A groundbreaking examination of the growing inequality gap from 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: The American Dream in Crisis" may be the most effective and compelling analysis of American inequality to date. While Piketty's "Capital" was (let's face it) largely a coffee table book that few read beyond the introduction, "Our Kids" is a highly readable and moving narrative. The book does include numbers, charts and graphs, but it combines them with real stories about real people in a way that puts you in direct touch with inequality and what it means for our children.
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It's very important to understand that the problem is going to get worse. Technology, especially in areas like robotics and artificial intelligence, is advancing rapidly, and this is going to lead to the disappearance of more and more jobs, especially for those with lower education levels. This may be one of the biggest challenges we face going forward. I also suggest reading The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future which focuses specifically on this issue.
"Our Kids" is a must-read book that goes beyond the numbers. It takes you inside the American social fabric and lets you see what inequality and poverty really mean for real people--and what it portents for the future of America if we don't address the problem.
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Details
- Hardcover: 400 pages ( Download PDF:
) - Author: Robert D. Putnam
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 10, 2015)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1476769893
- ISBN-13: 978-1476769899
- Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
About the Author
Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. Nationally honored as a leading humanist and a renowned scientist, he has written fourteen books and has consulted for the last four US Presidents. His research program, the Saguaro Seminar, is dedicated to fostering civic engagement in America.
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