Robert D. Putnam Quotes

we tend not to begrudge others their success or care how high the socioeconomic ladder is, assuming that everyone has an equal chance to climb it, given equal merit and energy.

Poor kids, through no fault of their own, are less prepared by their families, their schools, and their communities to develop their God-given talents as fully as rich kids. For economic productivity and growth, our country needs as much talent as we can find, and we certainly can’t afford to waste it. The opportunity gap imposes on all of us both real costs and what economists term “opportunity costs.

Consequently, children who experience toxic stress have trouble concentrating, controlling impulsive behavior, and following directions.

Rehabilitate ex-prisoners, keeping in mind that the prison population is comprised of young men with very little education, poor job records, and frequent histories of mental illness and substance abuse.

The sociologist Michael Hout reports that “the affluent were about as happy in 2012 as they were in the 1970s, but the poor were much less happy. Consequently, the gross income gap [in happiness] was about 30 percent bigger in 2012 than it was in the 1970s.”37

Neighborhoods are important sites of growing class segregation.

Big, centralized government, with the proliferation of federal bureaucracies and the expansion of public welfare programs, is sometimes said to have undercut the mediating institutions of civil society, “crowded out” private generosity, and sapped individual initiative. This is a common explanation among conservative commentators, who attribute the reversal from we to I in the 1960s to the welfare state.16 Empirical evidence for “crowding out” is modest, for across states in the US and across countries in the world, the correlation between big government and social solidarity appears to be, if anything, faintly positive, not negative.

Financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has steadily replaced social capital - that is, grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm.

parents in poor neighborhoods are more likely to experience depression, stress, and illness, which in turn “are associated with less warm and consistent parenting.

Rich kids are more confident that they can influence government, and they are largely right about that.14 Not surprisingly, poor kids are less likely to try.

As a matter of fact, mankind now possesses for the first time the tools and knowledge to create whatever kind of world he wants...

Living in poor neighborhoods remains almost always a high-risk factor for disorder, suboptimal parenting, and adverse child development. Similarly, neighborhood poverty is known to have deleterious health effects. For example, obesity is systematically worse in poor neighborhoods.

Schooling — unequal as it is in America — plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.

often within a single school, AP and other advanced courses tend to separate privileged from less privileged kids. Later on, kids from different class backgrounds are increasingly sorted into different colleges: for example, by 2004, kids from the top quarter of families in education and income were 17 times more likely to attend a highly selective college than kids in the bottom quarter.

These two types of equality are obviously related, because the distribution of income in one generation may affect the distribution of opportunity in the next generation — but they are not the same thing.