We lead our lives within a variety of institutions—including the labor market, public forum, and family—that exert different and often conflicting influences on our identities. The labor market, defined as all exchanges of work for wages, encourages us to accept existing hierarchies and mainstream ideologies, while the public forum functions best when we challenge entrenched power and think independently. Yet as we move between institutions, rather than constantly reinventing ourselves, we tend to retain the identities that we are most accustomed to inhabiting. For most of us, this means retaining our labor market identities, together with the hierarchies and ideologies they represent, across our interactions with all institutions. But we must realize that while the labor market’s hierarchies and ideologies arguably benefit our economy, they undeniably impoverish our democracy.