Personal choices determine life outcomes

There's an interesting piece, Index of Culture and Opportunity from The Heritage Foundation.

It is interesting because it bridges two or three different perspectives. Their primary focus is on whether the trends are constructive or negative at a societal level across 31 social and economic indicators. Those indicators are:

Marriage Rate
Divorce Rate
Total Fertility Rate
Single-Parent Households
Teen Drug Use
Abstinence Among High Schoolers
Abortion Rate
Religious Attendance
Violent Crime
Labor Force Participation Rate
Unwed Birth Rate
Self-Sufficiency
Total Welfare Spending
Subsidized Housing Participation
Food Stamp Participation
TANF Participation
TANF Work Participation Rate
Reading Proficiency
Charter School Enrollment
Private School Choice Participation
High School Graduation Rate
Student Loan Debt
Employment-Population Ratio
Unemployment Rate
Job Openings Rate
Job Hires Rate
Money Taxed Away by Federal Government
Start-Up Job Share
Major Federal Regulations
Economic Freedom

Looking at this list, there is clearly an agenda being served in terms of focus on preferred policy solutions (such as Charter Schools among others). Fair enough. Looking at this list though, I am struck that a fair portion of it could be fruitfully applied to predict good life outcomes for individuals as well as society at large. Some of the measures are related but not directly. For example, I don't know that abstinence among high schoolers is a robust predictive metric, but no children before marriage is certainly predictive of good life-outcomes.

If we were to convert this from a societal list to an individual list, what might be kept, changed, added? Some of these measures might be only marginally relevant other than that they are proxies for something more important. For example, abstinence rate is probably not that powerfully predictive whereas the underlying behavioral attributes of self-control and self-discipline are powerfully predictive. If we drop this list down from the societal level to the personal level, I think it might look something like this.

Marriage Duration
Total Fertility Rate
Single-Parent Households
Teen Drug Use
Abortion Rate
Religious Attendance
Arrest Rate
Labor Force Participation Rate
Unwed Birth Rate
Self-Sufficiency
Reading Proficiency
High School Graduation Rate
Debt to Asset Ratio

The four variables in bold are very highly predictive. Graduate High School, Stay Employed, Get Married and Stay Married, No Children before Marriage. These four variables reduce the probability of being in poverty to less than 2%. Add in the other predictive variables and things begin to look pretty good.

Regrettably, I don't think these elements of practical wisdom and empirical reality are much taught in schools. Much easier to posit patriarchy, structural racism and colonial mindset.