Book Review - Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam
Harvard professor and author Robert Putnam chronicles how economic inequality and class division rob children of a future.
The Occupy Movement brought to public attention the rapidly increasing inequality in the United States. In “Our Kids,” Robert Putnam looks at the related trend of increasingly unequal social mobility for young people. Relying on thousands of academic studies, he concludes “the class-based opportunity gap among young people” has grown at an alarming rate over the past several decades. Putnam recognizes that economic inequality caused by the deterioration of lower-class families is “the deep throbbing, ominous bass line” underlying the significant decline in social mobility. But he wants to avoid conflating the two types of inequality.
A Harvard professor and author of a book about the decline of social capital called “Bowling Alone,” Putnam has been called “the most influential academic in the world.” A work like “Our Kids” shows why. Everyone who cares about the “gathering force” that will “radically transform the life chances of our children and grandchildren” should read this book. If it ever existed, the American Dream is dead — or, at best, on life support.
Putnam introduces each chapter with interviews with young people and their parents on each side of the class divide. Putnam is careful to say that these individual stories are “illustrations not proof” of his conclusions. The proof is the thousands of studies and other sources he cites in 83 pages of endnotes. Putnam’s approach both personalizes the points he is making and provides the objective basis for the pessimism the low-income young people he interviews express about their future.
The author starts by examining his 1959 graduating class in Ohio at Port Clinton High School, which was very diverse with respect to social class. “Socioeconomic barriers … were at their lowest ebb in more than a century,” he writes. There was much less income inequality than today and less class segregation in schools, neighborhoods, marriage and social contact. “Civic engagement and social solidarity were high; and opportunities for kids born in the lower echelon to scale the socioeconomic ladder were abundant.” Amazingly, the data he collected showed that “economic or social privilege” had no “detectable effect on educational attainment” for his graduating class. In contrast, the current generation in Port Clinton faces dramatically decreased mobility.
In subsequent chapters, Putnam considers families, parenting, schooling and community. He describes “the collapse of the working-class family, which began to happen to blacks in the 1960s [and] began to happen to whites in the 1980s and 1990s.” The result of this “massive transformation” is a “two-tier family structure” and “fragile families,” where low-income families are less stable and kids from those families struggle to succeed.
A “class-based gap in parenting styles,” caused in part by economic hardship, leads to stressed parents, which leads to bad outcomes for their kids. For example, neurobiological studies have found that healthy brain development is “closely correlated with parental education, income, and social class.” The future of a child is increasingly determined by the family into which he or she is born.
Unequal schools are also a factor. Putnam found that a student’s achievement is more influenced by their classmates’ family backgrounds than by their own family background. A student from a lower-class family does better when surrounded by classmates from upper-class families.
Putnam proposes dozens of wide-ranging steps to address inequality, many of which will not surprise progressives: reforms to increase family income, expand social and educational programs and reform the criminal justice system. To combat criticism that these reforms are too expensive, he includes the societal costs of maintaining the status quo is more than $500,000 per so-called “opportunity youth” (age 16 to 24 and not in school or working).
Some suggestions — such as increasing areas of mixed-income housing and home visits by professionals to help with child-rearing and stress — may be a hard sell. Not everyone likes the idea of people telling them how to raise their kids when they’re doing the best they can. But the proposals make the reader think.
If there is a flaw in this powerful book, it’s Putnam’s relatively little attention to race. He does recognize the impact of racism on people of color. However, based on his mountain of data, he concludes that class differences within racial groups are a more important factor in declining intergenerational social mobility than are differences between racial groups.
At the same time, it is far from insignificant that, for example, the average wealth of white families is seven times greater than that of black families. At least for some people, it seems likely that the intersection of race and class is a powerful double whammy.
Putnam has done a tremendous service by describing inequality of social mobility in detail. Perhaps for his next project he can use the same rigor to look at the impact of racial inequality in this country.