Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

This book is an eye-opening documentary written for lay people. If I were born today, I am not sure I would be able to achieve the success in life I have had. My parents were incredibly poor, but the education I received laid the foundation for my future success. Robert Putnam's book shows how that that type of education, including the associated extracurricular activities that were readily available, is just not there for most poor kids today. It is quite humbling to realize that I am not as "self-made" as I thought I was.

Would be great if every citizen would read this and realize how much we are suffering by our failure to keep our families or whatever group is available sufficiently intact and functional to raise and protect every child in the land. It is a great failure on our collective parts that we are not providing sufficient care and sustenance of all types for every one of our children. I am not promoting the progressive agenda of thinking that government programs should be in place to do this. I do not believe that will actually deliver the needed environment. We must find it in our collective local communities, not mandated through some federal bureaucracy. If we cannot do it by essentially local initiatives, it will not happen. Others will have very different ideas, but I think this book shows how deep is our problem.

Neoliberalism has, since the 1980's, ensured that the rich get richer and the poor poorer. Robert Putnam has done his research well and presents evidence that the children of poorer parents today face barriers to education and employment unknown to octogenarians such as myself. Not only do we have a lost generation but we face economic stagnation, Without a properly prepared young workforce to drive the economy and pay the taxes needed to support we older folk hard times are ahead.

Every educated person who is concerned about this country should read this book. The only problem is his weak suggestins on how to solve the problem of getting ALL of our children educated and working productively. I don't know if there is a solution. Throwing more money at our poor won't solve the problem which starts in the family.

Amazing book, I really enjoyed the way it was written with interviews or real life accounts. Putnam brings the reader attention into a current problem with poor families and the perpetual lack of support and learning/income opportunities many, including myself, take for granted everyday. Ask yourself this question; when was the last time you wondered how you were going to pay all the bills and still eat or worried 24/7 about your safety??? I have in my past; that environment is not compatible with learning. Moving book!

I decided to read this because I was familiar with Putnam’s prior research and Charles Murray mentioned Putnam’s Bowling Alone many times in his Coming Apart, which I read awhile back and enjoyed. I thought Putnam’s new book would be a good follow-up to Murray’s Coming Apart. It was worth reading, but has some serious short-comings. Essentially, Putnam makes a PC, liberal version of the argument that Murray already made in Coming Apart using a lot of the same data and research. The gap between the working class and middle/upper-middle, college educated class has widened considerable to the great detriment of working and lower-middle class families, their children in particular. The reason for this is NOT the significant decline in moral and civic virtue among the working class, which is Murray’s argument (Putnam hardly even acknowledges this argument), but mainly “the system”, although, of course, he never uses that word. Putnam down plays personal responsibility to the point of tacitly denying it. Instead the main cause is the economy, loss of good paying working class jobs, less funding for public schools and supporting community/public institutions like libraries, rec centers, civic leagues, etc. Consequently, his proposed remedies are to give poor people more money, better fund their schools and other public institutions and/or move, relocate poor families to more affluent parts of town and/or buss their children to more affluent schools. In effect, we need to raise taxes on the middle and upper class and more rigorously redistribute wealth (although he stops short of saying this): we need to be much more like Europe. If you are liberal, you’ll probably like this book a lot.

He does acknowledge and graphically depicts through his anecdotes/case studies the collapse of the nuclear family among the poor but offers nothing in terms of remedying this problem. His only proposal is to make long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) much more widely available to the poor. That might help somewhat, but it will exacerbate the problem of a declining population well discussed in Jonathan’s Last’s What to Expect When No One is Expecting. Putnam states bluntly, “I see no clear path to reviving marriage rates among poor Americans”. He says that any policies intended to discourage children out of wedlock would be “absurd”.

The biggest problem with his thesis is the fact that many poor immigrant children, especially Asians, still succeed in rising out of poverty into the middle and upper-middle class. What accounts for this? Isn’t it precisely the fact that those families have the sort of civic and moral virtues, particularly the commitment to marriage and family, that Murray argues the poor and lower middle class increasingly lack. (Murray could have made his argument stronger by including a chapter on those immigrant success stories.) If it really is primarily the economy that is at fault, then these immigrant success stories should be much rarer than they are, especially considering additional disadvantages they face, e.g. rudimentary or virtual ignorance of the English language. In fact, most of Putnam’s anecdotes undercut his thesis by pointing out the omnipresence of drug abuse among the poor and its role in destroying families: it’s hard to maintain a decent job irrespective of how strong the economy is when you are an alcoholic, heroin, or crystal meth addict.

Finally, he cherry picks some of his data. This becomes clear just by noting the discrepancies in the data between Murray and Putnam on related issues. Specifically, he says studies indicate that cash allotments do help out the children of the poor. This flies in the face of common sense and most the studies I’ve looked at: what’s to stop the parents from spending the money just on themselves, e.g. to buy more drugs or alcohol? He says programs like Head Start, although the studies are not all agreed, are quite helpful to poor children. Most of the studies I’ve read show they are only modestly helpful in the short run but in the long run virtually negligible, e.g. drop-out, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy rates are not significantly different for poor children that attended such programs. In fact, that is exactly what you would expect from Putnam’s own argument about the effect of bad communities and families, which those programs do very little to correct for without tremendous costs per student.

The book was very well written. In some cases the statistics to back up the words were not there. Also, the interviewer did not receive the amount of credit I believe she deserved for completing two years of interviews with individuals who may not have been willing to talk to the lead professor/researcher who was her boss. She provided true insight and did a great job.

The book was very well written and identified a lot of topics which require further research.

I sent a email to the author congratulating him! Also reading Loving Learning which offers an answer in another fine book. Am one of the founders of a private school that taught values as the foundation. I have seen what builds great kids from the inside out!!!

There’s an epidemic out there. Poor kids these days don’t have a chance, and it’s getting worse.

Robert Putnam, with the help of an uncredited assistant (on the cover, at least), gathered storied of young adults and melded those stories of haves and have-nots with larger statistical trends to tell the story of how the educated class is ,moving away from the uneducated class. There are copious charts and graphs.

I really wanted to like this, since it covers a lot of the same ground as the recent Charles Muarry Book “Coming Apart,” and for ideological reasons I don’t want to read Muarry. The problem is that there’s no hook. The kid’s stories should be what grips you and pulls you into the text, but it doesn’t work. I think there’s too many so I can’t fully live their stories, or perhaps Putnam and company are better analytical thinkers than storytellers for generating pathos. Whatever it was, I was unengaged. It was good enough to finish, but it did not compel me to write marginalia. If you have to read this for a class, it will be readable but it might not pull you in if it is leisure time reading.