The criticism is: economic liberty, mobility blah blah, you need discipline at the individual level to balance that. Good education from parents and the eco-system you take part in, but i guess that is under your "certainly not sufficient" bit, but i believe that discipline takes you farther even in a not so ripe economic situation, i've seen joyful people in poor conditions, i've seen people bettering themselves in no to ripe conditions
i think this is the classic problem of people trying to fix their situations from the outside in, instead of from the inside out, ex: better economic situation = better people, but that is clearly faulty logic, i think it should be more like better people = way better economic situation
but then again why would a system that depends on its economy so much enforce such an idea: "better people", better people doesn't make enough money as it stands for them, that is why they don't put that in their ads instead of "buy this because of (some bullshit reason here) messaging" because "buy this because of this fucked up reason we created for you" makes more money, period,
politicians don't give a fuck about you and me man, they care about numbers, because of their vantage point, the ones that do end up getting wiped out, as we have seen throughout history, just like this new awesome movie lincoln shows "man wants people of all races to be free" get asassinated because of people with no self-discipline and no fucking compassion that were mostly focused on themselves
history really explains a lot about us, and so far it looks like we really haven't learnt too much
i wonder to think, what would the world be like if people in current power positions would actually be altruistic, sounds like a pipe dream to me