Never mind meritocracy; all that matters is what categories you fall into by accident of birth
Two articles last weekend made me feel sorry for American young people. We in the anti-woke brigade can be awfully hard on kids. But having been born in the twentieth century turns out to have been a stroke of good fortune.
On Sunday, the New York Times ran a feature about soaring mental illness in American teenagers. Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among people aged ten to twenty-four rose by 60 percent. Between 2015 and 2019, prescriptions for antidepressants for teenagers rose 38 percent. Between 2009 and 2019, emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries among people aged ten to nineteen doubled for both sexes; for girls, they more than doubled.
