Haidt lays out in pitiless detail what happened to the children of Generation Z when life moved online.

Erudite, engaging, combative, crusading.

The Anxious Generation is, to a considerable extent, a reiteration and expansion of Coddling. But it is also a vastly superior work. It’s less hung up on campus-outrage stuff, and it benefits from six additional years of research on how smartphones and social media dice the nerves and tamp the spirits of young people..

Proving causation (rather than mere correlation) is an iffy proposition. It’s especially risky for Haidt in the face of a large body of scholarly literature on the psychological harms of social media that’s ambiguous at best.

One avenue Haidt doesn’t explore, which feels like an omission, is that his critics might be partly right about teenagers feeling anxious and depressed in response to global events.

I realised in the end that I didn’t need Haidt to prove causation. Of all the likely causes — existential or economic gloom, something in the water — this seems the frontrunner..