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German social theorist Ulrich Beck has consistently maintained that the logic of social distribution in western cultures has been reconfigured over the last three decades. Beck believes that, in the first industrial modernity, political and economic energies were directed toward the dissemination of ‘social goods’, such as healthcare, employment and wealth. By contrast, in the second modernity - or risk society - the positive logic of goods distribution is displaced by a negative logic of ‘social bads’, exemplified by environmental despoliation, terrorism and nuclear accidents. Critically, whilst the logic of goods is sectoral - some win and some lose, some are protected, some exposed - social bads follow a universalising logic which threatens rich and poor alike. This article interrogates and challenges these core …