Cultural Capital

David Brooks, I suppose, fancies himself conservative for writing things like:

it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns and educational attainment. But the fact is... it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent... If your goal is to expand opportunity, then you have a much bigger and different agenda.

He is certainly correct up to a point: cultural capital matters -- big government policies that disregard that are doomed to fail. He, and others, however, imagine that there are other, smarter, big government policies which can, taking cultural capital into account, succeed.

Structurally, these arguments take some factor which is correlated to cultural capital (e.g.: home ownership, college education), latch on to any tenuous rationale arguing the relationship is causal (People take better care of things they own! College graduates have wider social networks!), push expensive government programs with inevitable unintended consequences that, equally inevitably, fail because wishful thinking cannot turn correlation into causation.

Von Hayek taught that the natural, evolutionary, processes of free societies tend to increase cultural capital. More traditional conservative teaching would accentuate the role played by community. In either case: A government which governs least expands opportunity best.