In a healthy society, people try to balance a whole bunch of different priorities: economic, social, moral, familial. Somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else. To address the problem, the centers experimented with fining the late parents. We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules. Society came to be seen as an atomized collection of individual economic units pursuing self-interest.

Source: New York Times January 11, 2019 01:07 UTC