Fixing the Culture

The author of Hillbilly Elegy offers his thoughts at the end of a longer interview.

This is a problem that government can help with, but it can’t be the only solution to a number of these issues. So where I would like to think it leaves us is that each individual actor in a community is going to have a different view on how to address some of these problems.

An individual parent should pick up the book and think maybe the way I’m interacting with my kid is causing a lot of problems down the road and maybe I should try to do it a little bit better. Maybe a social worker picks up the book and says, this is the reality of how these folks are living, maybe this changes how I approach my work. Maybe a church pastor picks up the book and says look, it’s really problematic that there are so few poor kids in our churches, but there are a ton of upper- and middle-income kids in our churches — maybe I need to go out and minister to the least of these as Christ said.

There's also a diagnosis of what he thinks the left, and the right, get wrong about culture.