The importance of culture as an influence on behaviour is no longer in the domain of speculation. In economics the Nobel Laureate George Akerlof has reformulated the springs of motivation and work performance. Instead of the traditional crude emphasis upon monetary incentives, the evidence now points to the centrality of the particular goals which people internalise. In turn, these are derived from the role models they adopt in building their sense of identity. Yet  more fundamentally, recent advances in neuroscience and experimental psychology flowing from the discovery of the mirror neuron have transformed our understanding. Imitation is hard-wired into the human brain: the perception of an action and its performance are neurologically the same phenomenon. I do not see an action and then decide to imitate it; I automatically imitate unless that urge is overridden by a subsequent conscious intent. But copying observed actions is merely the "low road" of imitation; the high road is imitation of stereotypes. The evidence here is chilling. Teenagers primed to think of the attributes of professors perform significantly better in tests than a control group primed to think of football hooligans. People primed to think of rudeness behave significantly more rudely than those primed to think of politeness. People primed to think of the elderly walk more slowly. 

The most astounding feature of these experiments is how light is the "priming" — exposure to a stereotype — needed to produce such results: people are highly suggestible. Compared to bombardment by popular culture they are the merest touch of a feather. The most heavily researched aspect of cultural transmission has been the effect of exposure to violence on television. Here the evidence of adverse effects is now overwhelming, but violence is not all we should worry about. In practical terms a culture is a menu of stereotypes by which its members, and especially its young members, learn the entire range of behaviour. Free will — the power to choose to behave differently — is exercised less at the level of individual responsibility than we have conventionally imagined, and more through the shaping of a culture. Cultures are highly dynamic: a relatively small group of influential people determines how a culture evolves. The middle class earns its right to privilege if it guides the evolution of the national culture.

The currently dysfunctional culture of the English working class was not an inevitable consequence of the modern world. In Australia the dominant culture has long been working class, but it has not been allowed to degenerate. There the working class won the economic war: Australia rivals France for the highest minimum wage according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It has regulated immigration through a points system so that immigrants are sufficiently skilled to compete with the middle class rather than being concentrated at the bottom of the jobs ladder. Perhaps decisively, Australia has avoided the toxic deference of the English class system. In contrast to England, Australian culture did not need to welcome dysfunctional influences in a wave of guilt. In France and much of continental Europe, the working class also won the economic war: a high minimum wage, job security, and generous pensions and unemployment benefits. But the middle class decisively won the culture war. In place of the Sun, France's largest circulation newspaper, Ouest France, is pitched somewhere between the Daily Mail and The Times. On French television, the airtime for American popular culture is limited by law, and its crass cultural teeth are pulled by being dubbed. 

The outcome in England has been disastrous for the bottom half of the working class. Defeat in the economic war led to a period of mass unemployment which broke the habit of work. As jobs re-emerged, usually in services rather than factories, 80 per cent of them were taken by immigrants who arrived with aspirations and a willingness to work hard. In the process, unlike in the rest of Europe, the apprenticeship system collapsed: employers found it cheaper to hire skilled immigrants than to train English youth. Despite overall higher employment than in continental Europe (the result of our deregulated labour market), we now have English working-class households in which three generations have been workless, living in neighbourhoods in which the majority also do not work.