The Progressive ideal, which started as only a faint glimmer in the US at the turn on the 20th Century, has grown to dominate our social mores over the past 50 years. For most people reading HN, it's all they have ever known. But there is a serious cost. We infatilize our adults and produce generations of new citizens paralyzed by anxiety and (to a large extent) incapable of tolerating the faintest hint of discouragement.
But at least fewer of them slip through the cracks.
It's not "individuals slipping through the cracks of society", it's society and the people who run it consuming people (or animals) as fuel. Progressive politics might only be as old as the Roosevelts but they have surprisingly deep historical roots[0].
The improvement in material conditions from, say, the 1500s to 2024 is a function of changes in the law that made it worthwhile to produce those improvements. Or, in other words, nobody is going to innovate in phone apps when they have to give 30% to Apple and Google. Back then, the "30%" would have been indentured servitude, debtors prisons, and so on. Innovation increased when serfdom ended and more people were able to innovate.
Innovation in an economy is a function of how many people have access to appropriate levels of capital. Which is itself a function of the distribution of wealth. An economy in which five people own everything is one where nobody can innovate outside of that system. An economy with redistributive effects - whether that be through government action or otherwise - is more productive at the expense of the growth prospects of the ultra-wealthy. Economies built to make one participant fatter are eating their seed corn.
I have no clue what you're going on about with infantilization. That seems like something downstream of several social trends.
[0] e.g. western feminism is older than the Declaration of Independence; abolitionism is at least as old as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lay