Summary Of Robert D. Putnam's 'Our Kids'

In Our Kids, Robert D. Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, examines the deterioration of the American Dream that has been replaced by an alarming “opportunity gap” between kids of low and high-income levels. This idea of “Our Kids” refers to a time when the community considered all kids as their own, but, unfortunately, this concept is long gone today. Putman illustrates these problems through the use of anecdotes about kids raised in different socioeconomic backgrounds and statistical evidence outlining the general patterns. Even though Putman clearly makes his case for the rise of income inequality and the opportunity gap, he often lacks a true analysis of the economic and political forces causing these tribulations,

He describes the lives of various families, both rich and poor, to illuminate the impacts these topics have on inequality and opportunity gaps. Children from high socioeconomic backgrounds are generally born within wedlock, have parents who invest early in their children through time and material resources, attend schools with academically competitive peers and ample extracurricular activities, and are exposed to a wide variety of informal mentors. Children from poor families, on the other hand, are often raised in a single mother household, are disciplined through physical beatings rather than reasoning, lack sufficient adult mentors, and attend schools with a shortage of resources and challenging curriculum. He concludes that family upbringing is having an increasingly large impact on a child’s future success, greatly lessening the opportunities available to poor

He looks at relative mobility, a measure of how a child’s ranking in the income distribution compares to their parent’s. Putman focuses on relative mobility because it is crucial when attempting to understand equality of opportunity, but absolute mobility, measured in absolute dollars, plays a vital role when exploring potential solutions to these problems. Because the key emphasis is on the individual, most of the policy proposals are based on increasing social capital including parental leave and mentoring programs. This is a very limited approach for such a complex problem, though, and a true paradigm shift will require an understating of how to redistribute economic growth. There is also little mention of the powerful political forces driving these predicaments, which is particularly interesting considering Putman is an academia of politics. One potential motive of omitting this information may be so that this book can appeal to a wider audience instead of creating partisan divides. I appreciate that Putman recognizes the difficulty in implementing these policies but also understands the urgent need to begin