Neighborhoods matter because culture matters. Middle-class families have always known this, which is why so many parents move to the suburbs in pursuit of safer streets, better schools, and shared values. Maybe parents matter less than peers. But parents have an enormous role in deciding what kind of peers their kids will be exposed to.It isn't impossible to become a responsible, functioning adult growing up in an inner city slum. It is just extremely difficult and relatively few overcome the odds.
As we wrote yesterday, our society doesn't know how to change culture without seriously violating people's individual freedom. "Violating individual freedom" is what the military routinely does with coercive basic training regimes, the more brutal, the more effective. It forces upon recruits a "culture transplant."
