The terrible loneliness of growing up poor in Robert Putnam’s America

[mahatmakanejeeves]

The terrible loneliness of growing up poor in Robert Putnam’s America

“Life is not something you do, it’s something you endure.”

Wonkblog
By Emily Badger March 6
@emilybadger

SWARTHMORE, Pa. — Robert Putnam wants a show of hands of everyone in the room with a parent who graduated from college. In a packed Swarthmore College auditorium where the students have spilled onto the floor next to their backpacks, about 200 arms rise. ... “Whenever I say ‘rich kids,’ think you,” Putnam says. “And me. And my offspring.”

The Harvard political scientist, famous for his book “Bowling Alone” that warned of the decline of American community, has returned to his alma mater to talk, this time, about inequality. Not between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, but between two groups that have also fallen further apart: children born to educated parents who are more likely to read to them as babies, to drive them to dance class, to nudge them into college themselves — and children whose parents live at the edge of economic survival.

The distance between the two is deeply personal for Putnam, now 74 and launching a book that he hopes could change what Americans are willing to do about children in poverty. He grew up in a working-class Ohio town on Lake Erie where, in the 1950s, poor kids could aspire to Rotary scholarships or factory jobs. He left Port Clinton for Swarthmore, where he met a woman in his introductory political science class who would raise two children with him. They would go on to Harvard. His grandchildren are college-bound, too, or already there, one of them living on the same floor of the dorm where Putnam once bunked.

Some of his classmates from Port Clinton in the 1950s, meanwhile, stayed for manufacturing jobs that later disappeared. Their children faced rising unemployment and stagnating wages. A third generation was born poor, often without two parents.

[hedda_foil]

1. That chart. OMG, that chart. nt

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. Robert Putnam was on Thom Hartmann's TV show last week.

Conversations w/Great Minds P1 - Prof Robert D. Putnam - The Opportunity Gap Explained

My guest for tonight's Conversations with Great Minds is one of the world's leading political scientists. Currently the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University - Robert D. Putnam, who has been called "the most influential academic in the world." He has advised three U.S. presidents - and has won a number of distinguished awards. Professor Putnam's 2000 book Bowling Alone is considered a classic of its kind - an was a national besteller. His new book - "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis" - is a fascinating and challenging look at our nation's deep crisis of opportunity.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. He was on the PBS NewsHour Thursday night, March 19.

What’s splitting a new generation of haves and have-nots

Aired: 03/19/2015
08:37
Expires:
Rating: NR

Political scientist Robert Putnam grew up in Port Clinton, Ohio, a town where, he says, both rich and poor children grew up together and had bright opportunities. But in the past few decades, social mobility has declined and the haves and have-nots have become increasingly segregated. Economics correspondent Paul Solman offers a look at what drove Putnam to write his new book, “Our Kids.”