We can also observe multiple ways in which cuts to public funding in healthcare, education, and welfare have pushed more and more people back towards kinship-based forms of self-care and mutual support and how the expansion of consumer credit has turned household deficit-spending into a substitute for state deficit-spending. Today, family responsibility very often takes the form of intergenerational debt where parents and other family members are actively enrolled in the debt obligations of children, signed up as guarantors or required to post their housing wealth as collateral to fund the social mobility (or simply stasis) of younger generations. Here too neoliberal policy prescriptions have played an important role, as Friedman and Becker were among the first to suggest that investment in “human capital” such as education should be the responsibility of the family, aided and abetted by private credit markets, not the state.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 247