Giles Fraser's now-notorious piece has copped a ton of stick. This is justified, but nobody has articulated my own discontent with it.

Fraser does raise some important questions. His assertion that care work should be done within the family (I'll gloss over his sexism) echoes a point made by Michael Sandel and before him Michael Walzer, that some activities should not be monetized, that to do so drains them of their essential meaning, of love and intimacy.

In itself, this is a reasonable claim. But Fraser misses two things. One is that there's another value here - efficiency. The division of labour can benefit everyone: employing carers can free up children to do other things, and allow older people with special needs to get specialist help. The other thing Fraser misses is the empirical evidence. Do paid carers really diminish love, intimacy and community? Or might it be that they do the opposite: they widen the social circle of the older person, and might improve family relationships by taking stressful interactions out of them.

Fraser's claim that social mobility and freedom of movement "could not have been better designed to spread misery and unhappiness" also speaks to an important possible trade-off - that perhaps freedom does reduce happiness: for example, American women's happiness seems to have fallen since the 70s whilst their career options have increased.

What Fraser is alluding to here is getting at here is Pitirim Sorokin's dissociative hypothesis - the idea that people who are upwardly socially mobile suffer a sense of isolation from being uprooted. And again, he ignores the empirical evidence. Tak Wing Chan, for example, has found the opposite:

On a range of social relational indicators as well as on several direct measures of well‐being, the upwardly mobile tend to do as well as, and in many cases better than, those who are immobile in the working class.

Personally, I was surprised by this: my experience was consistent with Sorokin's theory. And we might quibble with this finding. It's based upon a curious definition of class mobility - as movement from the working class to salariat - and so might not capture the dislocation that the extremely upwardly mobile suffer. The IFS, for example, has shown that men from poor families are more likely to be single in later life even if their incomes rise. And we might ask whether what's true of past generations is true now: the fact that young graduates almost universally want radical social change might speak to disappointment at what mobility has given them.

Again, though, Fraser doesn't address this evidence. Faced with tricky trade-offs between values, all he does is assert a preference. It's as if he wants to vindicate Alasdair MacIntyre's claim that we have lost the ability to talk coherently about morality.

But there's something else Fraser misses - capitalism.

There's a big difference between care work being done by dedicated professionals with big support networks and it being done by over-stressed minimum wage workers rushing from client to client. Neoliberal capitalism (and Tory/centrist austerity) gives us the latter, not the former.

And the mobility which Fraser berates isn't wholly a matter of people choosing to become "rootless Ronin". It's also a response to the failure of capitalism to provide decent jobs near to where people live.

Brexit, of course - and especially the no-deal Brexit Fraser wants - will of course exacerbate both these problems. A weaker economy means worse job opportunities and less chance of higher public spending on social care.

In this respect, Fraser has given us an example of what most non-leftist political discourse is about. It's a form of displacement activity, an attempt to blame anything for our current predicament except the failures of capitalism.