问答题 While most studies look at inequality of outcomes among adults and help us understand how America is coming apart, Putnam"s group looked at inequality of opportunities among children. They help us understand what the country will look like in the decades ahead. The quick answer? More divided than ever.
1 Putnam"s data verifies what many of us have seen anecdotally, that the children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in apparently different ways and have different opportunities. Decades ago, college-graduate parents and high-school-graduate parents invested similarly in their children. Recently, more affluent parents have invested much more in their children"s futures while less affluent parents have not.
They"ve invested more time. Over the past decades, college-educated parents have quadrupled the amount of time they spend reading "Goodnight Moon," talking to their kids about their day and cheering them on from the sidelines. High-school-educated parents have increased child-care time, but only slightly.
Affluent parents also invest more money in their children. 2 Over the last 40 years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their kids" enrichment activities by $ 5,300 a year, while the financially stressed lower classes by only $ 480, adjusted for inflation.
As a result, behavior gaps are opening up. In 1972, kids from the bottom quartile of earners participated in roughly the same number of activities as kids from the top quartile. Today, it"s a chasm. Richer kids are roughly twice as likely to play after-school sports. It"s not only that richer kids have become more active. Poorer kids have become more pessimistic and detached. 3 Social trust has fallen among all income groups, but, between 1975 and 1995, it plummeted among the poorest third of young Americans and has remained low ever since. As Putnam writes in notes prepared for the Aspen Ideas Festival: 4 "It"s perfectly understandable that kids from working-class backgrounds have become cynical and even suspicious, for virtually all our major social institutions have failed them—family, friends, church, school and community." As a result, poorer kids are less likely to participate in voluntary service work that might give them a sense of purpose and responsibility. Their test scores are lagging. Their opportunities are more limited.
Equal opportunity, once core to the nation"s identity, is now a tertiary concern. 5 If America really wants to change that, if the country wants to take advantage of all its human capital rather than just the most privileged two-thirds of it, then people are going to have to make some pretty uncomfortable decisions.