i've been told this has been going viral in right wing twitter so i gave it a read his core claim: prior generations inherited free "social capital" (trusted neighbors, functional schools, predictable careers, a safe public square) alongside rising financial capital. that social capital has since collapsed, so young people must now buy back privately, at high cost, what used to be free: private school instead of a trusted public one, paid childcare instead of a stay at home parent or community network, a degree as a mandatory screening tool. prices fell on non-essentials but rose sharply on essentials (housing, education, childcare, healthcare) and this shows up in stats as progress even though families feel squeezed. it's basically feminist marxist critique wearing a tradwife dress. gdp doesn't count unpaid domestic labor, care work gets commodified once women enter the workforce. this argument is decades old (federici, folbre, marilyn waring's "if women counted"). most marxists agree with this and marx famously warned about this happening in his time. capital vol. 1, chapter 15. marx's argument was that the value of a man's labor power was priced to cover the reproduction of his whole family, not just himself. once machinery let capitalists pull women and children into wage labor too, that same total family subsistence got spread across four wage earners instead of one. so each individual wage drops, the family as a whole works far more hours to land at roughly the same standard of living, and what looks like expanded opportunity (women and kids "entering the workforce") is actually capital using the whole family to depreciate the value of labor power overall. four people's working lives get used up to buy what one man's wage used to buy. there's a couple of places where he's a bit ahistorical, like the us did not always have only english speaking schools until ww1 with english only laws. the bigger issue though is that he never explains how we got here. he just states "social trust collapsed" like it's weather. no account of who built the postwar commons, who dismantled it, or why. the irony is that it was neoliberals that brought forth the gdp worship, a tradition way closer to his own politics than to the feminist marxists he's (unknowingly?) mimicking.