Nicholas Eberstadt assembles a host of empirical trends in order to reach a moral conclusion: that the growth of the entitlement state over the past half-century has undermined the sturdy self-reliance that has long characterized most Americans, replacing it with a culture of dependence that threatens the American experiment.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Eberstadt's statistics accurately represent the trends on which he focuses. But they are not the whole truth. To understand what...