It is possible for people to invent ideas independently. Also, maybe he just hasn't read Marx.
Furthermore, maybe he does, but I wouldn't call him 'lazy' for not providing some sort of citation: there's enough cultural baggage associated with Marx that as soon as you say that word, a certain portion of your audience's brains turn off.
Better to be 'lazy' and possibly reach some of those people than not.
Right. He hasn't read Marx. Or any other critique of capitalism, European or homegrown, for the past 100 years. Or any fiction that is informed, in whole or in part, by this critique. No, he didn't invent this 'independently'.
What's the point of 'reaching' people if you've got so little new to say? Its not a matter of 'citation', it's a matter of acknowledging that there are a host of proposed solutions (and critiques of critiques, and so on) out there. By pretending that none of it exists, you wind up with a tl;dr column that says what's been said before.
His contribution is in fact a subtraction from the sum total of human knowledge, in that the only thing original about it is wrong - the notion that the phenomenon that he talks about has something specifically to do with America between 1950-1990.
He was either 'failing to read anything', or, more likely, reading a fair bit and intentionally stripping all reference to this existing knowledge out of his column for whatever reason. The result was unsurprisingly sophomoric, which I suppose is why it has 150 points on HN.
Or, possibly, he was offering anecdotal observations, and he's not as dumb and lazy and unmotivated as people here are making him out to be. I know it's surprising, but people do come up with these things on their own sometimes.
Furthermore, maybe he does, but I wouldn't call him 'lazy' for not providing some sort of citation: there's enough cultural baggage associated with Marx that as soon as you say that word, a certain portion of your audience's brains turn off.
Better to be 'lazy' and possibly reach some of those people than not.