AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

THE AMERICAN DREAM IN CRISIS? A DISCUSSION

WITH ROBERT PUTNAM, CHARLES MURRAY, AND

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON

INTRODUCTION:

ROBERT DOAR, AEI

PRESENTATION:

ROBERT PUTNAM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

RESPONSES:

CHARLES MURRAY, AEI;

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

DISCUSSION:

CHARLES MURRAY, AEI;

ROBERT PUTNAM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY;

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

12:00 PM – 1:30 PM

MONDAY, JUNE 22, 2015

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/the-american-dream-in-crisis-a-

discussion-with-robert-putnam-charles-murray-and-william-julius-wilson/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY

DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM

ROBERT DOAR: Good afternoon and welcome to the American Enterprise

Institute and to what I hope will be a very stimulating conversation about a set of very

important issues. I am Robert Doar, the Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies here at

AEI.

The most important task of a moderator at an event of this kind with such truly

great and distinguished participants is to say as little as possible and get out of the way,

and that is what I intend to do. We are going to begin with Robert Putnam, who will

discuss his latest book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” which has received a

great deal of deserved attention and praise. Dr. Putnam is a professor of public policy at

Harvard’s Kennedy School and his previous work has included the widely read “Bowling

Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”

Then, we will turn to our two respondents, beginning first with AEI’s Charles

Murray, whose works have included “Losing Ground: American Social Policy,” 1950 to

1980, and “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” both essential

works for anyone interested in what is happening in America’s middle class and poor

communities. Dr. Murray has also, thankfully for parents like me, written a lovely book

called “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead,” which I’ve given to all of my

college age children, hoping they would take it all – take all of his advice. And by the

way, happy Father’s Day to everyone. (Laughter.)

After Dr. Murray, we will hear from William Julius Wilson, who is a renowned

sociologist and also a professor at Harvard. Dr. Wilson is the author of very significant

works, including “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public

Policy,” and “More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City,” both of

which brought brave and important insight to some of the hardest issues our country

faces. Were I to list the awards Professor Wilson has earned, we would have no time left

for discussion.

Now, I have one last thing to say, which may surprise some of you here today,

who perhaps came hoping for what that old late night talk radio host on WMCA in New

York, Malachy McCourt, used to call a real donnybrook. What I want to say is that I’ve

spent a lot of my weekend reading and re-reading some of the works of these three great

scholars. And I hope this doesn’t make any of you three uncomfortable, but you agree on

a great deal.

Bob, you start us off. (Applause.)

ROBERT PUTNAM: Thanks very much, Robert. I really appreciate this

opportunity. I’m grateful to AEI, to Arthur Brooks for the invitation. And I’m especially

grateful to my two co-panelists here, both of them very distinguished, as Robert has said,

but also both of them people who’ve blazed a trail that I’m, in this new book, following.

Bill Wilson, 40 years ago – almost 40 years ago, 1978 I believe it was, Bill –

published a book that was misleadingly titled but was remarkably prescient, the title was

“The Declining Significance of Race in America,” but actually the book was about the

increasing significance of class in America. I don’t know, Bill, whether you’ve ever

thought about re-titling the book. (Laughter.) But it was a remarkable book because a lot

of the evidence showed the increasing significance of class in America.

And then of course, Charles Murray, in 2012, published “Coming Apart: The

State of White America 1960-2010.” And that book does many things, but among other

things, it highlights three important big trends in American society, first of all increasing

inequality of wealth and income. Secondly, in part, following on that, increasing class

segregation – America’s increasingly segregated by social class, as Charles and others

have pointed out, both segregated in terms of where we live.

We’re not segregated in all respects more than we used to be. And I’m now just

summarizing some of what Charles also reported. We’re not more segregated. We’re less

segregated actually than we used to be, certainly in religious terms, but even in racial

terms, we’re somewhat less segregated. But we’re more segregated than we used to be in

social class terms, more segregated in residential terms, more segregated in terms of who

we go to school with, and more segregated – and again, Charles pointed this out – more

segregated in terms of whom we marry. And intermarriage rates, although intermarriage

religious and racial intermarriage rates have been rising, class intermarriage rates have

been falling for the last 30 or 40 or 50 years.

That’s an important indicator – intermarriage rates are an important indicator

basically because we tend not to marry people that we don’t know. (Laughter.) That’s a

joke. Don’t you do jokes at AEI? I’m sorry. (Laughter.) And that intermarriage rate is a

nice reflection of the fact that – or a distributing reflection of the fact that increasingly

people of marriageable age are more likely to encounter people of other religions and

other races, but less likely to encourage people of other social classes than we used to be.

And those three – and of course, the third big social trend that Charles point out

was the collapse of the working class family and collapse of the working class

community in America – white as well as, or even maybe more than, black. And those

three big trends are, in a way, the starting point of this new book of mine called “Our

Kids.” In the book, I mean to ask what are the implications of those trends, the increasing

salience of class in American society that both Bill and Charles have talked about. What

are the implications of those for our kids?

And in a series of stories and in a series of what I call scissors graphs, I mean to

lay out the evidence that over the last 30 or 40 years there’s been a growing gap between

rich kids and poor kids in America. And I want to emphasize that when I talk about rich

and poor, I’m not talking about the upper 1 percent and the lower 1 percent. I’m talking

about basically the upper third of American society, which is college educated

Americans, college graduates and kids coming from homes where the parents were

college graduates. That’s the up side and down side of all these scissors graphs are people

coming from the lower third of American society, which are people who did not – parents

who did not get past high school.

Would you raise your hands if you have a college degree, please? So when I say

rich, I mean you. And that – and I’m making a comparison. And these scissors graphs in

the book show in many different measures of child welfare and investments in children a

growing gap over the last 30 or 40 years between kids coming from college educated

homes or rich kids, and kids coming from high school educated homes or poor kids.

Sometimes the scissors point up, that is things are getting better for all kids, but getting

better faster for rich kids. And sometimes the arrows point down – I mean, the scissors

point down, saying that things are getting worse for everybody, but worse faster for poor

kids.

And let me just – I’m not – I don’t have time to summarize in detail all these

charts and graphs, but the basic kinds of evidence that I have that I draw on, and much of

this is drawn on from other people, some of it is our own direct research, but I’m trying to

pull together a wide range of evidence on this growing opportunity gap. It shows up in

how much money parents invest in their kids. That is the gap in the amount of

development parents spend on enrichment for their kids. That’s just a – you know – sort

of slightly jargony (ph) term for summer camp and piano lessons and computers –

computer games and trips to the zoo and trips to France and so on.

That kind of spending, among kids coming from well off families in America has

skyrocketed and it’s now nearly $7,000 per kid per year. Whereas, on the very same

measure, kids coming from high school-educated homes have had – high school or less

educated homes – have had no increase in that kind of indicator of summer camp and

piano lessons and so on. So they’re now just over $7,000 a year, so there’s a – $700 a

year. So there’s a huge gap and there didn’t used to be, in the kinds of benefits that

parents are able to provide to their kids. And I’m going to call that the summer camp gap.

But there’s an even more important gap in terms of the amount of time parents

spend with their kids, especially the amount of developmental time that parents spend

with their kids, which I call good night moon time. That is the amount of time parents

spend reading to their kids or playing pat-a-cake or taking them to zoo – all that sort of

thing. And it didn’t use to be that there was any class gap in the amount of developmental

time parents spend with their kids. But there’s been a sharp increase – it’s actually –

there’s been an increase, both among working class and among middle class, upper

middle class parents. But the trend is so much – so sharp that now kids – my

grandchildren, that is kids coming from college educated homes in America get 45

minutes a day more in good night moon time than the equivalent kids coming from high

school educated homes. And that makes a big difference because as we know now from

the most recent brain science, that kind of interaction – direct, personal interaction with

kids has a powerful effect on brain development, and especially very early in their lives.

But there’re similar kinds of gaps like this in test scores at school, gaps in

extracurricular activities, the amount of – taking part in, you know, band or chorus or

football or other extracurricular activities is quite steady and high among upper middle

class kids, kids coming from affluent homes, but dropping sharply among kids who are

coming from high school-educated homes. And that matters. I get teased sometimes for

hyperventilating about high school football, but the reason that that matters is we know,

as a matter of fact, that taking part in those extracurricular activities matters for kids. It

inculcates soft skills – I mean, demonstrably inculcates soft skills, teamwork and hard

work and Charles sometimes calls virtues of what my mom calls stick-to-itiveness. And

that’s – and we know that employers will actually pay more for kids who – holding

constant all the other things, test scores and so on – employers will pay people who had

extracurricular activities more than they pay equivalent people who haven’t. And that’s

because of those soft skills which have great value.

And if we had more time, we’d pause on the actual question, well, why has there

been this drop in extracurricular participation by poor kids in America? And the short

answer is pay to play. We’ve now started charging kids. Didn’t use to be. For most of the

20th century, all kids in American high schools, rich and poor, got free – got to play

football or band or chorus or whatever free. And that was thought to be by taxpayers all

over America a proper investment of their money to provide kids not just with the

reading, writing, arithmetic, and chemistry, but also the soft skills. We’ve stopped –

about 20 years ago, we began charging people for that. And of course, it had the obvious

effect, which is rich kids kept on going.

On average, it costs nowadays in America per kid, per semester about $400 to

take part in any extracurricular activity. So if you’ve got two kids, if they want to take

part in both semesters, that’s $1,600, $1,600 if you have an annual income of $200,000,

you know, it’s not a big deal. But if your annual income is $16,000, who in their right

mind is going to pay, you know, 10 percent of their total family annual income for their

kids to take part in athletics or a band? And that means that, as a matter of fact, we’ve

now, by privatizing what for most of the 20th century we thought of as a right that every

kid ought to have, by privatizing that we’ve taken it out of the hands of poor kids, not our

own – not kids coming from college-educated homes.

There’re similarly gaps like that in involvement in religious communities. That’s

a very important example of community involvement. Not – at least – I’m not trying to

make an argument that that’s theologically bad for poor kids. It may be, but that’s not my

argument. My argument is that religious communities used to be a rich source of social

support for kids outside their immediate families. As kids – working class kids have

become less involved in church activities, therefore, they’re less likely to encounter, you

know, youth group leaders or Sunday school leaders or just other parishioners who’d take

an interest in them.

So in – and indeed, I think the most important generalization you can make about

the implication of the trends – implication for kids of these trends that Charles and

William have – Charles and Bill Wilson have talked about is that increasingly poor kids

in America, unlike our kids, unlike kids coming from affluent homes, poor kids in

America are increasingly isolated, alone. They don’t trust anybody. A young woman we

interviewed in Portland, Ohio, who’s suffered from a lot of these symptoms that I’ve

talked about, recently posted on Facebook, love hurts, trust kills. And if you think for a

minute about what it means to grow up in a world in which you cannot trust anybody,

even your own parents.

One way to see the importance of that is to begin with the premise, which I think

is true, that all kids do dumb things. All – rich kids, poor kids, black kids, white kids,

brown kids, your kids, my kids – all kids do dumb things. Raise your hand if as a child

you never did any dumb thing. (Laughter.) Right, I rest my case on that point. But

nowadays, if you’re coming from an affluent home and your child does some dumb thing

– they get involved in drugs or they make a dumb decision in their romantic life, or they

get in a fight with a teacher, or they back the car into the next door neighbor’s garage,

when that happens, instantly, airbags inflate to protect the kid from the consequences. It

doesn’t allow the child to learn from that mistake. And if it were my grandchildren

involved, of course I’d inflate the airbag. But you have to imagine that if a poor kid does

exactly the same thing, no airbags. So – and therefore, it can ruin a poor kids’ life, an

event that otherwise would be a learning experience if it’s coming from a rich kid.

So the basic argument of this book is that in those and many other ways,

increasingly these broader trends of economic inequality and economic segregation and

the collapse of the working class family, those broader trends bear directly on kids. And

therefore, pose the likelihood, the challenge that, as these kids age, we’ll see increasingly

a growing gap in the opportunities kids have for moving up. Increasingly, the most

important decision a child will make is choosing their parents. And that is fundamentally

un-American.

Because the idea that every – Americans have not always agreed that everybody

ought to have the same outcome, but Americans have historically agreed – from our very

founding, we’ve agreed that everybody ought to get a fair, decent chance to get started.

We don’t care how high, you know, Bill Gates climbs or Warren Buffett climbs because,

you know, they’re probably better climbers. They work harder, that’s fine. On the

assumption that all kids are getting on the ladder at the same point, but that’s the issue

that’s posed by these trends that I’ve been talking about.

Now, what’s to be done? Well, here, I think there’s an interesting contrast that

maybe Charles will talk about between – we basically agree on a lot of things. I focus a

little more on the consequences for kids, but we basically agree on the larger changes that

have happened. But we have somewhat different – Charles and I have somewhat different

views about why it happened and, most important, about what can be done about it.

And I’m going to try to be very brief here and try to give him a big target to shoot

at. (Laughter.) Basically, Charles, as he once said publicly in another encounter that the

two of us were involved in, I’m a libertarian. Libertarians don’t do solutions. (Laughter.)

I think I’m quoting your – I think I’m quoting you accurately.

CHARLES MURRAY: (Off mic.) – laugh line all the time. (Laughter.)

MR. PUTNAM: Well, I try not to use it in your absence, Charles, but I will use it

since you’re here. And to the extent that Charles talks about solutions to this, he believes

that we should say to the upper class that they should start preaching what they practice.

That is, the upper class, you know, now have stable marriages. They should start

preaching that to poor folks, and there should be a cultural reawakening.

And I’m not saying to be dismissive of. That’s a particularly – that’s a good

interpretation. I offer much more – in the last chapter of my book – you can compare the

two last chapters, actually. The last chapter of my book offers a set of incrementalist

changes, what I call purple policies, that is some of them are going to look red or

conservative, some of them are going to look blue or progressive. I’ve been attacked by

both sides for the fact that I have suggestions in there from the other side of the political

spectrum. Probably I’ve actually been attacked more by liberals for having put some

conservative observations in the book. But – and they’re all incrementalist.

And I – but behind that difference – I mean, what I’m saying by incrementalist? I

mean, I think early child education is a no-brainer. I think that would make a big

difference to leveling the playing field. I think community colleges could provide an

important on-ramp for kids that haven’t had opportunities because of their parents. I think

apprenticeships. I think tutoring. I think – including, I think, a big contribution that the

religious groups in America could make is to be much more interventionist, much more

active in reaching out to poor kids and providing tutoring and social support, and so on. I

think that parenting – coaching programs around the country of coaching parenting that I

think would be really helpful, a practical maybe implementation of Charles’ idea of

preaching what the upper class practices.

But behind that, and this is my really last point, I think Charles and I have a

different interpretation of American history. And it’s worth surfacing that in this context,

I think, so that we can have a – we can see how these two interpretations, two big macro

interpretations of America, which agree on what’s happening now, how we differ a little

bit about how we got here and where we might go from here.

Charles, I think, and he’ll be able to speak next, so he’ll say what I’m wrong

about this, doesn’t talk much about history except to talk about the importance of certain

virtues in American civic cultures that have been in our national DNA since the founding.

And I sort of agree with it that that’s – that those are virtues that they’ve been in our

cultural DNA, or civic cultural DNA since the founding. But then, basically you don’t get

much sense of historical change in Charles book until 1963, when Kennedy’s

assassinated and basically the rule goes to hell in a handbasket, and he then offers some

interpretations for why that might have triggered this increasing class disparity, partly

having to do with permissiveness, partly having to do with public policy that gave

incentives to people not to be virtuous.

And he – Charles basically sees the alternatives available to us as either

libertarianism or what he describes, I think fairly, as European social democracy. Those

are the two options we have. I actually have a different view. I don’t – I think that the

history of America is not a constant, but the history of America is variable. I think

there’ve been periods in American history when we have been very individualistic. And

now is probably the most dramatic instance of that. But there’ve been periods in America

when we’ve been very egalitarian and also very communitarian.

And so I’m going to close with one PowerPoint. Let’s see if I can get it up there.

I’m going to show you – and then, I’m not going to make a point about, I just want to

show you a series of charts about social change in the 20th century. So I’m going to begin,

of course, with the first place that you would begin, which is with “Bowling Alone,”

which is a great book, if you’ve not read it, you ought to get it. (Laughter.) So here’s the

trends in social capital in America over the 20th century. This book – this graph appears

in “Bowling Alone.”

And you could see, it begins very low, and this is based on associational

membership, begins very low, rises, dips during the Great Depression, then rises, reaches

a peak in the middle ’60s, just about the same time that Charles’s change of America

begins, and then declines. That’s that “Bowling Alone” part is the last drop down.

Now, I’m going to show you a different graph, completely independent

methodologically. This is a graph of philanthropy, the degree to which the fraction of our

personal income that we give away to other people and, well, looks like the same graph

almost. We became more and more generous toward other people, giving away a larger

and larger fraction of our income to other people, until just about the same time actually,

1963. Sorry.

Thank you. Do I need to repeat everything I’ve said? (Laughter.) The first graph

shows the trends in associational membership as one index of social capital over the 20th

century, rising for the first two thirds of the 20th century and then falling. The next graph,

methodologically quite independent comes from IRS tax data, which shows giving as a

fraction of total personal income. And that rises until just about the same time and then

begins declining.

Now, let me show you a different chart. This is a chart of economic inequality.

This comes from the famous Piketty work about economic – this is income inequality in

America. Huh, looks like the same trend. Rising inequality from the – I mean, sorry, this

is income equality. The graph is income equality. Income equality rises for the first two

thirds of the 20th century and then sometime in the middle to late ’70s begins to – equality

begins to decline and that’s, of course – that graph, historically is anchored in two gilded

ages. The gilded age of the end of the 19th – the last part of the 19th century, which then

led into the – that’s why we had a very unequal distribution of income in 1900 – got more

and more equal, and then ended in the current gilded age in which we’ve had great

income inequality. And of course, Charles talks about this in his – Charles talks about the

second part of that, the increase in inequality, in his book.

Now, I want to show you – let’s see, what’s the next trend? This is a trend in

political consensus. Actually, it comes from a book by a couple of political scientists.

Their measure is political polarization. And I’ve done is flipped it upside down. So it’s a

measure not of polarization, but a measure of non-polarization, depolarization. And just

amazingly it begins with a highly polarized political system, becomes less and less

polarized, reaches a peak of depolarization in about 1965, ’70, and then polarization. So

if you just came into the story, in the ’60s, you’d see the depolarization. But if you look

at the whole 20th century, you see this – now, I hope it’s beginning to be puzzling – this

U-shaped of the 20th century, which begins in – begins in a polarized period, ends in a

polarized period, but in the middle – just as in the middle we were more communitarian,

we were more philanthropic, we were more egalitarian in our distribution of income, we

were more depolarized and consensual in our politics in that period.

This next graph is union membership. I put that in here just to discombobulate

some AEI folks. But union membership turns out to have exactly the same pattern. And I

actually interpret that as reflecting that we have a solidarity within the working class, but

doesn’t matter whether you have some other interpretation. Nevertheless, that’s what the

graph looks like, reaches its peak in the early – late ’50s or early ’60s.

We can look at another chart here, which is – oops, sorry, I went too quickly –

past – is this wealth? And amazingly, now you’re going to be shocked, that the trends in

inequality in wealth show the same pattern rises. Inequality in wealth peaks a little later.

And actually, let me just pause for one second here to note that I haven’t yet said what’s

causing what. And it’s an interesting question. I do not know the answer to what’s

causing what. Most people, when they first begin to see these patterns, they think it must

all be driven by income inequality or by wealth inequality. But if you’ve looked to the

graphs carefully, you’ll see that actually in all cases, the economic variables are the last

to turn. They turn about 15 to 20 years after the other variables turn.

And since, for the most part, causes precede their effects – (laughter) – it’s a little

implausible, if you look at these graphs, to think that it’s all being driven by economic

inequality because the trends began to go – all these other variables began to go down

before economic inequality. That even raises the possibility, which would be interesting

to pause over, if we had more time, could the trends in economic inequality, in some

sense, be the consequence of these other trends? And if we had more time, I’d try to

convince you that’s a possibility. All I want to say is that’s a possibility. I’m trying to

have you not jump too quickly to a causal conclusion.

And then, the last chart – the last chart comes from another scholar and I can’t

statistically put them on the same graph because – well, for reasons you’ll see in a

minute, he – he’s composed it of two different datasets, so they don’t yet quite connect

with one another, but they show trends in interclass marriage; that is, these are trends in

the degree to which people are marrying one another across class lines.

And you see that interclass marriage was rising for the first two thirds of the 20th

century, people were more and more marrying people across class lines – and if my

interpretation of intermarriage is right, they were more and more connecting,

encountering one another across class lines. And then, just about the same time that

people began to – you know, we became less equal and we became less philanthropic,

and we became all those other changes, we also began this trend away from interclass

marriage.

Now, as in many of these cases, Charles actually reports the second half of that

chart, but doesn’t report the first half of the chart. Now, if you put all those together, it’s

pretty remarkable. That something’s going on – passes the famous statistical test, the

Interocular Trauma Test, it hits you between the eyes that something is going on. Now, I

don’t know quite what’s going on. You could – every – actually, every single line in that

graph, there’s somebody who says it’s the cause of everything else. Or there’s something

that explains just it.

If you look at union membership, for example, you know, you could talk about

FDR and then the Taft-Hartley Act. So I mean, you could find a micro-cause for each one

of these trends. But if you step back, it seems maybe something bigger is going on. I

actually know the cause – (laughter) – which I’m about to share with you.

I first began to vote in 1964. (Laughter.) And I am now able to reveal that I

personally brought all of this on to America. (Laughter.) And I want to just quickly

finish. If I can just take a minute. If you look at these charts, one of the things that occurs

to you the more you think about it is what caused those trends to move in upward

direction for the first two thirds of the 20th century? When, I think if we had data going

even further back – I’ve looked at this, we don’t really have good data – it was not as

bad. It had gotten – you know, it was another cycle back there earlier. What caused that

turning point?

I told you what caused the turning point in the middle ’60s here, ’63-’64. What

caused the other turning point? And the answer was, I think, Americans across the

country recognized how bad things had gotten. There were a lot of parallels between – a

lot of parallels between the society and economy and politics of America at the end of the

19th century and today’s society and economics and politics. Great inequality of income,

big wave of immigration, very high levels of political corruption, very high levels of

political alienation, and of course degradation of the cities. And then, pretty quickly, in

about 10 to 15 years, from about 1890 to about 1910, Americans across the country

began to recognize that we had become two societies. A famous book written at that time

was called “How the Other Half Lives.” And “How the Other Half Lives” was simply a

description of poverty in the slums of the Lower East Side intended to be read by folks on

the Upper East Side.

Now, some of the people on the Upper East Side said, that’s fine. You know,

they’re immigrants. They’re Jews (at times ?), whatever, I don’t care how they’re living.

But some of the people on the Upper East Side reevaluated their view and underwent

what Charles talks about actually as something we need now and I agree with this, it’s a

sort of a civic reawakening. But you could see it in that period.

The most important result of – there’re many, of course, important results, but the

most important result relevant to our time is at that time, for that purpose, Americans all

over the country, beginning in small towns in the Midwest and then spreading rapidly

across the country, invented the high school. Invented the high school. That was the first

time in world history that anybody in any place of the world had agreed that everybody in

town should pay for all kids to get a free secondary education.

It was not an easy sale because the rich folks in town, the rich lawyers and

bankers and farmers and so on, already had paid for their kids to get a private secondary

school. And they were off making money in Chicago. But the deal was you had to sell

those rich folks in town on the idea that they would maybe be better off if they helped

pay for other people’s kids to have a secondary education. And that turned out to be the

best public policy decision America’s ever made. Because it turned out, the economic

historians show that most of American growth of the 20th century came from that

decision that everybody should pay for everybody’s kids to go to secondary school.

It raised the total level of the productivity of American workforce enormously and

accounts for almost all of the American growth in the 20th century. And it simultaneously

leveled the playing field. And that is what accounts for this, I think, this – the upward

turn. And all I’m saying now is – and this is what the last chapter of my book is arguing –

we need – I don’t want us to become like Sweden. Charles thinks I want us to become

like Sweden. I don’t want. I want us just to become like America.

We’ve done this before and we could do this again. Thank you very much for

your time. (Applause.)

MR. MURRAY: Policy analysts who write about America’s new lower class

hardly ever know what they’re talking about at first hand. Your average professor or, for

that matter, think-tank scholar probably came from the middle class or upper middle

class.

Before talking about people under the age of Bob and Bill, and they probably

came from the middle class or upper middle class home. They went through their Ph.D.

They know the numbers on labor force participation and on educational attainment, non-

marital births, backwards and forwards, but they’ve never actually lived in a working

class community. They’ve never hung out with those people. They haven’t the least idea

what life is like there.

And the great virtue of Bob’s book – and this is a big deal – is that he uses this

brilliant device to open each of the six chapters in the book, where he has two extended

narratives, drawn from field interviews, one with a middle class or upper middle class

family that’s doing OK, and another from a, what I call the new lower class. It’s really

hard to do that well.

For one thing, if you have somebody going out to the field to interview and they

have no idea what’s going on, they don’t get really open answers. And furthermore, there

is a real temptation when you write up your field notes – if you have a narrative in mind

that explains all of this, there’s a real temptation to self-censor.

What Bob has in the book, “Our Kids,” are beautiful evocative narratives about

what’s going on, several of them that just are completely authentic, as far as I can tell. A

lot of the credit for that goes, as Bob gives in the book, to Jennifer Silva, who conducted

most of the interviews. She must just be a brilliant interviewer. But Bob is the guy who

wrote them up. And he wrote them up in ways which preserve that authenticity. And if

for no other reason you ought to buy and read the book.

And if you work professionally in this field, as my colleagues do and as a lot of

you in the room do, you’ve got to read this. This is that overused phrase “required

reading.” “Our Kids” is required reading.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time saying all the things I agree with Bob about

because that’s not very helpful, but I just want to say in passing, pay-to-play ought to go,

absolutely? No airbags, I think that’s a huge factor distinguishing the lives of kids with

privilege and kids without. No airbags if you are a poor kid. Equality of opportunity, even

though you end up with unequal outcomes – could not agree more.

And for that matter, even when Bob and I disagree probably on the evaluation

literature for something like Pre-K. Look, if you have a kid who’s in a punishing

environment, and for a couple of hours a day, you put that child into an environment

which is genuinely nurturing and loving, well, that’s good in itself, and so outcomes 20

years down the road may be interesting, but they aren’t the only justification for that kind

of expenditure.

So in all of these things, if Bob gets his way in and spends huge amounts of

money on the kinds of programs, the purple programs he describes, some of them I will

enthusiastically support and others of them I will say to myself I don’t know how much

good they’re doing, but the government has lots of worse ways of spending my money,

so, you know. (Laughter.)

OK, at this point, I must take on my role, which I’ve been taking on for 30 years

now of being a Grinch. Everything, in my view, that Bob recommends could be

implemented full bore with big budgets, far beyond any reasonable hope and little real

change in the long term.

The reason I say that is that the opportunity gap is driven by larger forces that his

policy prescriptions cannot do much about. And three reasons for that pessimistic

statement stand out in my own mind. First, the standard interventions for improving the

lives of poor kids are aiming at a relatively unimportant target. Children’s personal

characteristics, everything from athletic ability to cognitive ability, personality

characteristics are the product of three sources: genes, shared environment, and non-

shared environment.

The shared environment refers to the kinds of things that Bob talked about during

his presentation, things such as family income, parenting style, the money that’s spent on

kids to go to summer camp and so forth, exposure to books. When you talk about this

statistic – everybody likes to talk about a child from a poor family knows about 5 million

fewer words or whatever by the time they’re at the age of five than a child from a

privileged background. OK, that’s part of the shared environment as well, so is religious

upbringing and parental investments of other kinds.

The non-shared environment includes everything from prenatal events in the

womb to injuries and illnesses that affect one sibling but not another. Peer groups are an

important aspect of the non-shared environment, and another 100 other random events,

random in terms of affecting one sibling in a family, but not the other. Whatever they

may be, the elements of the non-shared environment are largely beyond the reach of

public policy by their very nature.

The surprising, the even counterintuitive but consistent finding, based on a large

literature of high quality studies is that the shared environment has this remarkably small

role in explaining how children turn out. Let me give you two examples. The numbers are

coming from a recently published meta-analysis of all such studies from 1958 onward.

It’s a landmark study actually because it pulls together so much. It was published in

Nature, which is not a right wing rag. You can find it yourself if you google, Nature

heritability of human traits. It comes up online.

Anyway, the two important examples of traits we want to affect through

interventions, one of them is cognitive ability. In that one, the role of the shared

environment in explaining the variance is 17 percent, compared to 54 percent for genes

and 29 percent for measurement error in the non-shared environment.

For conduct disorders, which includes many, many studies on – focusing on anti-

social and aggressive behavior, the shared environment accounts for only 15 percent of

the variance, genes for 51 percent, and 34 percent for everything else. That’s not the

whole story obviously. Genes and environment interact, among other things, but my point

survives the complications. The roster of standard interventions to reduce the opportunity

gap are almost entirely focused on factors that fall under the rubric of shared

environment.

Furthermore, a program that only lasts a few hours a day at most is only going to

affect a fraction of a fraction of that aspect that causes the problems. If policymakers

were really serious about getting all the juice they can out of altering the shared

environment, they would be advocating adoption at birth and high quality orphanages.

They don’t. I know just mentioning the word “orphanages,” that’s as, see, he’s like I

always said he was. He’s – he wants to bring back the Dickensian orphanages and put all

the poor kids into them. That’s not really what I had in mind.

But in any case, the second point is that we – the opportunity gap is accompanied

by a substantial ability gap. The graphs in the book are divided into the children of

parents with at least a college degree and those of parents with no more than a high

school diploma. OK, you’ve got educational attainment correlated with IQ. You’ve got

parental IQ correlated with children’s IQ. And the upshot is that if you use the National

Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which has one of our best databases for this, you have a

gap in the mean IQ of children of mothers with at least a college degree and those

mothers with only a high school diploma of 16 points. That’s a little more than a standard

deviation. It’s a big difference. And remember that the role of the environment in creating

that 16 points is really quite small. Remember that’s 17 percent of the variance that’s

accounted for by the shared environment.

Again, my underlying point is simple. IQ has a substantial direct correlation with

measures of success in life, including other qualities that lead to success, such as grit or

perseverance and other kinds of things that go under the label emotional intelligence. A

lot of the differences in outcomes we’re seeing between the upper class and the lower

class are the product of those kinds of differences and inability.

And third, the gap in human capital in working class and upper middle class

communities has been widening over time. Bob talked about assortative mating and

showed data for it. It’s really stunning. I’ve just had my 50th reunion at Harvard, and so

we’ve got the Big Harvard Book, where we all write our life histories and so forth. And

I’ve been going through it. And the degree to which gilt-edged guys have been marrying

gilt-edged girls in terms of their educational backgrounds and the rest of it is incredible.

It’s pretty widely accepted that after the civil rights revolution African-American

communities took a big hit in their human capital, when the most successful blacks could

move out. I think an argument can be made that the same thing is happening in white

communities today.

Well, Bob has already referred to my takeaway from all this with the ways in

which we really need a civic great awakening. However, I got to say that the fact is civic

great awakenings have about as much chance of transforming what’s going on as a full

implementation of Bob’s purple program does. The parsimonious way to extrapolate to

the trends that Bob described so beautifully in the book is to predict an America

permanently segregated into social classes that no longer share the common bonds that

once made this country so exceptional and the destruction of the national civic culture

that Bob and I both cherish.

I hope for a better outcome. I do not expect it. Thank you. (Applause.)

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: As Bob Putnam pointed out, in 1978 I published a

controversial book entitled “The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing

American Institutions,” in which I argued that economic class has become more

important than race in determining the life trajectories of individual African-Americans.

My thesis is consistent with one of Bob Putnam’s central arguments; namely,

although racial barriers to success remain powerful, they represent less burdensome

impediments than they did in the 1950s. By contrast, class barriers in America loom

much larger than they did back then. And this is revealed not only in growing income

inequality among all racial and ethnic groups, but also increasing disparities and many

other aspects of wellbeing, accumulated wealth, class segregation across neighborhoods,

quality of primary and secondary education, enrollment in highly selective colleges, and

even life expectancy.

And as I reflect on the powerful arguments in Putnam’s book, I conclude that one

of the major underlying themes of the declining significance of race, the other theme that

economic – that racial conflict has shifted from the economic sector to the social-political

order I’m not dealing with today. But the changing relative significance of race and class

on one’s life trajectory, that’s consistent with Putnam’s article because it has been

extended to all U.S. racial and ethnic groups and our kids, with the emphasis, of course,

on the trajectories of today’s children.

The title “The Declining Significance of Race” lends itself to misinterpretation

among those who have either not read the book or have not read it carefully. For such

readers, as I pointed out in the book’s third edition, in 2012, published by the University

of Chicago Press, the title conveys an optimistic view of American race relations and

doesn’t reflect the book’s pessimistic tone about the conditions and future of poor blacks.

In many respects, the conditions of poor African-Americans are worse now than

when the first edition of “The Declining Significance of Race” was published, almost

four decades ago. And the gap between the haves and have-nots in the African-American

community has widened significant.

Now, Bob Putnam captures this growing intraracial divide in our kids, particularly

in chapter three on parenting, when he discusses the growing class and income

differences among African-Americans in Atlanta, Georgia. And I would like to reinforce

his arguments by showing that the divide is even greater – that the divide in the African-

American community is even greater than he discussed.

Let me draw upon U.S. Census data using the Gini ratio, which measures the

extent to which the actual income distribution of a particular group deviates from a

hypothetical distribution in which each household of the group receives an equal

proportion of the total group income. The measure ranges from zero, perfect equality, to

one, maximum inequality.

Now I don’t know how many of you can see this figure, but as revealed in figure

one, income inequality across the American population as a whole rose from a low of

0.39 in 1970 to 0.48 in 2013. This is certainly consistent with Putnam’s argument. Even

more significant, however, is a high level of intragroup inequality among black

households. Although the absolute level of black income is well below that of whites,

blacks, nonetheless, display the most intragroup income inequality, reaching a household

Gini index of 0.49 in 2013, followed by white’s 0.47 and Hispanics 0.45. Blacks in the

green bars, whites in the red bar – red line, Hispanics in the blue – is that purple? Yeah, a

purple line. OK.

Now, research reveals that income inequality is related to income segregation.

Figure two presents data on income segregation by race in metropolitan areas with

populations of more than 500,000. And the source for this figure is a study by Kendra

Bischoff and Sean Reardon.

Oh, I’m sorry. Now go forward? Nope. There we go. I’ll keep my hands off this.

(Laughter.)

So as I said, research reveals that income inequality is related to income

segregation. This figure presents data on income segregation by race in metropolitan

areas with populations of more than 500,000. And as I said, the source for this figure is a

study by Kendra Bischoff and Sean Reardon. Now, this figure reveals that income

segregation has grown rapidly in the last decade, and particularly among black and

Hispanic families.

And what is notable is that whereas African-Americans in 1970 recorded the least

income segregation, they now registered the highest income segregation. Now, please

note that we are talking about – we are talking here about residential segregation among

black families of different income levels, not segregation between black and white

families. And another way of talking about these trend lines is that they describe the

extent to which the exposure of families to neighbors of the same race has changed over

time.

Although income segregation among black families grew considerably in the

1970s and 1980s, it grew even more rapidly from 2000 to 2009, after slightly declining in

the 1990s. And when considering a person’s life trajectory or life chances, the differences

in the quality of one’s daily life between residing in a predominantly affluent

neighborhood and a poor black neighborhood are huge.

And it is important to note that today poor black families have fewer middle class

neighbors than they had in 1970, when I – even before I began writing “The Declining

Significance of Race.”

When income segregation is coupled with racial segregation, low-income blacks

cluster neighborhoods that feature disadvantages along several dimensions, including

joblessness, educational attainment, and family structure. Now, to select only one

important indicator, in 1978, poor blacks age 12 and over were only marginally more

likely than affluent blacks to be violent crime victims, roughly 45 and 38 per 1,000

individuals respectively, in 1978. However, by 2008, poor blacks were far more likely to

be violent crime victims, about 75 per 1,000 as compared with 23 per 1,000 for affluent

blacks.

So despite the continuing intraracial disparities, the socioeconomic gap between

better off blacks, including the college educated and poor blacks is wide and growing.

However, in order to keep things in proper perspective, it is important not to overlook the

continuing interracial disparities. For example, even though there has been greater

income segregation among black families, middle class black families tend to live in

areas with a much higher percentage of low income families than do comparable white

families.

Racial differences in wealth helped to explain some of these patterns. Because

white families have greater average wealth than black families, they are more likely to

afford housing in higher income neighborhoods. Researchers at the Pew Research Center

recently released data showing that the median financial wealth of white households in

2013 exceeded that of black households by almost $131,000.

So despite the sharp increases in income inequality and income segregation

among blacks, the interracial disparities between blacks and whites remain huge and must

always be kept in mind when discussing and highlighting growing intraracial differences.

And Bob, if I have one quibble with your book, I don’t think you devote sufficient

attention to the continuing interracial disparities. But this is the only criticism I have of

this remarkable book.

And let me just conclude by saying that I think that Bob Putnam’s thoughtful

policy recommendations, he calls them incremental policy interventions, are really

designed to achieve what the social philosopher James Fishkin – F-I-S-H-K-I-N, Fishkin

calls equality of life chances. According to this principle, if we can predict with a high

degree of accuracy where individuals will end up in the competition for preferred

positions in society, merely by knowing their family background, race or gender, then the

conditions that affect or determine their motivations and talents are grossly unequal.

Supporters of this principle believe that a person should not be able to enter a

hospital ward of healthy newborn babies and accurately predict their eventual social and

economic position in society solely on the basis of their race and/or economic class

origins. Unfortunately, in many urban neighborhoods in the United States, you can

accurately make such predictions.

Supporters of the principle of equality of life chances feel that it is unfair that

some individuals in our society receive every conceivable advantage, while others, from

the day they are born, never really have a chance to develop their talents. This depressing

picture is vividly portrayed in Putnam’s excellent book.

Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. DOAR: OK, so those were excellent presentations, as we expected, and

thank you very much. I’ve got a couple of questions, and then we will open it up to some

questions from the audience. And of course, I invite panelists to comment anything

they’ve heard before.

My first question comes a little bit from my background as a social services

practitioner in large federal programs that intervene or try to help in families lives all

across America. And one of the things that struck me about your book, Dr. Putnam, was

the extent to which those large programs – SNAP, cash welfare, Medicaid – are very little

mentioned, either in the wonderful depictions of the families or in your – until the very

end, where you say, protect the social safety net.

And I wondered whether the three panels would talk a little bit about the extent to

which the – and, by the way, a lot of that happened right at the turn of your U-shaped

color – the extent to which that had an effect on civic society and on what was going on

in communities and among families.

MR. PUTNAM: Yes. Actually, what I’m puzzling about here is how to reconcile

your question about the impact of public policies with your colleague’s question about

the impact of public policies because Charles basically said this is all determined by

things other than policies. So I don’t see how you both could be right.

MR. DOAR: Well, that’s the thing about AEI –

MR. PUTNAM: I want to suggest the two of you talk. If these outcomes are being

driven by things that are impervious to policy, which is what Charles argued, then it can’t

– the trends can’t have been caused by public policies.

And my own view is that things like SNAP and Medicaid, for example, have

prevented the problem from getting worse. And I think there’s pretty good actually

evidence about that, at least in the case of food stamps, SNAP, that, actually, kids of

equal circumstances, whose families have gotten SNAP have actually done better in

terms of upward mobility than kids of the same circumstances, whose parents didn’t get

SNAP. We may disagree about the details of any particular evaluation, but that’s the way

– I really intimate that’s my view.

I think the problems of poor kids in America would have been much worse if their

parents hadn’t benefited from SNAP from – well, I don’t say all transfer programs but at

least from the ones – the ones – that one and probably also Medicaid. I can’t imagine that

these kids would have been better off if their parents had not had access to medical care.

MR. MURRAY: This gives me a good chance to clarify something that could

have been confusing from the presentation.

When you have a situation where, for example, non-marital births, to take one big

statistic, goes from a few percent of children to 40 percent of children over the course of

50 years, you’ve clearly had something causing that, and you’ve had policy changes that

may or may not have been implicated if they certainly could have been.

When I’m talking about how children, individual children turn out, I’m talking

about such things as success in school, the likelihood that they’re going to get arrested,

and those kinds of things. And those are the ones where, when you have targeted

interventions to try to change the lives of children, they’re going after elements in the

shared environment which do not seem to be determinative of these kinds of outcomes,

except for a small proportion of the variance. So you have some big causes out there.

And what I’m really saying, I guess to simplify it a lot, is it’s not whether they

hear five million words more or fewer than other kids. There are large macro-causes that

are shaping the culture, shaping the zeitgeist.

And those are the things I think we need to think more seriously about and also to

recognize – let me just say it this way, OK? I am saying nothing more controversial about

the role of the shared environment in shaping outcomes than every parent of more than

one child in this room knows. Every parent of more than one child in this room had major

differences of one kind or another in their kids. And if any of you were under the

impression that you could have done anything to have made their personalities or

cognitive abilities or behaviors more like each other, you are part of a very small number

of experienced parents.

And that’s all I’m saying about determining how children turn out. These things

going to the shared environment, aren’t nearly as important as most people think.

MR. DOAR: I want to see if – did you want to comment or not?

MR. WILSON: Right. I just want to say that, you know, the kinds of income

inequality that we’re talking about is not unique to the United States. It’s occurring in

other Western democracies, maybe not as extreme as in the United States. But we should

not lose sight of the fact that all of these societies are experiencing changes in the

economy that now place a premium on college education, advances in technology, the

off-shoring of manufacturing jobs of places overseas. We have to build these arguments

in when we’re looking at the overall picture.

MR. DOAR: Did you want to say something?

MR. PUTNAM: Well, at some point, I want to respond directly to Charles’

argument that policy can’t really affect the things we care about. I don’t have to do it

now, but I want to respond to that.

MR. DOAR: You can do it now. (Laughter.)

MR. PUTNAM: It’s important to keep in mind what we’re trying to explain. We

all agree, or I think we all agree that, increasingly, poor kids are at a disadvantage relative

to rich kids. “Increasingly” is the important word, not just that poor kids have an

advantage – I mean, rich kids have an advantage but that advantage is growing. And it’s

the growth that we need to focus on.

And that’s not the same – and the book, that book, which is a great book, is about

change. It’s not about how one individual could do compared to another individual. It’s

about how the – the overall structure is changing. And the question is whether the sorts of

factors, especially the genetic factors that Charles now wants to emphasize, could

conceivably account for the change.

Now, what Charles wants to argue is because of increasing homophily, that is rich

folks marrying other rich folks and poor folks marrying other poor folks – he doesn’t

quite say it, but what he wants to say is, what do you expect? You’ve got these rich folks

marrying one another, they’re smarter, and their kids are going to be smarter.

But the question is, as a matter of genetics, could the big changes that are

described here, have possibly been produced by genetic factors over two generations?

And the answer is they couldn’t conceivably – something other than the genetic

endowment of these kids must have accounted for the change. And even I don’t doubt for

a moment –

MR. MURRAY: We agree on that. We completely agree on that.

MR. PUTNAM: Well, but then, you can’t argue that policy is irrelevant to the

question of – policy is irrelevant to the question of whether a smart kid is going to, you

know, do better than a dumb kid, but here’s the important fact. It didn’t use to be the case

in America but it is now the case in America that rich dumb kids are more likely to

graduate from college than smart poor kids. And that – hey, that didn’t always used to be

the case, and it controls – that statement controls for these genetic things. And all I’m

saying is that idea that rich, smart kids have a better chance in life than poor dumb kids

isn’t fair.

MR. DOAR: Thank you. I’m glad there was agreement.

One question, Dr. Wilson, I wanted to follow up with you on and just to see if

there’s any hope in the revitalization of some of America’s larger cities in terms of

middle class and more affluent and more educated people moving back into the city.

Have you – do you see any sign that that can lead to greater social interaction and greater

involvement and better outcomes for the poor kids that had been left behind?

MR. WILSON: You’re really talking about gentrification. I think of

gentrification, I think of the city of Washington, D.C., which is undergoing significant

gentrification.

I was on leave this semester from Harvard at the Library of Congress and I got a

chance to talk with a number of the block workers who work at the Library of Congress.

And they said they can’t afford to live in their neighborhoods anymore. They said they’re

moving out to some of the poorer suburban areas.

Gentrification has certainly had a major effect on neighborhoods in that it

significantly improves resources in a neighborhood, you know, improvements in – you

have first class supermarkets showing up in these areas, improvements in public schools,

and so on.

The problem, however, is that gentrification results in sometimes a significant

increase in rents, significant increase in housing appreciation, and, unless you own a

home to begin with, it’s very, very difficult to remain in these communities. Local taxes

increase sharply, so much so that many local residents can no longer afford to live there.

You know, it would be great if we could have gentrification that maintained the

kind of integration that we would love to see in neighborhoods, that is economic

integration, not to speak of racial integration. But unless there is some program to help

these families stay there, gentrification results in significant social dislocation.

MR. DOAR: No comments. OK. We have a question. Yes. Tim. Wait for the mic.

Q: Thank you very much. I found all of this incredibly edifying but when – Mr.

Putnam, when you were talking about the invention of the high school being this great

advance, I wonder if, in the long run, public schools create the – exacerbate the coming

apart.

My kids’ parish school, Catholic school is much more racially diverse than the

average public school in Montgomery County because we don’t have to be able to afford

the property taxes, the property values that exist in Bethesda-Chevy Chase or the really

good public schools.

At the public schools, whether it’s local property taxes or just the costs of the

home in the better schools create this class segregation that doesn’t exist maybe so much

in, you know, a church-run school or something like that, where anybody can come in

and there’s significant financial aid for the lower income.

MR. PUTNAM: Well, to begin with, you’ll maybe be pleased to know that in

“Our Kids,” I actually talk about the role that Catholic schools have played in narrowing

the opportunity gap. So I’m on the same side of that with you. But I do want to address

the larger point that you raised which is our public schools making the problem worse.

And I want to be clear because I think I may provoke some people in the room. I

think that this is not a problem that – the opportunity gap, I’m talking about in general –

is not a problem that schools created.

I think schools are a site where this happens but, in general, public schools in

America – I’m not now making any negative remark about Catholic schools, but public

schools in America marginally narrow the opportunity gap. You can see this in many

ways. The gap is actually fully present before kids even get to school. That suggests it’s

not being exacerbated by schools. It’s schools are – and the other evidence you probably

know is the gap widens when kids are out of school in the summer and narrows when

kids are in school in the winter.

So schools – I’m trying to summarize my basic position clearly so that people can

respond to it. I think schools did not cause this problem at all.

What caused the – the relevance of schools – I mean, the way in which schools

serve as echo chambers for factors outside the schools is a different sort. Because of

increasing segregation, economic segregation that we’ve talked about, increasingly rich

kids are going to school with other rich kids, and poor kids are increasingly going to

school with other poor kids. And, as we’ve known for a long time, the most important

thing about school quality is who else is going there.

So, increasingly, rich kids are able to benefit from the fact that other kids in their

class are bringing in their backpack – when they come to school, they’re bringing their

parents’ resources, their parents’ aspirations, their parents’ civic culture. And that helps

all the kids in school. And poor kids, when they go to school, are increasingly going to

school in which other kids are bringing in their backpack, family disruption, and

depression, and gang violence, and so on. And, therefore, schools are not the origin of

that problem.

The origin of the problem are these outside factors that we’ve been talking about.

But schools could maybe do more to narrow the gap. I’m not saying that schools can’t do

more to narrow the gap and there’s some suggestions about that in the book.

But I am not – I think it’s important to keep distinct two issues, is this another

problem that the schools are causing? And I think the answer to that is pretty clearly no.

This is not a problem caused by school but it is a problem that schools could help fix, in

part by following some of the same strategies that Catholic schools have used effectively

to help poor kids.

MR. MURRAY: Just one real quick addition to that is I think you have a big

difference in the roles that the schools play in smaller communities and in big cities.

In a community with only one high school but that has different socio-economic

classes, the schools are a great source of getting kids to know everybody and – well, both

Bob and I grew up in such towns. But that’s still true in small towns and small cities

today.

As soon as you get into a large city, the segregation that we’ve all talked about is

so extreme that the schools act as a bubble, particularly for the elites, that is I think very

destructive.

MR. DOAR: The guy in red.

Q: I’m Harry Holzer from Georgetown and Brookings. I guess my question or

questions are for Charles Murray.

Having not looked at the paper in Nature that you’re talking about, but it sounds

like the dependent variable there is overall variance in outcomes, which is really – just

means inequality.

If we narrow our goals or agenda – let’s say we’re all pessimistic that dramatic

declines in inequality aren’t’ going to happen, but if we have a more modest goal, which

is simply to improve the life outcomes, the chances of the kids at the bottom, maybe from

moving from the bottom quintile, when they become adults, up to the second quintile,

something like that, number one, would you not agree that there’s some policies that

could affect that? One thinks of the Civil Rights Act, one thinks of the GI bill. I think

there’s enormous social science evidence that those things did improve life outcomes for

somebody.

And if you would agree that some things can matter for those kids, number two, is

there a prospect, is there a possibility of a purple package, maybe not exactly the one that

Bob Putnam has at the back of his book, but a package of educational and training,

economic packages, civics, marriage promotion, as Brad Wilcox – can you imagine a set

of packages – a grand bargain, where, even if you remain relatively pessimistic, that you

could sign onto along with Bill Wilson and Bob Putnam, which, given this town, given

how amazingly polarized ideologically and politically this town – that would be a quite

powerful statement I think to make.

MR. MURRAY: OK. Just a couple of quick statements.

One is – as I indicated in my remarks, there are some aspects of Bob’s program

that I support wholeheartedly – public schools, extracurricular activities should be free,

and things like that.

As you gave a list of things that went into the package, is if you’re going

incrementally from the ones that I could agree with to ones that I think aren’t going to –

you know, parenting programs implemented at a large scale, all of these go directly to the

kinds of limitations of the importance of the shared environment.

And, by the way, you should take a look at the article. It’s a big deal in terms of

summarizing a whole lot of evidence.

It’s very hard for people to accept the degree to which kids turn out the way they

do for things beyond our control. And I guess that’s what I’m trying to emphasize, not

that we shouldn’t spend any money on this stuff. Moderate your expectations way, way

down because the wiggle room for them affecting individual kids is much smaller than

we previously thought.

And here’s what I emphasize. Bob, the brunt of my remarks was not to emphasize

the importance of genetics. It was to emphasize the unimportance of the shared

environment.

MR. PUTNAM: But that’s only related to the importance of genetics. Those

percentages you were doing, the 13 percent and 15 percent were what they were because

you were including in the things that you – were part of the causes, these genetic factors,

which were 54 percent and 55 percent in those things. And if you left out of the debate

that, I think you can’t escape it quite so simply as that. They’re low, though the relevance

of those factors, the things we could control in principle, the relevance of things that have

changed – this is the point we know that there’s – genetics has been around the whole

time.

MR. MURRAY: Right. But it’s a different set of causes.

MR. PUTNAM: A lot of time – we had a more egalitarian, greater equality of

opportunity before 1960. Both you and I agree.

MR. MURRAY: We’re agreeing. I’m saying that we are looking at the wrong

causes, OK?

MR. DOAR: OK.

MR. MURRAY: The wrong non-genetic causes.

MR. DOAR: Right here, in the front row. And we have one more and then we’re

going to be done.

Q: Aparna Mathur, AEI. If you’d step back from the focus on children and we

look at aggregate household data, we know from the CBO that income inequality has

been widening tremendously over the last 30 to 40 years.

But we also know from the Chetty study that just came out – or came out earlier

last year – that mobility hasn’t changed all that much and has essentially stagnated over

the last 30 to 40 years.

So how do you reconcile – you know, your focus seems to be that we have

widening inequality in terms of how we spend on children or how much people at the top

versus the bottom spend on the children. But are you suggesting then that mobility for

children is going to be different? And how do you reconcile that with the Chetty finding

that households really haven’t experienced those changes?

MR. PUTNAM: Yeah. That’s a very good question. And I think the world of

Chetty, and we’re colleagues, and we’ve talked about these things.

You have to understand – everybody has to understand one thing about the

relationship between income inequality and opportunity and inequality of opportunity.

Inequality of opportunity lags changes in income inequality a lot, not just by a

minute or two. I mean, a lot of this debate about the question of the relationship between

the so-called Great Gatsby curve and all of that discussion about the relationship between

income inequality and opportunity inequality assumes that there’s essentially – the lag

structure is such that it is very short in a matter of a year or two.

But, actually, the real lag structure between those two variables in the real world

is measured in decades, not in minutes or hours or even years. And the reason is because

– let me go back to Portland, my own hometown. The factories closed in Portland, and

then, 15 years later, the non-martial birthrate increased. And then, 15 years after that,

those kids began to get into school. And then, 15 years after that, those kids will be far

enough along in their life trajectory that we will know what their lifetime outcome is.

The normal way in which mobility has always been studied is to compare kids’

income when they are in their 30s or 40s with their parents’ income when they’re in their

30s or 40s.

And the fact of the matter is these changes that I’m describing have occurred

relatively recently and, therefore, we shouldn’t – the kids in my book won’t show up in

those standard datasets, you know, measures of mobility, for another 15 or 20 years.

Chetty tries a shortcut of measuring mobility not based on how income a child has

when they’re 30 or 40 – that’s what everybody else has done – but when they’re much

younger, in their 20s. Why haven’t other scholars used that technique? Because we know

that people’s income at age 25, say, is not a good indicator of their lifetime income.

So let me take a very personal example. My son went to Harvard Law School.

And when he was 25, my income was roughly 10 times his income. And you say, poor

John Putnam. He had this tremendous collapse in his – relative to his parents. Five years

later, my son was – or 10 years later, my son was a really well paid lead lawyer in New

York and his income was 10 times my income. And so, if you measured it then, you’d

say, correctly, well, Putnam Jonathan, really did terrific compared to his – you know, if

you think that money matters, and, of course, I do. (Laughter.)

My point is this: Chetty’s idea that mobility has not changed rests on trying to

peek into the future I think with methodologically inappropriate tools. That is, he’s trying

to look at the cake before it’s really baked. You see what I’m trying to say?

And to his credit, Chetty has now backed away some from that claim that we –

he’s right that there wasn’t any change in mobility among kids who were raised in the

’60s and ’70s and ’80s, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

So I have a bet with Chetty. When we’re 20 years from now, I’ll take him to a

really nice restaurant, and if it turns out that there’s still no change in mobility, he’ll take

me to a really nice restaurant so there is change in mobility. Since I’m now mid-70s, it

may be a bet that he won’t want to take but not because of his accuracy of his predictions.

MR. DOAR: Brett (sp), last question I’m afraid.

Q: So I want to come back to a point you made actually in your presentation, and

that is that many of the trends that we’re sort of looking at, concerned about today in

terms of things like family and religious attendance actually preceded the economic shifts

that you just touched upon in your remarks, that is that shifts in religious attendance

started in the ’60s, as did many trends in the family.

And much of the sort of economic inequality really began to take off in the ’70s,

and also shifts, of course, to men’s place in the workforces, Percy Wilson’s, you know,

books have suggested.

So I’m just wanting you to talk a bit more about what you think the cultural

dimensions of all of this have been. And, you know, given that kind of diagnosis, how

does that sort of shape our response to growing class divide?

And also, just very quickly, to kind of connect this also to your book, “Bowling

Alone,” where, of course, you make the point that popular culture has played a – in your

view, at least in that book, a big role and a declining role of civic or civil society in

America. So how does pop culture finally play a role in all this too?

MR. PUTNAM: Actually, I don’t remember that I said that pop culture – I said

television actually made it. But that’s not – but not because of the content of television,

but we kept it – because we watched television rather than going bowling. That’s

basically the – I’m summarizing a 500-page book in one sentence. (Laughter.)

But I’ll try to respond to the other question, which is a really important question.

If you read “Our Kids,” you’ll see that I agree that cultural or values change has played

an important role in the explanation of the collapse of the working class family. I don’t

disagree with that. That’s one reason actually why folks on the left are critical of this

book because I do say that those cultural changes have been relevant.

I don’t think that they’re the sole explanation for what’s going on. I do think that

the fact that the working class men have had a terrible time in the job market over the last

30 or 40 years is relevant to the fact, partly because I think it affects the choices that

working class women make about whether they’d want to marry this guy who’s kind of a

loser. Now, the question is, is he a loser because of cultural changes or is he a loser

because of these larger economic changes? I think it’s mostly the changes in the economy

that account for that.

But I also agree – and I say that right here, actually – that I think that the changes

in – I’m not sure it’s directly changes in religion, frankly, but I do think it’s – because

there’s not a whole – you know, we both know this literature. There is good evidence that

religious people are more – are nicer than non-religious people. I tried to make that case,

as you know, in the previous book I wrote. It’s not clear that religious people are

necessarily more likely to abstain from sex than non-religious people. And, well, the

debate is – we can have that debate off camera.

What I’m really trying to say is I want to say it’s both and. These cultural – or the

change in norms regarding having kids and whether you’re responsible for them – that’s

the key issue. Do you feel responsible for your progeny – that is in part, actually, I agree,

a cultural or a values issue, but it’s also I think an economic issue.

And I think – you know, this is why I find this discussion so frustrating, because,

actually, there’s a lot we agree on and we could – you know, this town is a little

polarized. (Laughter.)

But, actually, if you talk to the experts in the area, most people agree on the basic

facts, and we should be – I want to shift the focus to the kids and start doing things to

help these poor kids. We can have these debates at the margins but I think there’s a core

of things we can all agree on that would make things better. (Applause.)

MR. DOAR: OK. Does anybody have any final comments? You guys OK?

You’re all right? I’d like you all to remain seated as we go out because we’ve got to go

quickly this way. And thank you all very much.

(END)