, and the rule takes her check away when her rainy-day fund reaches $2,001. A bipartisan bill to raise the limit to $10,000 for one person has been introduced in Congress again this year. Until it passes, the people who need help the most can lose that help by following the oldest advice in America.

Every fall, the Federal Reserve asks Americans how they would pay a surprise $400 bill. In the survey taken in October 2025, 63 percent of adults said they would pay it with cash or its equivalent, and more than a third said they would have to borrow, sell something, or go without paying. The gap by schooling is wide. In the 2024 survey, 82 percent of adults with a bachelor's degree could cover the bill with cash, and only 29 percent of adults without a high school diploma could. What a third of the country lacks is the $400.

Scarcity also changes the mind that is doing the saving. In 2013, Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao showed that money worries take up room in a person's thinking. Lower-income shoppers at a New Jersey mall did worse on reasoning tests after they were asked to think about a large car-repair bill. Sugarcane farmers in India did worse on the same kinds of tests before harvest, when money was short, than after harvest, when it came in. The same farmer thought less clearly when he was poorer. Scarcity pulls a person's attention toward whatever is most urgent, which is a sensible thing for a mind to do when life is urgent.

The disabled woman, the third of Americans without $400, and the farmer before harvest are living the marshmallow test every day, at a table where the grown-up has already broken a few promises. Some of them eat the marshmallow, and they have good reasons. Immediate need tells us about a person's life, and it tells us very little about that person's character.

VI. Pandora's jar

Around 700 B.C., the Greek poet Hesiod told the story of Pandora. Zeus sent her to humankind with a jar. She lifted the lid and let every trouble out into the world, and one thing stayed inside, caught under the rim. Its name was Elpis, a Greek word usually translated as hope, which can also mean plain expectation. Readers have argued for nearly three thousand years about whether hope was the one good thing left behind to comfort us or one more evil that Zeus kept in reserve. In 1878, in Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche took the darker reading. He wrote that Zeus wanted people to keep living no matter how much the other evils hurt them, so he gave them hope, and that hope is the worst evil of all because it stretches the suffering out.

In Nietzsche's telling, the one who could end the suffering hands the sufferer hope instead, and hope keeps the sufferer patient, quiet, and at work. That is the oldest picture I know of hope as the devil's tool.

The picture keeps coming back. In 1844, Karl Marx called religion "the opium of the people," in a passage that also describes it as the comfort of people living under oppression. In 1911, the labor organizer Joe Hill wrote "The Preacher and the Slave," a parody of a hymn sung by the street bands that competed with union speakers for crowds of hungry workers, and his song gave English the phrase "pie in the sky" for a reward promised after death to people told to accept hunger now. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail to eight white clergymen who had asked Black citizens to be patient. He told them that the word "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." King was writing to men who asked other people to wait while they themselves were waiting for nothing.

In 2011, the cultural critic Lauren Berlant gave the pattern a name, cruel optimism. Berlant used it for an attachment to something a person longs for that is itself keeping that person from thriving, such as the dream of a steady job and a good house, held by people whose jobs and houses keep slipping away. And in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that the love of money was a disease that a richer future would one day see clearly. Until that future came, he wrote, "avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still." He guessed that in about a hundred years people would work around fifteen hours a week and live well. Nearly a hundred years have passed, the fifteen-hour week never came, and the gods he named are still in charge.

Hesiod, Nietzsche, Marx, Joe Hill, King, Berlant, and Keynes are describing one arrangement. Hope works as the devil's tool when four things are true at the same time. The person told to wait does not control the reward. The one who controls the reward has reasons not to pay. The suffering in the meantime could be prevented. And the person waits alone. Mary Jane Johnson and the other depositors of the Freedman's Bank lived under all four conditions. The disabled woman held under $2,000 lives under all four today. Celeste Kidd's children met all four, in miniature, at a small table with a marshmallow.

The devil in this essay is a metaphor. No major religious tradition teaches that hope belongs to the devil. In Christianity, hope is one of the three great virtues Paul names in First Corinthians, along with faith and love, and Thomas Aquinas counted despair, the giving up of hope, as a grave sin. The devil I mean is any power that profits from other people's patience.

VII. The other hope

The line "Hope is the devil's tool" can hide as much as it shows, and the people it hides deserve to be seen. Paul wrote to the Romans that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope, a hope that does not leave people ashamed. He also wrote, in the King James wording, that "hope that is seen is not hope." Enslaved people in the American South sang about crossing the Jordan into a promised land, and the words carried two meanings at once, heaven and freedom in the North. Historians still debate how often the songs gave literal directions for escape, and the double meaning itself is well documented. For the people singing, hope was a direction to travel.

In 1964, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote in Theology of Hope that Christian hope refuses to accept the present world as final and pushes believers to change it. Václav Havel, the Czech playwright who spent years in prison under a communist government and later became his country's president, described hope as a deep sense that something is worth doing whatever the outcome. The organizer Mariame Kaba has made "hope is a discipline" a working phrase for people trying to end prisons, and she means a practice people keep up together, day after day.

The philosopher Jonathan Lear tells the story of Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow Nation, in his book Radical Hope. Plenty Coups led his people through the end of the buffalo and the move onto the reservation, a loss so complete that the old ways of measuring a good life stopped making sense. Lear shows that Plenty Coups hoped for a good future for the Crow even when he could not picture what it would look like, and that this hope guided hard, practical choices about schooling, land, and alliances. His hope held a people together through catastrophe.

Psychologists have found the same stubbornness in ordinary people. In 2005, Patricia Bruininks and Bertram Malle asked people to describe hope, optimism, and related feelings, and found that people use the word hope for outcomes they care about deeply and cannot control, and that they keep hoping even when they do not expect things to go well. Optimism is a forecast. Hope can live where the forecast is bad. That is what makes hope so valuable to people in trouble, and it is also what makes it so useful to anyone who wants people in trouble to keep waiting.

The enslaved singers, Moltmann, Havel, Kaba, Plenty Coups, and the depositors of the Freedman's Bank held a different kind of hope from the one Nietzsche described. The devil's line can make their hope sound foolish, and it can make despair look like wisdom. Despair serves power too, because people who believe nothing can change are easy to rule. The evidence and the traditions describe two kinds of hope. The first is handed down by whoever holds the reward, and it asks people to wait alone and stay quiet. The second is held by people together, who act on it now and make their claim in the open. The first is the devil's tool. People have used the second to resist the devil for as long as there have been people.

VIII. Lunch in the basement

In January 2006, my friend De'Amon Harges went to work as the Roving Listener for a new effort called the Zawadi Exchange, in the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood on the north side of Indianapolis. Zawadi is the Swahili word for gift. The idea grew out of conversations between neighbors and the people of Broadway United Methodist Church, where Mike Mather was the pastor, and Broadway gave the work a home. De'Amon went door to door, one block each week, and asked neighbors questions that people in that neighborhood rarely heard from anyone with a clipboard. He asked what they were good at, what they dreamed about, and what they had to offer. At the time, the estimated income per person in Mapleton-Fall Creek was $15,095 a year.

In April 2006, neighbors came together for lunch in the large community room in Broadway's basement. A neighbor known for her love of food and hospitality catered it. The organizers divided the room into the six passions that neighbors had named most often to De'Amon, which were economic development, the arts, gardening, the culinary arts, health care, and youth activities. People picked up their plates and sat wherever their passion took them, and each table talked about what it could do together. At the end, someone from each table stood up and reported their plans. I came on later that year as the Illustrator of Gifts, and by then the neighbors had already directed, managed, and powered the whole process themselves.

The neighbors in Broadway's basement were preparing for the future the same way the villagers at Dhra' did eleven thousand years ago, in shared space and in plain view of one another. They were asked what they had, and what they had was each other and about $15,095 a year apiece.

Twenty years later, the store looks like Pharaoh's. In June 2026, when SpaceX went public, Elon Musk became the first person in history whose net worth passed a trillion dollars. His fortune has swung by hundreds of billions of dollars since then, and this month it is back above a trillion. The Federal Reserve keeps a running count of who owns what in this country. In the fall of 2025, the bottom half of American households, more than sixty million families, held about $4.25 trillion all together, which was 2.5 percent of everything Americans owned. One man's fortune comes to about a quarter of what half the country has put together over a lifetime of work.

This summer, after a SpaceX stock slide, Musk's net worth fell by about $750 billion in a matter of weeks. At the start of 2026, the bottom half of American households had about $793 billion in the bank, counting every checking account, savings account, and coffee can that made it into a deposit. One man lost nearly all of it on paper in a few weeks and stayed the richest person in the world.

Set those numbers beside the advice. The disabled woman on SSI is told to keep her savings under $2,000. A third of the country cannot cover a $400 bill in cash. The neighbors in Broadway's basement were told, like every poor neighborhood in America, to put a little away for a rainy day. At the bottom of a pile that tall, a savings account has almost no real value as a road to security. It buys a few weeks of rent, if that. The sermon about saving has real value for the people at the top, because every family waiting alone over its own small account leaves the big store unquestioned. That is the work hope does for Pharaoh.

Saving turns into hoarding when the store is held to keep other people in need, the way Pharaoh's barns finally were, or when it grows past any use, the way the rich farmer's barns did. A trillion dollars is past any use one person could find for it in a hundred lifetimes. The manna story names the line in plain words. Gather enough, keep some for rest, and the extra kept out of fear will rot.

IX. The endowment

Philanthropy is the savings account of the rich, and it comes with the power to tell other people how to live. The arrangement is written into the tax code. A private foundation is money set aside and kept, and federal law asks it to give away about 5 percent of its investments each year, under rules Congress first wrote in 1969. The rest stays in the store and keeps growing. American private foundations hold about $1.8 trillion, and together with donor-advised funds the total passed $2 trillion this year. The Institute for Policy Studies found that the 144 foundations with more than a billion dollars paid out an average of 5.1 percent in 2024. For the biggest stores in the country, the legal floor has become the ceiling.

The largest of those stores is here in Indianapolis. The Lilly Endowment was started in 1937 with gifts of Eli Lilly and Company stock, and the success of the company's weight-loss drugs pushed that stock to new heights. In 2025 the Endowment became the first private foundation in the United States with more than $100 billion in assets, and it paid out 5 percent that year for the first time since 2009.

Elon Musk keeps a store of his own. He gave billions of dollars of Tesla stock to the Musk Foundation, which held more than $14 billion at the end of 2024, and one analysis estimated the gifts saved him about $2 billion in federal taxes. The New York Times reported that the foundation failed to give away the legal minimum in 2021, 2022, and 2023, and again in 2024. That year the largest share of what it did give, $370 million, went to The Foundation, another Musk nonprofit, which runs a private school near his company offices in Texas.

The Zawadi Exchange ran on philanthropy too. Its first money came in January 2006, a matching grant of $30,010 from the Indianapolis Center for Congregations through the Lilly Endowment. The grant was earmarked for one thing, De'Amon's job as the Roving Listener, and it ran for one year. When I wrote our full proposal for more funding, I wrote it the way funders expect, with charts of goals, outcome objectives, and process objectives. One objective promised to increase the time De'Amon spent roving and listening by 100 percent within four weeks, as documented by his timesheet. A man whose gift was sitting on porches and listening to his neighbors had to prove his listening on a timesheet to keep the money coming.

I have sat on both sides of that table. I have written proposals, and I have made grants at IMAGINE, Serve Indiana, Health by Design, and the Centri Tech Foundation. From both sides the arrangement looks the same. The people with a store save without limit, and the tax code rewards them for it. The people without a store are told to keep their savings under $2,000, and when they come to the store for help, they are asked to change how they live, count their hours, report their outcomes, and wait for the next grant cycle. The 5 percent that comes out of the endowment usually carries instructions. The 95 percent that stays inside carries none.

In very real terms, philanthropy is a system of savings, and those savings are used to steer the behavior of the people who have none. It is the Freedman's Bank turned inside out. In 1874, the trustees of a bank built to teach poor people thrift lost the savings of the poor. Today the rich keep their own savings, grow them tax-free, and hand out a slice each year with rules attached about how the poor should behave. Pharaoh sold the grain back to the people who grew it. The endowment gives some of it back and asks for a timesheet.

The other hope, the one that has carried people through the worst things that ever happened to them, has always turned toward the store itself. The depositors of the Freedman's Bank petitioned Congress for their money for decades. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to wait. The senators pushing to raise the SSI limit are making a claim on the store in public. The neighbors in Broadway's basement sat down at tables together and decided what they would do with what they had, out loud, in front of each other. Each of these was hope held in common and pointed at the people who hold the reward.

Hope is the devil's tool wherever people with power ask people without it to wait in private for a reward they may never pay. Every sermon about saving, waiting, or hope leaves the same plain question behind it. Who holds the store, and when will they open it?