Robert D. Putnam Quotes

Parental wealth is especially important for social mobility, because it can provide informal insurance that allows kids to take more risks in search of more reward.

The decline in religious participation, like many of the changes in political and community involvement, is attributable largely to generational differences.

these costs total about $500 billion per year, or the equivalent of nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). More specifically, we estimate that childhood poverty each year: (1) reduces productivity and economic output by an amount equal to 1.3 percent of GDP, (2) raises the costs of crime by 1.3 percent of GDP, and (3) raises health expenditures and reduces the value of health by 1.2 percent of GDP.

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 t

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.

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

"If we think of politics as an industry, we might delight in its new "labour-saving efficiency", but if we think of politics as democratic deliberation, to leave people out is to miss the whole point of the exercise."

Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen.

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.
…
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.
…
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

Many people have a stereotype of what it means to be poor. And it may be somebody they see on the street corner with a sign: “Will work for food.” And what they don’t think about is that person who’s struggling every day. Could be the person who waited on us, took our bank deposit, works in retail, but who is barely above the poverty line.

Contemporary discussion of inequality in America often conflates two related but distinct issues: • Equality of income and wealth. The distribution of income and wealth among adults in today’s America — framed by the Occupy movement as the 1 percent versus the 99 percent — has generated much partisan debate during the past several years. Historically, however, most Americans have not been greatly worried about that sort of inequality: 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. • Equality of opportunity and social mobility. The prospects for the next generation — that is, whether young people from different backgrounds are, in fact, getting onto the ladder at about the same place and, given equal merit and energy, are equally likely to scale it — pose an altogether more momentous problem in our national culture. Beginning with the “all men are created equal” premise of our national independence, Americans of all parties have historically been very concerned about this issue.

Intuitively, we know that neglect is not good for a child, and abundant evidence from neuroscience helps explain why: neglect during early childhood reduces the frequency of serve-and-return interactions and produces deficits in brain development that are hard to repair. A landmark randomized study of Romanian orphans who were institutionalized at an early age found that extreme neglect produced severe deficits in IQ, mental health, social adjustment, and even brain architecture.

One broad class difference in parenting norms turns up in virtually all studies: well-educated parents aim to raise autonomous, independent, self-directed children with high self-esteem and the ability to make good choices, whereas less educated parents focus on discipline and obedience and conformity to pre-established rules.

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.

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.