Today the effects of this shift in public finance are experientially self-evident. The Federal Reserve recently published a report seeking to explain the fact that a growing number of young adults are living at home with their parents well into their twenties and even thirties—a demographic trend it attributes first and foremost to college debt. The shift from public to private investment in so-called human capital has forcefully reinvigorated the importance of family debt networks and inherited wealth in the shaping of social destinies. The effect of more than three decades of neoliberal economic reform has been to reinstate the legal and economic function of the private family as the first-line provider of welfare, very much in keeping with the policy prescriptions of neoliberals themselves.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 260