One possible alternative explanation is that all the kids were stressed out of their minds because there was a killer virus on the loose and no one could focus in school or outside. If you want to guess at gender differences, one might be that girls care about other people more, and so were more stressed out by the thought of their parents or grandparents dying. I don't really think girls care that much more than boys though. There would need to be some kind of retrospective ethnographic study to figure out what the heck happened.

Another explanation could be that since the kids were used to distribute viruses to reopen the economy, their health suffered. There is ample documentation that women get long covid more frequently than men.

A colleague of mine that went to an Ivy League school in America told me her friends in Poland, not a wealthy country by any means, laughed at her for "buying her degree".

Of course, competition leading to near-zero profits means most competitors collapse, and the remnants get bought up by monopolists or oligopolists who then become rent extractors.

The technology was fundamentally developed with government grants to universities, or corporate labs like Bell Labs that were funded by a legal mandate on its parent corporation. Capitalists can only develop products that are basically ready for market, their margins are thin and planning horizons can only survive about 5 years usually. Their main power is throwing oodles of money at something ready to go and scaling it.

Edit: I will be slightly more charitable and note that capitalist companies can also do incremental research if there is a gentle and obvious hill to climb. Sometimes people do make crazy bets and they pay off, but that's more the exception, in America the dominant driver of technological innovation is government funded research supplied by capitalist scaled technologies (i.e. you research the next paradigm in the lab and purchase e.g. pre-existing computing resources from a company).

One description I think that aligns somewhat with our current era is “technoplatonism”, which is my own coinage but I think is not wholly original after googling. They want to create an artifical philosopher king that is commanded by a small elite of capitalists. So it has elements of fascism but it’s also a bit different, more classical in some ways. Just straight repression of the working class without inspiring or mobilizing the petite bourgeoisie in great numbers (though the artificial prominence of AI boosters on X and other digital platforms owned by the rich is one attempt at this).

In other countries, you can still do it yourself, you just don't have to do it if it's simple.

They don't do this in this country because (a) it's a political project to make people to sympathize with the rich by feeling their pain (b) it's a great scheme for legalized corruption by creating incentives to build companies around a fake problem.

With AI you can see a stark illustration. In America, the government is captured by the rich and the AI companies. They can do whatever they want to you and you have no control. In a worker's government, the government will direct production on behalf of society so you will benefit.

China uses a capitalist mode of production, but imposes strong restrictions and ensures the benefits accrue to the people. That's democracy.

The "authoritarian" propaganda about China is primarily sermonizing against people being able to being able to choose a direction to go in. Instead, the rich are supposed to be able to do whatever they want to whomever they want. That's the American dream.

OpenAI was started because Elon and Sam thought Demis was going to make himself dictator and they wanted a piece of that action (reading between the lines). All the labs, even Anthropic have the same idea dressed in different marketing gloss. The major exception (I imagine) are Chinese labs, since the Communist Party of China will demand control over these labs and their models. Good! Democratic human control is a good thing. Certainly, there is more democracy in China than in America. That's the idea of socialism, democracy for the workers, not for the capitalists (we do the inverse).