GEORGE WILL: What if Major Causes of Poverty Are Behavioral?

Well yes. Thomas Sowell and Theodore Dalrymple have been saying this for decades. As Sowell wrote in 2015, in a piece headlined, “The Inconvenient Truth about Ghetto Communities’ Social Breakdown,” “Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read [2001’s] Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.”