Studying Robert Putnam's _Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis_: Part 2 -- Conflating Equalities

Below I offer the second in a series of posts reflecting on my reading of Robert Putnam's 2015 Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. In this and coming posts, I examine Our Kids in digestible chunks, offer critique, and attempt to expound upon connections I see to education and schooling, education reform, and my own experiences. I see this book as central to understanding contemporary exigencies regarding education policy and essential to building and actualizing an egalitarian social justice agenda.

Part 2; Chapter One: “The American Dream: Myths and Realities” -- Conflating Equalities

In Our Kids: The American Dream at Risk, Harvard University’s Robert Putnam says that Americans tend to conflate two kinds of equalities/inequalities. Equality of income and wealth (EIW) refers to income distribution. Putnam refers to recent talk about 1%-ers as an example of attention to EIW. He states that for much of America’s history, citizens haven’t worried so much about EIW. “[W]e tend not to begrudge others their success…assuming that everyone has an equal chance to climb…given equal merit and energy” (31). Though, given the tenor of Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid, we might have more evidence that this is changing.

Americans fuse EIW with equality of opportunity and social mobility (EOSM). This kind of equality refers to the ease or difficulty with which younger people from myriad backgrounds will be able to sustain or improve their socioeconomic prospects, especially in comparison to older generations. If the race metaphor from Part 1 helps us understand the gist of the book, Putnam’s embedded ladder metaphor offers clarity on these constructs.

 Putnam could spend more time on the differences between EOW & EOSM. I *think* I'm getting it.
Click to see the enlarged graphic scaffold. 

EIW refers to folks’ positioning on the socioeconomic ladder and how high they climb. Americans don’t care so much about where a peer starts out on the ladder or how high one climbs  – or so Putman suggests --  so long as everyone has a chance to prove their ladder-climbing skills regardless of the rung on which they start. EOSM refers to the likelihood or improbability that, “given equal merit and energy,” any one person from a given generation or class or gender has the same chance to scale the ladder as any other person from previous generations. EOSM also considers the initial rung upon which person starts. Given equal merit and energy, are young people within the same generation and across demographics and generations “equally likely to climb” the ladder? (31). Putnam suggests while EIW hasn’t concerned Americans historically, EOSM has.

Putnam and his research crew seek to focus on elements of EOSM, especially “distribution of opportunity.” Rebranding his earlier bookish assertion into a scholarly research inquiry, he informs that the guiding question of Our Kids is this:

“Do youth today coming from different social and economic backgrounds in face have roughly equal life chances, and has that changed in recent decades?” (31-32).

Click to enlarge this illustration chronicling the history of economic in/equalities in the U.S.A. 

Over the course of the 20^th Century, inequality forms a horseshoe-shaped pattern. At its beginning and end, the gap between the affluent and poor was vast. Some may recall pundits making allusions to the 1890s and 1920s as the internet, real estate, and banking bubbles came and went and ushered in austerity measures which constitute much of the global neoliberal economic politick of today. Putnam says the Great Depression and World Wars helped equalize things (though one must read between the lines to see if Putnam means the Great Depression equalized via making things worse for everyone, and he offers even less clarity regarding whether the wars helped rise or lower the economic tides for the majority). Income distribution moved toward greater equality from 1910-1970, Putnam informs, and “the equalizing trend continued during the three postwar decades” (34).

Things changed in the 1970s. Indeed, having read and viewed other texts regarding economics in the United States, I can tell you that many problems we face today and appear to have remedied are ever-present – regardless of which party is in the White House – and have only been given the Band-Aid treatment and have been daunting us since the ‘70s. (I recommend the 2012 George Foster Peabody-winning 2012 documentary *Park Avenue: Money, Power, & The American Dream*). The 1970s is when “that decades-long equalizing trend began to reverse,” says Putnam (35). Reverse. The operative word is reverse.

Americans are used to shifting gears. But many are stuck in reverse despite their efforts.

Putnam informs that the 1970s saw the “bottom drop away from the middle,” and the 1980s saw “the top start to pull away from everyone else.” By the current decade, the “very top” has pulled away from the top (35). By 2012, incomes of the top 1% raise by 31%. The 99%-ers saw virtually no change upward at all.

The kicker, though, resides in these lines:

Even within each major racial/ethnic group, income inequality rose at the same substantial rate between 196 and 2011, as richer whites, blacks, and Latinos pulled away from their poorer co-ethnics (35).

He continues, “the last 40 years have witnessed an almost unprecedented growth in inequality in America” (36).

My takeaway from the first 40 pages of Putnam’s text is two-fold. For one, it justifies my sense that my social justice agenda needs rooting in socioeconomics and poverty. So much of education studies, other social sciences, and humanities is based in critical race theory, certain feminist and marginalized racial/ethnic theories, talk of microagressions and the overwhelming assurance of the existence of white privilege and white superiority. Our Kids helps provide a strong basis for viewing all oppression and power dynamics through economic/socioeconomic lenses. I favor such lenses because they help me consider oppression and systems of oppression not just in the era of the “Pax Americana” but throughout the history of what we call “civilization.”

 I worry that current dominating – and, I’d go so far as to say domineering – theories focusing on race or gender or sexuality or ethnicity at the expense of other social phenomena have a limited view of  history even as they attack “formal” discursive accounts of it and create and advocate for revisions and revisions of revisions of human nature. I worry that such approaches actually apply blinders to some quite possibly very disturbing aspects of human behavior which might just be ingrained in our species regardless of which race or ethnicity or gender or sexuality is the dominant discourse de jour.

I feel these lenses help me have a more inclusive agenda, one which raises up all people rather than – as I fear many scholars and thought leaders might truly want – replace the players rather than the game and hope that “trickle-down” equity takes place once one perceived dominant group has been replaced with another majority or empowered minority. I don’t see these lenses as allowing me to assert #AllLivesMatter instead of #BrownLivesMatter or #BlackLivesMatter. Rather, I see this perspective as responsibly enveloping all people.

 That doesn’t mean I eschew the notion of white superiority or white privilege, but I can see through a knowledge of EIW and EOSM a more even-keeled way of seeking reform. Yes, white privilege exists, but socioeconomic data reveal that it does not exist in equal amounts for all whites at all times everywhere all the time. White supremacy can be seen not just as systemically racist, but systemically classist – and, most probably, systemically racist because it is systemically classist.   

Running with the hashtag phrasing in the above sentences, I share with you that this is how I’ve summed my position on twitter: “It’s hard to talk about class without also talking about race, but we sure can talk about race without class.”

The same applies to gender or sexuality or orientation or ethnicity in relation to class/socioeconomics. Whereas existing scholarships and theories and paradigms have the talk of revolution and seek to deconstruct certain paradigms, I see them as too laser-focused to see the big picture, too obviously seeking to replace power rather than to reform it, and becoming as domineering, dictatorial, and exclusionist as the constructs they so fiercely critique. To be stark, I worry "check your privilege" has become the new "shut the f*ck up." 

I want to develop a social justice agenda that helps me raise up all people, and as I continue to digest Putman’s work, I think readers can see that his research and suggestions *bare out* the need and validity of such an agenda.

Secondarily, I see Our Kids’ introductory volley as evidence that those who have “made it” today, especially Baby Boomers and their ingénues and protégé, probably shouldn’t assume their stories correlate well to the stories of younger Americans, those not only in their teens and twenties but even in their thirties (like me) and early forties. 

So few established people seem to understand exactly how much rarer and more exclusive is their success  now than it might have been a decade ago. I believe neoliberal and neoconservative partisanship exacerbates this reality, as does the global corporacratic drive which distorts American exceptionalism and perverts the egalitarian concern once inherent in Americans’ focus on EOSM in favor of media falsehoods of American individualism, the universality of the singular as rule rather than exception, and the lie that anyone in this nation or any other is or can be a “self-made” affluent/influential. 

Younger people and those still trying to eke out a place in their fields or desired professions and lifestyles might not be dumber or lazier or less intelligent or less diligent, -outgoing, -gritty, and/or -persevering than those who have found success. There’s just less pie to go around, and fewer people are sharing it. Indeed, as will avail itself through more talk on Putnam’s book, those with the pie see less and less of anyone who needs it.

I’ll speak more about how these two benefits of reading this book apply to schooling ecologies and education reform at a later time, assisted by Putnam’s comments on education.

NEXT: The New(est?)  Segregation