Mar 12, 2015
KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with
Harvard Professor,
Robert D. Putnam, on his groundbreaking examination of the
growing inequality gap in America. Putnam is the bestselling author
of Bowling
Alone:
why fewer Americans today have the opportunity for upward
mobility.
It’s the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a
house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we
believe in—a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and
effort. But during the last twenty-five years we have seen a
disturbing “opportunity gap” emerge. Americans have always believed
in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of
their family background, should have a decent chance to improve
their lot in life. Now, this central tenet of the American dream
seems no longer true or at the least, much less true than it
was.
Robert Putnam—about whom The
Economist said,
“his scholarship is wide-ranging, his intelligence luminous, his
tone modest, his prose unpretentious and frequently funny”—offers a
personal but also authoritative look at this new American crisis.
Putnam begins with his high school class of 1959 in Port Clinton,
Ohio. By and large the vast majority of those students—“our
kids”—went on to lives better than those of their parents. But
their children and grandchildren have had harder lives amid
diminishing prospects. Putnam tells the tale of lessening
opportunity through poignant life stories of rich and poor kids
from cities and suburbs across the country, drawing on a formidable
body of research done especially for this
book.
Our Kids is a rare combination of individual testimony and
rigorous evidence. Putnam provides a disturbing account of the
American dream that should initiate a deep examination of the
future of our country.