Amy Wax & Larry Alexander

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.

Co-​authors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander of “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture,” The Inquirer (August 9, 2017), an article that caused a huge backlash against Dr. Wax at her institution, the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Immediately following the above-​quoted passage, the article continued:

The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-​century environment. Nor are the single-​parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-​class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-​city blacks; the anti-​assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-​market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-​middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.

Would the re-​embrace of bourgeois norms by the ordinary Americans who have abandoned them significantly reduce society’s pathologies? There is every reason to believe so. . . .