Robert D. Putnam Quotes

The bottom line in the political industry is this: Financial capital — the wherewithal for mass marketing — has steadily replaced social capital — that is, grassroots citizen networks — as the coin of the realm.

Most fundamentally, school systems need to put higher quality teachers in poor schools under conditions in which they can actually teach and not just keep order.

TV-based politics is to political action as watching ER is to saving someone in distress.

"If the parents of schoolchildren in an elementary school in Austin worry most about the dangers their children face crossing busy streets near the school, they getting a stop sign installed or a traffic pattern changed will be their first goal. Other aims and actions may follow, once they experience their collective power. "Winning creates imagination," says Sister Judy Donovan, leading organizer of Valley Interfaith. "Once they see they can get a stop sign, they start thinking about what might be done in the school." Successful action gives people lessons in their own power."

{The Progressives] outlook was activist and optimistic, not fatalist and despondent. The distinctive characteristic of the Progressives was their conviction that social evils would not remedy themselves and that it was foolhardy to wait passively for time's cure. As Herbert Croly put it, they did not believe that the future would take care of itself. Neither should we.

Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high poverty schools. Every one of ten stressors is two to three times more common in high poverty schools — Student hunger, unstable housing, lack of medical and dental care, caring for family members, immigration issues, community violence and safety issues.

Serendipitous connections become less likely as increased communication narrows our tastes and interests. Knowing and caring more and more about less and less. This tendency may increase productivity in a narrow sense while decreasing social cohesion.

Indeed, many of the corporate titans who dominate the American imagination live by an ideology of individualism that barely masks selfishness and an air of superiority. A philosophy of supreme self-reliance is common, and the pursuit of unfettered self-interest is considered a laudable ethic to live by.

The decades between the Civil War and World War I were also an epoch of rapid population growth and urbanization. Between 1870 and 1900 national population nearly doubled from 40 million to 76 million, while the population of cities tripled from 10 million to 30 million.
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Year after year an endless stream of hopeful emigrants from American farms and European villages poured into the anonymous teeming cities of tenements and skyscrapers. These migrants were living now not merely in a new community, but in a setting so unfamiliar and disjointed that many doubted it deserved the term community at all.
Most of the new urban dwellers were also living in a new country. In the thirty years between 1870 and 1900, nearly 12 million persons immigrated to the United States, more than had come to our shores in the previous two and a half centuries. In the following fourteen years nearly another 13 million would arrive. In 1870 one-third of all industrial workers in America were foreign born. By 1900 more than half were. In 1890, immigrant adults actually outnumbered native adults in eighteen of the twenty cities with a population over 100,000.
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To those who lived through this epoch, what was most striking was simply the overwhelmingly accelerated pace of change itself. We often speak easily about the rapid pace of change in our own time. However, nothing in the experience of the average American at the end of the twentieth century matches the wrenching transformation experienced at the beginning of the century by an immigrant raised as a peasant in a Polish village little changed from the sixteenth century who within a few years was helping to construct the avant-garde skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan in the city of ‘big shoulders’ besides Lake Michigan. Even for native-born Americans, the pace of change in the last decades of the nineteenth century was extraordinary. A Bostonian Henry Adams later wrote of his own boyhood, ‘The American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than t

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.

Faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America. “The church is people,” says Reverend Craig McMullen, the activist co-pastor of the Dorchester Temple Baptist Church in Boston. “It’s not a building; it’s not an institution, even. It is relationships between one person and the next.”6 As a rough rule of thumb, our evidence shows, nearly half of all associational memberships in America are church related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context. So how involved we are in religion today matters a lot for America’s social capital.

We all know that the way to get something done is to give it to a busy person.

Social dislocation can easily breed a reactionary form of nostalgia.

In the quarter century between 1979 and 2005, average after-tax income (adjusted for inflation) grew by $900 a year for the bottom fifth of American households, by $8,700 a year for the middle fifth, and by $745,000 a year for the top 1 percent of households.

They grew up in an era when public education and community support for kids from all backgrounds managed to boost a significant number of people up the ladder — in Bend, Beverly Hills, New York, Port Clinton, and even South Central LA. Those supportive institutions, public and private, no longer serve poorer kids so well.