Culture! Not public policy.

I keep coming back to this interesting piece.  From The Family is the Whole Story by James J. Heckman.  I posted about it here a couple of weeks ago.

I regard this a major deal.  There is pretty solid evidence now supporting the limits of state social policy and increasingly clear evidence about the impact of personal choices in terms of behaviors, goals, and actions.

What most shapes personal choices in terms of behaviors, goals, and actions? Culture!  Culture religious, culture, regional, culture national, culture family.  What are the behaviors, goals and actions you see modeled in your environment.  What are the Overton windows thereby opened or closed (to your benefit or detriment) from your very earliest years?

If the answer is more about culture than about public policy, what role, if any, does Government play?  And if it does play a role, what role under what circumstances.  There is a lot of meat in this argument and no one seems to be tackling it.