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Personal responsibility is an illusion afforded to those who grew up in certain environments.

The social structure of gangs is such that, when you grow up in a tough neighbourhood and you have crappy parents it's safer to join a gang.

When everyone around you considers the drug trade to be normative behaviour, you don't really see the downside.

It's not that we can't make choices for ourselves. It's that what we consider to be a good choice changes with our environments (and, frankly, our cognitive ability to make good choices also varies given your parent's income at birth - here's another TAL for a source on that last statement http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/364/g... )

> This article making the USA look like it has the most criminals is a bit misleading.

Well… a criminal is an invented category. A criminal is someone who broke a law, and we write new laws every day. The US just has more laws that put you in jail than any other country.

No offense, phillmv, but you strike me as a serious person with an open mind.

If this is true, for only 62 cents you can get a copy of this book (http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Slum-Salford-Quarter-Century/d...), which describes a (low-crime) Edwardian slum from the perspective of someone who grew up there and later became a sociologist (author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Roberts_(author)). You'll have to shell out $5 for prison psychologist Theodore Dalrymple's view (http://www.amazon.com/Life-Bottom-Worldview-Makes-Underclass...) of their great-grandchildren.

If you think the difference between these societies can be reduced to the availability and/or legality of intoxicants, you have a very one-track mind. Take another hit on the bong and perhaps your perspective will expand. Oh, and the subjects of both studies are predominantly white. So in case you're a racist, that's not an option.

Thanks! That's the nicest thing someone has said to me in an internet forum.

I'll take a gander at your books.

I offer in return http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational . I haven't finished http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature but it's somewhat related. I'm not a huge fan of Freakonomics but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio... is an interesting one. Finally, the TAL episodes I've linked elsewhere in this thread:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/s... and http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/364/g...

If you look at any of the above, the TAL episodes are probably the most easy to consume.

A very easy way to expand your perspective beyond the ken of the average NPR intellectual is to read old (pre-1923) books. You know that feeling the medieval scholastics got when they realized they could actually read Virgil, Cicero, Homer, etc, in the original? Pretty much spoiled them on Church Latin.

That's not to say there aren't good or interesting writers in the present era. The range of discourse is much narrower, however. You won't find a lot of present-day perspectives that did not exist before 1923, but you will find an enormous quantity of pre-1923 perspectives which are completely alien to you - and in many cases quite distasteful. Also, the price is right!

As for Pinker, though, _The Blank Slate_ is pretty good...

Sure. Just can the silly paternalism next time.

It's jading, and it really detracts from the rest of your argument.

It's hard to keep posting when polite, helpful posts like this only gets you references to Pinker and Gladwell, but please do.

Doing exactly that has led to the US being in exactly the position it's in. Clearly it's not working.

Anyway, what's missing from your self-righteous spiel is that not everyone has access to a mentor who can show them the way out of poverty - and the first part of the battle is even knowing it's possible. Overall, it's a far more complex issue than you paint it to be.

Do you think that there would be more prisoners in Africa if all of the rapists and murderers were somehow instantly apprehended tried and convicted? This article making the USA look like it has the most criminals is a bit misleading.

Africa is a big place, much, much bigger than the US and with far more people and varied cultures. But it doesn't really matter, because you're bottom-feeding. The US should be compared to its contemporaries, rather than the worst possible example that can be found.

Yes, it's their personal responsibility. No, it's not about absolving it. It's about recognizing trends that condition people (including those who haven't even been born yet) and finding a pragmatical solution that benefits both you and them.

Your argument is that of a designer of a nuclear missile control panel who puts the "disarm" and the "launch" buttons both side by side with the same size and color and without labels and then excuses himself that it's the operator's responsibility to learn which is which. And the really stupid part, is that in this case the designer is in the missile's impact zone.

You're ignoring the will power it takes to overcome these situations. Yes, people do. They're called "exceptions". Why do you think it's always celebrated when someone breaks out of this cycle?

And no one is talking about giving dangerous people a free pass. Prohibition never works. How can something that grows in the ground naturally be illegal?

I loved your comment at the end that seems to hint that it's not that the US has too many people locked up but rather that everyone else isn't strict enough!

"And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States." This was admittedly addressed to a graduating class at Yale, but certainly circumstances matter. Doing poorly in school and experimenting with drugs generally ends much worse if you're in a terrible environment than in a safe, secure environment where lots of second chances are available.

Reminds me of this recent submission: http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic

HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633985