In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, film critic A.O. Scott writes an extended and provocative diagnosis of what he calls “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.” It’s a topic Scott addresses with considerable erudition and impressive range, stretching and shaping the idea so that it encompasses the final half-season of “Mad Men,” Leslie Fiedler’s critical study “Love and Death in the American Novel” – a reference that marks Scott (as it marks me) as a literary nerd of a particular generation – the rise of underappreciated TV feminism, and the inarguable fact that “young-adult” fiction has become a deceptive term of art, since it’s widely read by actual adults.

Scott is too smart to get trapped by the most obvious pitfalls in this kind of borderline-reactionary cultural jeremiad, a set of pitfalls that can be summarized with the brain-deadening phrase “David Brooks.” He’s aware that by rooting his essay in the (presumed) impending demise of Don Draper, Jon Hamm’s character in “Mad Men,” he risks defining “adulthood” in terms of a certain model of mid-century masculinity, a model simultaneously mocked and idolized by that show and the model that men of Scott’s generation and mine were raised to aspire to, or to reject, or to do both at once. Scott includes several paragraphs on the transformative force of feminism in contemporary culture, and correctly notes that in retrospect “Sex and the City” may have been the most important TV series of the 2000s. (I should say here that I’m on cordial terms with Scott, but don’t know him all that well.)

You can almost feel Scott manfully struggling to resist lamenting the fact that no one knows how to dress for dinner anymore, or how to mix a cocktail that isn’t some funny color. Even as he complains about middle-aged men wearing flip-flops, or female colleagues wearing plastic barrettes in their hair (the horror!), he tries to fend off charges that he’s a “scold, snob or curmudgeon” with self-mockery, admitting that his instinctual responses to such phenomena are “absurd,” “impotent” and “out of touch.” His piece is full of astute “aha” moments – I particularly admire the connection he draws between the man-child heroes of classic American literature, the anxious bro-comedies of Judd Apatow et al., and the critique of male privilege embedded in the persona of Louis C.K. But by the end he finds himself pinned on the horns of a dilemma, clearly displeased with “the general immaturity of contemporary culture” but not quite willing to reject its ethos of perennial liberation, borderless exploration and “perpetual flux,” no doubt for fear of looking like a hopeless troglodyte.

This fundamental confusion and ambivalence reflects a deep-seated blind spot, I would argue, one that’s endemic to the culture-vulture trade. Scott carefully anatomizes the trees but misses the forest, or to speak more precisely ignores the condition of the soil. There really is something beneath his “death of adulthood” premise, whether or not you like the prejudicial phrase. But to coin a phrase: It’s the economy, stupid. Scott’s essay appears to treat “culture” as a sealed and self-referential system, one that shapes and reflects human consciousness but has only an incidental relationship with economic, political and social factors that lie outside its purview. We have moved so far from the old Marxist view of culture as an ideological “superstructure” erected upon the economic base of society that we now pretend it’s an entirely autonomous force, or a mystical-cum-psychological shadow play that gives “human shape to our collective anxieties and aspirations,” in Scott’s phrase. There are clues in his article suggesting that he doesn’t entirely buy that, and we need to remember that he works at the Times, where critics are not encouraged to venture into contentious ideological terrain or to suggest that they may have political opinions.

Well, if Scott gets to play frustrated English professor in his article, I get to play former college Marxist in mine, and insist that sometimes economic forces really do shape the cultural zone. Real wages have fallen since Don Draper’s heyday, especially for American men and double-especially for the middle-class and working-class white men who were once the bulwarks of the mid-century model of adulthood. We now live in a culture (using the word in its anthropological sense) of diminished expectations and permanent underemployment, where many or most young people will never be as affluent as their parents. Lifetime job security is an antediluvian delusion, and in many metropolitan areas home ownership is out of reach for all but the rich. It’s just as useless to object to those changes as it is to complain about grownups reading Harry Potter books, but certainly those things were the essential underpinnings of classic adulthood, and without them it’s no surprise to see the old order fading away.