The contention that behavior matters, that it has profound effects on individual lives, is what got law professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander in trouble with left-leaning colleagues. In a 2017 op-ed defending "bourgeois culture," Wax and Alexander argued that traditional social norms provided people with the values and ways of acting that ultimately improved their lives. What were these recommended behaviors? To get married before having children and to stay married, to get an education, to be a good employee, to serve one's country, to be neighborly and charitable, to avoid lewd public language, to respect authority, and to avoid crime and drug abuse. This is the same kind of advice offered to most young people by their parents. Even so, Wax and Alexander committed a sin in the Left's eyes: they made the connection between behavior and life outcomes explicit and thereby rejected the narrative that unjust social structures, not individual choices, block people from reaching their potential.

By the same token, what we could call behavioral poverty helps explain how some individuals spend their lives mired in poverty and social dysfunction. Behavioral poverty is reflected in the attitudes, values, and beliefs that justify entitlement thinking, the spurning of personal responsibility, and the rejection of traditional social mechanisms of advancement. It is characterized by high self-indulgence, low self-regulation, exploitation of others, and limited motivation and effort. It can be correlated with a range of antisocial, immoral, and imprudent behaviors, including substance abuse, gambling, insolvency, poor health habits, and crime.

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One of the first scholars to document the continuity in antisocial conduct over an individual's life was Lee Robins, a versatile social scientist whose work includes seminal research on antisocial personality disorder. In one of her landmark papers, Robins compared developmental trajectories of prosocial and antisocial behavior, using data from various samples--some composed entirely of whites, some entirely of blacks, and some racially representative of the U.S. population. Robins found that behavior was the foremost predictor of subsequent conduct and life circumstances and that social class or poverty played little role. This finding was particularly pronounced for pathological criminal behavior--environmental conditions, such as poverty, had relatively little effect in explaining such behavior. Poverty, Robins found, was often a result--not a precipitating cause--of the behavioral repertoire that produced relationship strife, school dropout, chronic unemployment, substance problems, and transiency. The same characterological deficiencies that plagued the research subjects as children in Robins's work remained evident decades later, when they were adults.

Some offenders eventually embrace adult responsibilities, building better lives for themselves, but most will remain on the bottom of the economic ladder. Criminal behavior is a powerful predictor of poverty--not because offenders encounter such harsh social and legal sanctions but because their actions remain consistently antisocial. Contrary to depictions that portray offenders as victims of a punitive criminal-justice system that cuts off their opportunities for a stable life, a good job, and healthy relationships, the truth is that many don't seek these goals, and even more lack the habits to achieve them.

Inevitably, of course, some people do deviate from these values. Too often, the Left's answer is to remove the negative consequences of these choices. The Left's current enthusiasm for large-scale release of offenders from prison is a good example. Its wrongheadedness is made clear by the Bureau of Justice Statistics' recidivism data and the utter failure of reentry efforts--to say nothing of the deteriorating conditions and rising crime rates in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, and others, in considerable part because of their political leaders' unwillingness to apply consequences to everything from disorderly behavior and vagrancy to violent crime. Admittedly, changing behavior is difficult, but robbing people of the motive to change by removing consequences also removes accountability. That some are unaffected by negative consequences is not evidence that consequences don't matter but that some individuals are immune to social sanctions.

"The vision of the Left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom--whether black or white--who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and behavior," economist and social thinker Thomas Sowell observed. Put more simply: behavior is what makes a society.