Think about it: regardless of the gender dynamics, that's a bad evolution. A shift from making things to not making them, as part of general enervation of the country. In that respect, health care and social assistance are as good as hawking crypto-coins and social media influencing.
> While Trump is telling Americans that he can bring back traditional manly jobs, Charlie Kirk called for a return to traditional gender roles — getting women to marry and have children young rather than focus on career.
And it's pretty clear that "getting women" to "focus on career" will eventually lead to extinction. It's a shortsighted optimization with severe medium to long term problems, a lot like industrial pollution. Of course someone like Krugman will try to hand-wave that problem away with immigration, but the math there just doesn't work. As best, that's like moving the factory overseas to destroy some poorer person's environment instead of yours. Birthrates are declining everywhere, including in poor countries. Worldwide fertility is at replacement and dropping. The poor places will get depopulated (e.g. poor elderly left without caretakers), and eventually fail to provide the needed replacement workers.
> Like Trump’s job promises, Kirk’s prescriptions were impossible. We will never return the share of manufacturing in the economy to 1950s levels, and neither will women eschew birth control and quit their careers.
Is Krugman that dumb? Nothing like that impossible. Imagining history as a ratchet moving monotonically to more progressivism is a delusion (see: Trump and the failure of minorities to cooperate with the predictions in "The Emerging Democratic Majority"). I mean, trivially, given enough time anything possible will inevitably happen. 1950s American society happened, so is possible, so something like it can happen again.