Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Paperback – 29 Mar. 2016

This was an economics book club choice, and one of the best that we have read in recent years. Here are my notes:Summary:In this book the sociologist Robert D Putnam discusses the decline in social mobility in the US over the past half century. He uses statistics taken from academic research to document the following trends over that period:• Increased income inequality• Decreased social integration leading to increased class segregation• Decreased intermarriage between social classes• Decreased civic engagement• Decreased opportunities for children from poor backgrounds to scale the socioeconomic ladderHe also uses personal experiences and anecdotes to illustrate all the effects of these trends on modern Americans of all social classes. The result is a book that is enlightening and an easy read.Synopsis:I really enjoyed this book, which is by some margin the best book club book that we have read in a while. The mixture of personal narratives backed by statistics drawn from academic research was a good one, and made the book accessible and readable. However, he is much better at diagnosing and illustrating social problems than offering convincing remedies.As he describes it the causes of reduced social mobility are the due to reduced educational and social attainment levels amongst poor children, and increased levels amongst the children of middle and upper classes. As a result, American society is increasingly divided on class lines, with the middle and upper classes taking positive steps to segregate themselves and their children from the lower classes who they now have little in common with. He documents the following as the main causes of reduced social achievement in the lower classes;• The breakdown of the family caused by fewer children born within marriage, and the breakdown of the institution of marriage, resulting in “fragile” families with less stable parenting, and more one-parent families. Children benefit from stable parenting.• The role of the father has become increasing voluntary so that “only the most committed and financially stable men choose to embrace it”, so lower class children are increasingly brought up in fatherless environments.• Lower class parents lack of engagement with their children’s education• The disappearance of well paid manual jobs that allowed children with poor educational achievement to escape the poverty trap• Relatively lower levels of time and attention given to their children (although all social classes give more attention to their children than they did 50 years ago, the increases have been more pronounced in the middle classes)• Poor parenting results in poorly behaved children who are unwilling to learn, and disruptive at school. As a result schools in poor areas fail to attract good teachers.In contrast the middle and upper classes have absorbed the results of a half century of study of children’s wellbeing and are increasingly engaged in their social and educational wellbeing. They spend increasing amounts of time in reading to them, ferrying them between children’s social and sporting activities, and they invest both time and money in their education.All this matters because the research has also shown that a child’s early environment is crucial to their adult development. As Putnam puts it “the brain develops as a social organ not an isolated computer”. “A landmark randomized study of Romanian orphans who were institutionalised at an early age found that extreme neglect produced severe deficits in IQ, mental health, social adjustment and even brain architecture. Most of these impairments turned out to be reversible when children were placed in home settings before the age of two, but they were increasingly difficult to repair when placements occurred at later ages.”Thus, children raised in stable middle class homes in which they are given lots of love and attention develop into capable adults who well placed to thrive in the modern economy, while children from poor, fragile homes develop into adults who are socially and educationally limited and who become trapped in a cycle of low achievement.Among Putnam’s prescriptions for fixing these problems are:• Government cash transfers to poor families during children’s first 5 years: “An increase in family income by $3,000 during a child’s first five years of live seems to be associated with an improvement on academic achievement tests equivalent to 20 SAT points and nearly 20% higher income later in life”.• Professional “coaching” to teach parenting skills to poor parents• Mixing schools by moving poor kids into schools in better neighbourhoods• Vocational trainingCritiqueThe basic problem appears to me to be that children have a principal-agent problem: they rely on their parents to look after their welfare. In the 1950’s and 1960’s society was bound by rigid social codes that discouraged divorce and having children outside marriage, and these rules had the effect of forcing parents to stay together to bring up children. This was bad for the parents but good for the children. Now society is free from such social conventions, and parents are free to divorce and change sexual partners whenever they like, and the resulting family instability is bad for their children’s emotional and educational wellbeing. It is very difficult to counteract these social trends: we cannot make divorce more difficult, or force parents to stay together for the good of their children. It is therefore no wonder that government schemes to counteract inequality have such a poor record, the causes are deep and there are no easy solutions.In previous periods the ready availability of highly paid manual jobs in manufacturing meant that adults with poor educational achievement could still aspire to a good life. Globalisation has resulted in the disappearance of such opportunities, with negative effects of incomes and social mobility for poor families. Once again, there is no easy solution: we cannot unwind globalisation.Putnam makes a good case that the best way of counteracting this reduction in social mobility is to give money to poor families. In doing so he seems to diagnose the problem as being primarily an economic one, but actually the problem he describes is mainly social/cultural. It is telling that immigrant families (who have not yet adopted American social norms) have lower divorce rates, higher marriage rates, lower births outside marriage and more two parent families, and their children thus have higher levels of educational and social attainment. What he is actually describing is economic sorting according to parental attitude: middle class parents are choosing to invest heavily in their children, lower class parents are not. Although some of the investment middle class parents make is financial, the most important investment in children is time spent talking and reading to them in their first 2 years, and all parents can invest that time if they choose. One of the most interesting aspects of this book was that there has been a huge amount of research on child development, but that so little of it is widely known. Perhaps if all parents knew that they could make a huge difference to their children’s long term wellbeing by reading to them, talking to them and playing to them in the first few years more would do so. Should we not teach parenting in schools?Putnam searches for socioeconomic causes for these trends, but does not look to cultural causes (admittedly that takes us into politically difficult territory). I know from growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 80s, and going to a racially and socially mixed school, that many working class British white kids do not aspire to become highly educated. As the economic returns to education rise, so that attitude is increasing destructive. In my own children’s London state grammar school 90% of the children are from an Asian background, and many of them are working class, because their parents place a high value on education and push them to study (I wonder whether there is a Hindi or Gujarati word for “swot”). It would have been interesting for Putnam to have included some comparisons from other countries where education is higher prized, such as South Korea, to see whether they also suffer from increasing levels of social inequality.

This is a much more complex book than meets the eye.The format whereby an author establishes via interviews and follows over a period of time the story of a family and explains a social phenomenon via a narrative is very powerful. Last book I read that followed that format was Jonathan Cohn’s “Sick” and I found it brought to life a number of issues regarding healthcare very eloquently.“Our Kids” is a mix between this “human” format and a veritable torrent of data, chiefly displayed on scissor charts. A scissor chart is a chart with two lines on it: One goes upwards and describes something positive (like regular family dinner) that is happening to the better-educated Americans and the other goes downwards and shows the worse-educated Americans are getting less of it. Or it could be the opposite way round if we are describing unwanted pregnancies. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying)The author uses the parents’ educational attainment as his definition of “class” for the very simple reason that it correlates well with wealth, while offering the advantage of being trivial to measure, and indisputable, to boot.By the time you’ve finished the book, you are left with exactly zero doubt that social mobility in America is a distant memory rather than the reality on the ground. Additionally, very strong evidence is offered that the correlation of this phenomenon with race is not the same as causality and mostly describes the past: inequality on all fronts is currently increasing within racial groups, not between them.On the other hand, while the author purports to have explored the causes of this stagnation across four separate axes (family, parenting, schooling and community) the distinctions between the four are very blurred. He does his best to tease these distinctions out of the multiple examples of families (and extended meta-families) he researches, but, for me at least, the only true result was that by the end of the book, and despite genuine intentions to keep it all in my head, I’d totally lost count of who was who in all the stories.I hate to say it, but there were too many families here and, financial circumstances aside, they all really came in two categories, namely 1. functional and 2. non-existent.So there are poor families and single moms, true heroes of this book, that do a tremendous job of keeping their kids on the right path and there are even some kids who are growing up with absent or incarcerated parents who are doing what they can to raise their siblings well and not doing a bad job of it at all, and all this defies the interpretation that there is nothing that can be done.Yes, there are also clear examples where families with privilege can shield their kids from hazards (example: the ADHD label) the poorer kids are fully exposed to, but you also get to meet poor parents who fully grasp the value of moving neighborhood to get to the better school. Another important observation is that the underprivileged kids are raised with "rules" and are taught to mistrust their neighbor, where the privileged kids are raised with "guidance" and have trust in their neighbor imbued in them by parents who have the time to provide the guidance.So it’s rather complex and the overlap between the “Parents” chapter, the “Schooling” chapter and the “Families” chapter is so enormous, you get the feeling different kinds of chapters are warranted: chapters relating to the problems and pathologies. In no particular order, I think I took away the following potential issues1. Increased (and increasing) levels of parent incarceration, particularly minorities2. Women (not girls) who believe they will not change their financial or economic status through marriage increasingly have and raise children outside of marriage; especially so in neighborhoods where their potential male mates have little to offer.3. Perhaps as a result, most inequality we observe is fully established by age 5 and is never reversed4. Some schools are not learning environments5. There is a lack of counseling regarding the opportunities for higher education for the poor6. The cost of higher education has balloonedOne chapter, however, stands out, and it’s the “Community” chapter, which could also have been called the “Neighborhood” chapter. This is no coincidence, the author has written a whole book about how our neighborhoods have changed. I came away from reading “Our Kids” feeling that the key to most of the problems, both to how they came about, and hopefully also to how we might one day reverse all these “scissors charts,” lies with our communities.So, for example, parent incarceration is a phenomenon that occurs on a neighborhood basis, first and foremost. Not fit for purpose schools quite possibly even more so.The author starts the book in his neighborhood and ends there too. My takeaway from “Our Kids” is that to do right by our children we need to pay attention to the neighborhoods where their future colleagues, friends and partners are growing up. And if we want them to grow up in a world as good as the one we had the privilege to be raised in, we need to make sure that’s every neighborhood, not just the one we happen to live in. Yes, it’s much easier said than done, perhaps it’s even cliche, but this knowledge is a start and it was imparted on me by reading this book.Thank you Robert Putnam.

Excellent, informative book which has been very well researched and is written in an interesting manner keeping your attention. In retrospect I wished I had bought the physical rather than kindle edition as there is a lot of good information and data which is excellent reference material.

Like with his previous book, Bowling Alone. Putnam and his research associates under take an excellent review of the fading life chances of American young. are other countries like UK likely to follow the same patterns?

Great book. Fascinating insight into our changing relationship with the American Dream and an honest take on inequality in the US.

This was clearly a well researched book, and had an important message, but tbh I got bogged down in the life stories throughout the book. I know they were used to add life to the statistics and theory, but I just found them irritating and overlong. Perhaps there is a cultural thing, but everyone was presented so positively, facing adversity bla bla.I think this book could have been an article - it felt stretched out. I think the main point is that the early years, and community ties matter. Quick summary to save you ploughing your way through this book!