Book Review
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
by Robert Putnam
(Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $28)
[From review]
Our Kids relies on both a series of contrasting interviews with affluent and lower income-children about their families, their schools, and their communities, and an impressive collection of charts giving numerical heft to the differences that emerge from their tales. Adding to the breadth of the book is its geographical range: from Orange County, California to Port Clinton, Ohio, the author’s hometown and from Atlanta, Georgia to Bend, Oregon,
[. . .]
Skeptics may be most convinced by Putnam’s graphs and figures. In example after example, Putnam shows the “scissoring” of class-based children’s experiences since 1970 as conditions improved for rich kids and declined for the poor and working class.
[. . .]
The quality of family life, schools, and communities are mutually reinforcing, leading to success for rich kids and struggle for the poor. The gap, Putnam concludes, is bad for kids, bad for the economy, and—especially given the lack of trust and civic engagement among low-income families—bad for democracy.
[. . .]
Had Putnam ended there, he would have had a powerful book. But in the final chapter—“What is to Be Done?”—the social scientist yields the floor to the missionary in two notable ways. First, quoting Proverbs, Isaiah, and Pope Francis, among others, he reminds us that unequal opportunity “violates our deepest religious and moral values” and rues that we are “ignoring the plight of poor kids.”
[. . .]
School spending at all levels has gone from 4 percent of GDP in 1984 to 6.1 percent in 2010. Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University estimates the per-capita government spending on means-tested programs has increased by 74 percent between 1975 and 2007. The federal government spends over $800 billion on 92 such programs. Of course, that doesn’t include the billions doled out to nonprofit groups by grant officers at the country’s thousands of philanthropies. And, all along, inequality has risen.
It’s still possible that the money and effort are not sufficient to the scope of the problem. It’s also possible that while government efforts may have helped to keep people out of poverty, erasing the opportunity gap is beyond the reach of conventional public policy.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/bc0327kh.html
KAY S. HYMOWITZ
Robert Putnam’s Mission
The Bowling Alone author’s prescriptions for closing the opportunity gap have been tried—and found wanting.
March 27, 2015
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