Our Kids, Robert Putnam's Latest Tome, Book Review

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

Pundits Ignore Vulnerable Groups

Pundits Ignore Vulnerable Groups

[This letter was published in the Boston Herald on Wednesday September 12, 2007]

Pundits from Robert Putnam to Pat Buchanan share the same limited notion of
diversity. (Jose De La Isla, "Not quite bowled over," September 8, 2007) Nowhere
in this article are the populations of persons with disabilities and elders
mentioned. Is it because they lack a political action committee to make campaign
contributions?
Upper class persons of color, upper class women and upper class homosexuals
show they are diverse. The ethnic lobby shows their diversity as well. But they
exclude poor persons, persons with disabilities and older citizens.
That is bad enough. But upper class journalists who ignore this overt bias
show that they too share the prejudices toward those two groups and have no
shame about doing so.

Roy Bercaw, Editor, ENOUGH ROOM

Not quite bowled over
Gutterball by Harvard’s diversity detractor
By Jose De La Isla
Saturday, September 8, 2007
http://www.bostonherald.com
Opinion & Editorial

Forget presidential politics. The real debate might be taking place outside that
arena. And a good thing, too. The dumbed-down, lightning-fast, popular vanity
answers by presidential aspirants might be irrelevant.

In August, The Wall Street Journal’s deputy editorial page editor, Daniel
Henninger, brought up an important concern about the times we live in. The
header boldly read, “The Death of Diversity.”

He reported that Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, author of the best seller
“Bowling Alone,” claims after 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities, “People
in ethnically diverse settings don’t want to have much of anything to do with
each other.”

This doesn’t sound very promising for those who believe we can all not only get
along but thrive when real and imagined barriers come down.

That typically happens when our social networks (called “social capital”) do
their job and provide economic and cultural security. But that type of
solidarity seems to go down when immigration is up.

Henninger, who otherwise appears to be sort of middle-of-the-roadish, has a
definite spin on all this. He thinks advocates for campus, corporate and media
diversity “gave short shrift to assimilation” and elevated “differences” to
another category by challenging the old ways in court.

Because the diversity issue (ethnic, race, gender, sexual orientation) was
unnerving, “little wonder the immigration debate is riven with distrust.”

I disagree with Henninger’s perspective.

Diversity issues, at least since the 1970s, have been about fairness standards.
Why should all citizens pay for higher education when their own kids don’t stand
a chance there, or how fair are glass ceilings for our educated, well-qualified
daughters?

Pitting diversity concerns with immigration movements implicitly looks at social
change from a xenophobic point of view. It makes the traditional populations
seem as if they are under jeopardy of some kind because they might feel they are
losing power.

In fact, Putnam says in the first line of his scholarly paper that new ethnic
and social heterogeneities pose both challenges and opportunities not just in
the United States, but in most advanced countries.

In this changing of the guard, especially in Western Europe, the traditional
networks to find a job, get a mate, raise children, enjoy status and even have
prominence within a circle of acquaintances is changing.

Simply put, Putnam says ethnic diversity will increase substantially.

In the short to medium term, immigration and ethnic diversity will challenge the
established social solidarity.

In other words, “different” people will be trying to get into our networks or
will be forming networks of their own.

So far, so good. But now comes Pat Buchanan and others with another
interpretation. They wrongly claim Putnam says greater diversity causes greater
distrust in our country. Imagine that! The increasing lack of trust researchers
have reported since the 1960s happened because of immigrants of the 2000s.

Conveniently misunderstanding what Putnam says misleads the country about an
important insight.

Yes, “bonding” within social groups becomes less solid in the face of diversity
and immigration. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of “bridging” with
non-traditional groups. That’s why Putnam says immigrant societies dampen the
negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities.

Negative-oriented people, like Buchanan, will never get it. They can only look
at a situation and think about what was “lost.” They can’t see all the new
gains.

Or, as Putnam puts it, the main challenge is “to create a new, broader sense of
we.”

Now of those running for president, which candidate is enough of an intellectual
to understand the big picture and lead us there instead of scaring us?
Article URL:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/editorial/view.bg?articleid=1030054