Are We Really Coming Apart? (full session)

the book coming apart is a long book and I'm basically going to give you cliff notes for about 12 minutes and just cover the highlights and then after Bob makes his statement we can get into a lot more of the details there are two broad aspects to the book one is about the formation of a new lower class the other is about the formation of a new upper class and proposition is that we have seen the formation of classes that are different in kind from anything we've known before not talking about the 1% versus the 99% I'm talking about cultural diversions --is that happy that have profound implications for the way the country runs let me start with the formation of the new lower class between here's the one statistic that I guess in a really brief overview will capture what scares me as of 1960 among whites ages 30 to 49 why do I use for data on whites it concentrates our attention you don't have to say to yourself well as Murray really talking about a problem focused in the black community or Hispanic community these are non Latino whites ages 30 to 49 1960 in the upper middle class defined as people with college degrees and working in managerial or professional jobs about 94 percent were married and about 84 percent of the white working class were married working class meaning high school educated or less and working in a blue-collar service or low-level white-collar job 84 percent were married so there was a difference but it was not a difference in norms that the overwhelming norm is marriage you then move to 2010 all right 84 percent of the upper middle class are still married marriage is actually alive and well in the upper middle class divorces down good news in the white working-class 2010 48% 30 to 49 are married that is not a statistically interesting trend that is a fundamental huge divergence in a social institution that has ramifications for all kinds of things social capital being among them the social capital is generated in very large part by by married families trying to create environments for their kids that they want I have other indicators involving work hi David welcome to see some parts of the working class got their message was at 9:15 p.m. so I have indicators on industriousness and on honesty and on religiosity which I will not go into here except to say once again when you see a huge divergence and a spent and reduction in the working class of religiosity you are talking about another institution that has profound implications for the way communities work let me turn and spend most of my time in this brief overview about the formation of the new upper class because let's face it we are currently in the belly of the beast we are that we are it and the new upper class is not the same as the upper-middle class I'm talking about the people who run the country it's a small percentage people who have positions of influence in the way that the culture and the economy and the politics of country runs now we've always had an upper class but that here's the difference again I'm just using one number to capture a whole bunch of others that I could talk about I assembled data at the census tract level for 14 neighborhoods that were considered elite even in 1960 places like the North Shore Chicago upper what East Side of New York Northwest Washington and the rest even then this is where the elite lived the median family income in 1960 expressed in 2010 dollars was 84 thousand dollars in those communities 26% had college degrees and that's actually the more important statistic because what that means is at that time not only was there a whole lot of economic divergence that goes way below wealth - and even below affluence you also had great cultural diversity in the way people had been socialized so most of the couples in those elite neighborhoods had at least one member who had only a high school diploma and a lot time's both of them did not you go to the same 14 neighborhoods into the 2000 census median family income is up to one hundred and sixty three thousand dollars so you are talking about a much larger group that is genuinely affluent but the main thing is that a percentage of adults with bas is up to 67 percent there's a whole lot of those that include advanced degrees a whole lot of those coming from elite colleges that represents a kind of homogeneity increased homogeneity of tastes and preferences and as everybody in this audience is aware the socialization process of college is really important the result of this is a is a new group that David Brooks chronicled so brilliantly in Bobo's and paradise but essentially it says that in the new upper class you have a different culture than in mainstream America it involves everything from the age which we get married and the age at which we have children to the foods we eat - how good care we take of ourselves the new upper class is really irritatingly skinny I mean look around this room I consider my own weight an act of cultural rebellion we a lot of things that the new upper class does are great women in the new upper class as soon as they head north whiff of pregnancy not the slightest molecule of secondhand smoke nor the slightest drop of alcohol across their lips and they take terrific care of themselves and and they are terrific in terms of the nurturing the children a lot of other things are not good versus bad they're simply different whether it's the TV shows we watch or don't watch the average TV and an American household is on for about thirty five hours a week whereas you guys watch Mad Men maybe if you're feeling really you know loose but otherwise it's mostly mostly masterpiece theater you know and and yeah you do watch NPR and and and when I use the phrase all the children above average you all know what the reference is for that but this is not true in mainstream America again it's not good versus bad it is here's the problem remember those 14 neighborhoods I talked about well in fact we now have unclaimed Pope's that constitute not just neighborhoods but sort of quasi cities example Northwest Washington in and McClain and Shetty Jason and the places where everybody who is anybody in Washington lives there are 13 such zip codes I created a an index that combined education and income to rank all the ZIP codes in the country on this index of those 13 all of them are in the top four cent aisles of the nation's zip codes 11 of them are in the 99th cent aisle 10 of those in 11 are in the top half of the top 1% well I can tell you the same stories about the Upper East Side of New York about the suburbs of watch of New York City about you know the suburbs surrounding Palo Alto a lot of you come from these places and they are contiguous and so you can live your lives within a community that basically is composed overwhelmingly of people just like you this is not such a huge problem in terms of the cultural effects that I've worried me if you grew up in Queens and then you became a wealthy hedge-fund manager and now you live in Fifth Avenue because you bring your memories with you you can still go back to Queens and you'll be completely familiar with the street life around you if you grew up in a small town and now live in in San Francisco same thing the problem is the generation after that with the kids who have always grown up in that bubble and then they go to colleges which are completely another bubble completely consistent culturally with that one then they go to graduate school and then they go into their jobs which are else in the bubble and they do not have a clue about what life in the rest of America is about and the problem is they make the rules or they will as time goes on to the rest of America and there are all sorts of ways that we can get into as the the conversation progresses about why this is a bad thing but I will just simply summarize it this way it's not such a big problem if a truck driver does not understand the priorities and the sensibility and so forth of a Yale Law Professor or of a cabinet official of the rest of it it is a real problem if law professors or news anchors or cabinet officials don't have any way of empathizing with the priorities of truck drivers if you have grown to adulthood and you have never held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day you fundamentally do not understand what work is like for a great proportion of the population and I could go on with those examples but I will skip through the question I will anticipate the question that I'm sure I will get what's your solution I am a libertarian I do not do solutions the the you know no the solution I will tell you this is a good news about about the reception of the book I am directing it at you and by the way it is written in a way that all of you who are on the left in this room which I suspect is maybe a small majority uh you can read this book without throwing it against the wall there are there there are no there are no shots at the left in the entire book until the last chapter but that's okay you can know you wherever I do talk about my own perspective on a lot of this what I'm really asking you is to think about your own self-interest for you and your children about living a satisfying life I don't want you to go out and do good I don't want you to go out and mingle with the rest of America to help them out I want you to consider the extent to which we have gotten very good at constructing glossy lives for ourselves but ones that lost a lot of texture ones where if you think of the sources of satisfaction in your life as drawing from vocation from your family from your faith perhaps or from your community think of the degree to which you may have lost a dimension known as community either defined locally or defined nationally in ways that are that are diluting the quality of your own life and I want you to think about the ways in which you can change aspects of your life that don't involvement revolutionary changes but but can bring you back in touch again with the rest of the country in ways that will resurrect a phrase that was still in common use in 1960 and has since faded which is a resurrection of the American Way of life thank you thank you thank you Charles and thank you for Bob for coming today this was a panel that Kitty and I talked about some time ago would be an ideal panel for Aspen because it really addresses some very serious trends that are underway in the country that don't get a lot of conversation and you know the day to day news is all focused on the who's up and who's down without a sense of what's going on underneath the surface and the I was reminded as we prepared for this of a report that was written some almost half century ago by Daniel Patrick Moynihan who wrote her when he worked for Lyndon Johnson wrote a report for call the Negro family and it was a call for national action and in that report he described it as deterioration in the family structure of Negro families all across the country especially the disappearance of fathers and what that was doing to Negro life and it was enormous ly controversial he took I eat a lot of flack for it but what he warned and what we now see is he warned this is not a racial issue it's a class issue and it could become a he warned that this same trends the same ways of living could easily spread and would likely spread into the white culture and now what Charles Murray has come along and said you know it's here and that's and it is it's very serious we do have a group of those many of us in this town who are elite who don't understand it and don't sympathize with it we don't talk about it we've got our were separated out as Charles said and yet we have to understand both the dimensions of it and the causes and we asked Robert Putnam to come because he has been thinking about a lot of these issues for a long time on the issues of civic engagement he wrote the classic book Bowling Alone that many of you I hope have read and understand and he's been concerned about aspects of coming apart for a long time so what we asked Bob to do is come in and come and give us a fairly long unusual for this kind of forum responds to as what he sees and I think what we're going to my sense is what we're going to see is that these two fellows have some parallelized both grew up in the Midwest both went to school got PhDs and elite universities and now have you know are coming full circle and thinking about the lives of people who grow up in communities like there and but they they have parallel views of what's happening but very different views of why and maybe what needs to be done about it so with that Bob Putnam thank you thanks very much David and thank you all for coming Charles Murray's portrait which he's just outlined at least he's outlined parts of it of America's coming apart is coming apart along lines of social and economic class not race is in my view largely accurate as far as it goes and to emphasize this that this split is about class and not about race in his book he focuses almost exclusively on white folks and I'm going to follow his example here although we both recognize that troubling racial gaps assist and my arguments going to be that Charles's picture of America has been inadvertently cropped in some crucial ways and that if we widen the scope scope of the of our view of what's been happening in America we get a somewhat different understanding of what's what's happening in our country and of why it matters and I'm going to begin by asking I guess I'm going to focus mostly on this what about the kids Murray devotes very few of his four hundred pages in the book to exploring what difference this America is coming apart will make for the next generation of Americans and if we widen our focus to look not only at his to archetype all places Fishtown which is his label helpful label for a white working-class America and Belmont which is his useful label for upper-class America I want to focus not so much on the adults in Fishtown in Belmont but on the kids in Fishtown and Belmont that switch redirects our attention from equality of outcome or inequality of outcome in the current generation to inequality of opportunity in the next generation this is an important distinction this distinction between inequality of outcome and inequality of opportunity is an important distinction which I think has been too much ignored in our discussions in America over the last year or so about equality or inequality it's fundamentally a distinction between two different generations yesterday's generation that's me and tomorrow's generation and so I want to describe tomorrow's generation into in a real place that represents in itself today both fish both the fish town and Belmont but that a generation ago represented a very different America and the place that I want to talk about a real place is my hometown we as port clinton ohio and i graduated from Parkland High School in 1959 this town of 5,000 people on the shores of Lake Erie roughly between Toledo and Cleveland was the kind of will begun on the lake and life was pleasant not idyllic not affluent no very rich folks in in Port Clinton and very few very poor folks in Port Clinton the Portland was was and remains overwhelmingly white just like Belmont and Fishtown unemployment in Port Clinton in the 50s and 60s averaged under 4% the days of my classmates worked on the in local factories which were suppliers to the automobile industry it's part of that Midwestern automobile industry or they owned modest farms or they ran small businesses my dad was one of the people who ran a small business and like many small business men he had his ups and downs but like most parents in town my mom and dad were solid supportive parents and the local schools were good one of the as I was about to go up to college that happened to coincide with one of the rougher times in my dad's business career but I was fortunate because the corporate parent of one of the local factories gave me a scholarship to go to college and and I off I went to Swarthmore and then to Oxford and to Yale and a little later ended up at teaching at Harvard and my wife Rosemary and I had two kids who graduated both of them from Harvard and they launched successful families and successful careers both of them and we ended up with with seven terrific grandchildren I'd love to show you the pictures actually Walden grandchildren but I want to talk very briefly about one of the eldest of our grandchildren Miriam Miriam lived with her two supportive parents in Pittsburgh and went to the Pittsburgh Public Schools but she wasn't doing as well there is she or they liked and so she they enrolled her in a in a outstanding private school we helped out a little bit with the finances and at her new school unlike the public school in Pittsburgh Miriam studied microbiology and medieval history she went off to summer one went off to Italy one summer to study cooking she made a lot of good friends in the in the in drama and in other extracurricular activities and in the fall she'll enter one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country Miriam liked her siblings and her cousins all of our grandchildren is hardworking self-assured surrounded and supported by a strong family by good friends and by caring Mentors now that story will sound banal to almost everyone in the room because I could easily have been describing your kids or your grandchildren that's the kind of life our children and grandchildren lived but I not want to tell you this story about the granddaughter of another Portland night a young woman that I will call Mary Sue that's a fictitious name but Mary Sue is a sadly a very real person in the land in the half-century since I left Port Clinton the town like many others in America has has been devastated by hard times beginning a decorator two ago when all those local factories closed and all the jobs fled unemployment today in Park Linton is about fourteen percent almost the highest in all of Ohio which is the center of the Rust Belt most of the shops that I remember going to as a youth are out of business and their premises are derelict so if you walk down downtown and in Parkland mostly you're seeing broken windows and and empty shops on the other hand the beautiful shoreline because it's right on Lake Erie has drawn well-to-do Ohioans from Cleveland and Columbus and so on and they have built up along the shoreline wonderful second homes and so that that strip right along Lake Erie is is in great shape and the local local real estate people and local developers who've been there for you know ridden Portland all their lives have done very well part Linton remains statistically among the most egalitarian places in America compared to other parts of America today but just like the rest of America inequality inside Portland has grown dramatically over this period there are a lot of statistics that show this but the best example that I found of that was you know in a newspaper the local Portland newspaper week or two ago you could read an ad for a nine hundred thousand dollar mansion on Lake Erie right next to an ad for an eleven thousand dollar double-wide that's poor Clinton today and in one of those double wides about eighteen twenty years ago Mary Sue grew up Mary Sue who my research team met in Port Clinton last month is almost the same age as my Miriam her grandfather might have been one of my classmates but when I went off to Swarthmore he chose to forgo college in favor of a decently paid job honorable job as a local firefighter he got married just like I did and raised a couple of kids just like rosemary and me who also graduated from high school confident that they would lead a similarly comfortable future just as their dad had but when the factories closed and the good well-paying blue-collar jobs fled their future trains changed dramatically so while my kids went off to Harvard and successful careers his kids never found a steady job got involved in crack cocaine I'm describing a real family by the way here got involved in crack cocaine and went through a string of impermanent relationships and Mary Sue is the product of one of those impermanent relationships let me just let you hear from Mary Sue about her own life I'm going to be quoting from the field notes of my colleague Jen Silva who was in Portland a couple of weeks ago Mary Sue was very candid about her life wrote my colleague opening with her parents divorce when she was little which turned her life upside down because her mother started stripping and leaving her alone for days her dad remarried a woman who would hit her put up baby gates to keep MarySue in one room when Mary Sue was little she recalled her only friend was a yellow mouse who lived in her apartment in her in her trailer at that point said my aide I abandoned the interview guide since asking about piano lessons seemed a little absurd instead I heard a harrowing tale of abuse her stepmother later went to jail for seven years for child neglect trouble with the law Mary Sue herself was put in juvenile detention for a while because she was caught selling pot and then she finished high school online so she actually never graduated Portland High School she was living there and she Mary Sue is left with a deep deep distrust of anyone and everyone thrown into heart is thrown into sharp relief by the burn scars on her arms where a man she hooked up with a few months ago burned her in the middle of the night Mary Sue wistfully recalled that four years ago this month she had a stillborn baby since breaking up with a baby's dad who left her for someone else and breaking up with the second fiance who cheated on her after he got out of prison Mary Sue is currently in a relationship that feels stable although her boyfriend has two infants with other women born two months apart now the contrast between the lives of Miriam and Mary Sue you can't hear that contrast I hope without just feeling sick to your stomach but wait you'll say come on haven't there always been great disparities of outcomes in American life aren't I just cherry-picking a particularly tragic example to get your sympathy to be sure Mary Sue's tragic experiences are not typical of every working-class white kid in America and Miriam's life has been more fortunate than many upper-middle class kids today but over the last six years my research team has conducted exhaustive quantitative analyses of young people nationwide that confirm a shocking truth Miriam and Mary Sue personify a sharply growing class divide among America's next generation that's grown rapidly over the last two decades I'm normally a numbers man I spoke yesterday afternoon about the numbers that lie behind that that underlay my my claim about this sharply growing class of urgency among our young people so I'm not going to do the numbers now but I'm going to just try to summarize very quickly what our research has shown over the last several decades test scores of white kids from affluent homes like Miriam have risen whereas test scores from of white kids from bless well-off homes that is kids like Mary Sue have not risen as professor Sean Riordan of Stanford has shown over the last several decades college-educated parents like Miriam's parents have spent have more than quadrupled their good night moon time with their kids and their soccer sideline time whereas kids like Mary Sue have had a much smaller increase in time with their parents because impact in fact in part because as Charles has shown more and more of the kids like Mary Sue only have one parent um and that and by now and by now across America the average the difference in the amount of time that Mary Sue's parents and Miriam's parents spend with them is an hour a day the Myriam's of America are getting an hour a day more of their parents time than the Mary Sue's and worst yet the time the time difference is concentrated in the first three or four years of life precisely when time with mom and dad makes the most difference um affluent parents are also investing more financially in their kids not just investing time over the last year over the last 40 years income lower income parents of all races have increased lower income people have increased their spending on enrichment for their kids by $400 by little less than $500 a year in constant dollars whereas upper-middle class families have increased their spending on enrichment for their kids by fifty three hundred dollars a year a ratio of more than ten to one in so it's not just investing money it's also investing time a generation ago there were no class differences in religious observance in America but now attending church among them among the Mary Sue's in America has collapsed working-class participation in class has in in religion has declined among working-class kids whereas among the Miriam's of them of America church involvement religious involvement has not changed much a generation ago there were only modest very modest class differences in extracurricular activities in high school but over the last several decades participation in banned and French club and debate and and varsity sports have risen sharply among the Miriam's of America and has fallen sharply among the Mary Sue's of America over the last several decades involvement in community activities like Scouts and volunteering have risen sharply among the Miriam's of America and have fallen among the Mary Sue's of America over the last several decades social support from peers and mentors has risen among them among the Miriam's of America and fall among the very sewers of America and in short and it's not surprising measures of how much they trust other people how much they trust the people around them among the Miriam's of the world have gone up over this last 30 or 40 years and among the very sewers of the of the world have collapsed in America well no wonder virtually every social institution in America has failed Mary Sue family church school community or institutions friends no mentors anymore in the lives of these kids Mary Sue's in reliance on that yellow Mouse for friendship accurately symbolizes the social isolation of many white working-class kids in America and it didn't used to be that way in short the contrasting lives of Miriam and Mary Sue are depressingly typical of a middle of America that we live in now and it didn't used to be that way in Portland or in America half centuries ago half century ago although and here's the the most important part of what I'm saying all of those things that I just described time with parents the church being involved community activities getting higher test scores all of those things predict success in life and therefore they point directly at what we could call an opportunity gap an opportunity gap that is already on us in America though it hasn't yet shown up in this in the national statistics on social mobility Miriam my Miriam is talented and hardworking and deserves her bright future but Mary Sue doesn't deserve her bleak future her parents made mistakes but her she only made one mistake she chose the wrong parents and that's fundamentally unfair and it's fundamentally a a signals the collapse of the American Dream that kids from all sorts of backgrounds if they work hard and play by the rules can have a chance at upward mobility why did it happen well there are a number of parts of it part of the explanation is the trend that Charles Murray has highlighted the collapse of the white working-class family but where did that come from how come the white working-class family collapsed Charles is a little agnostic on that question but his kind of preferred explanation for this collapse of the white working-class family in the last quarter century is the social welfare reforms of the Great Society but in Port Clinton that story just doesn't sound nearly as plausible as the much more obvious story three decades of vanishing jobs and economic insecurity for the bottom half of the US labor force given Mary Sue's story it's hard not to demonize her parents but we have to ask why they unlike their parents unlike the people the less educated people of college good high school educate people and I went to school with they weren't monsters why did their kids become monsters and the answer I think all the serious scholarship and I'm there's a long footnote here to the dozens of articles that looked at this question all the serious scholarship says the collapse of the white working-class family is above all traceable to the collapse of the working opportunities and the economic the growing economic insecurity for that for that group but family structure that Charles talks about his own is only part of the story in order to become a heart Allen a tenured Harvard professor you have to pass a test in name-dropping and I'm now about to try to prove to you that I'm a legitimate Harvard professor four or five years ago I was talking with George W Bush and Laura Bush and Karl Rove and a few other people in the White House about our emerging results and they were quite taken by them too to his credit the president was very much engaged in this question and his first question was exactly the right first question and it was one that that Charles would approve of how much said the president of this is attributable to family structure that was the right first question as I said to him the answer is a little less than half of this total change is attributable to the change to the total change of the kids experience I mean is it tributyltin gin the in family structure but what else could it be he said and I was kind of stumbling around talking about the growth in income inequality in America but Laura Bush stepped in and saved me she she interrupted me and interrupted her husband and turned to us but it said George if you don't know how long you're going to keep your job and you don't know how long you're going to keep your house you just have less energy to invest in the kids and I think that's probably right on target I think that my research group we call that the Laura Bush hypothesis and it's a story about how growing economic insecurity among the working class is feeding through into the next generation there are other other explanations that are part of the story here one is the collapse of working-class the social fabric of working-class neighborhoods so all the sociological safety net that used to exist in the fish towns of America and in Port Clinton the churches and the you know the Knights of Columbus and the the Parks and Rec guy who paid attention to the kids on the playground all of that in working-class towns across America is gone now the Knights of Columbus is shut down Parks and Rec was one of the first things to get hit by budget cuts and the you know the neighbor ladies who just who used to work there look used to pay out look out for kids who are doing very well are no longer there in the neighborhood and what that means is that if a chick falls out of a nest there because something goes wrong at home there's no net there used to be a net to catch those chicks in working-class neighborhoods that net is all gone solving this problem will be costly not solving it will be even costlier if success in life comes to depend upon how well you choose your parents our country will pay a massive economic price for writing off about a third of our workforce and morally such a system is simply unfair my parents generation thought of all the kids in Portland as our kids but in the ensuing half-century the meaning of our kids has shriveled we now think of Miriam as our kid but Mary Sue somebody else's kid that's not how America thrived in the past and it can't be our future thank you Charles is remarkable to me - to what extent the two of you agree on your description of what's emerging and clearly you have disagreements about the causes and you now address that issue to what extent it's the loss of jobs and a Rust Belt area versus cultural factors yeah I I explicitly do not talk about causes in the book for the new lower class for a very specific reason because I wanted you to be able to be able to read the book if I had rehearsed the arguments that I wrote in losing ground you would have never gotten past the prologue and and the reason that I thought it's okay not to deal with that is because to a great degree what the original causes were are irrelevant to what we do now let me let me give a quick example of this in losing ground I talked about the increase in out of wedlock births and I argue that the social policy had a lot to do with that particularly it made decisions of young people that made sense in the short term that didn't make sense in the long term but suppose I was right the fact is that once you have growth of out of wedlock births uh for whatever reasons you also start to lose the stigma once you start to lose the stigma then the behavior that the dynamics of that behavior which is increased we're now looking in Fishtown at about half of all births out of wedlock a white community remember you know the reason it continues to increase is no longer what I would argue is the original cause and a lot of the same thing applies I think to economic explanations let me let me suppose let's say okay I agree with all of Bob's description of what's happened in Port Clinton and generally in the working class and somebody say okay I have a program even though I am a libertarian which is going to produce a really hot job market it is going to be a job market where you see help wanted signs hanging out everywhere and not just for minimum wage jobs I will be talking about in which the average wage for working class jobs is about $18 an hour okay if I can do that jobs everywhere pretty good wages surely we will see some resuscitation in Fishtown of what we've seen in this kind of collapse well I'll tell you what I am describing the late 1990s that's what we had during that same period white male labor force participation in the working class didn't budge it had been rising and so I guess the good news is it stopped rising but it did not go down the work hours did not go up as you could work as many hours as you wanted to work in the late 1990s work hours didn't go up and here as I I'm really happy to hear Bob describe the field work that is people are doing because in those field notes and so far gives you engaged in extensive conversation is a reality that we have to come to grips with if you go down to Fishtown and you talk with guys in Fishtown about why they aren't working you are not going to hear them tell you stories about without looking for jobs you know for two or three months and I finally got discouraged and I didn't do it when you talk to women about why they didn't marry the father of their child they are not saying you know Joe is a great guy but he just doesn't feel it's right for us to get married when he doesn't have a job that can support the family what they are going to tell you over and over and over again is why would I want to marry that bozo he can't hold on to a job he gets jobs occasionally and then he doesn't show up for work or he shows up work drunk or he doesn't work when he's there and he gets fired and that's happened over and over again bringing him into the house would be like bringing a new child into the house Paul Solman who does the the news our segment on on the economy is yeah PBS he did he did an interview with me segment last January February but he asked us before he came off the interview to also bring a couple of employers of local labor around so we had one guy who does general contracting and another guy who has one of these things that does tree work and it turned out the reason he wanted to talk to them was to talk to them about their problems in getting guys to work for them because he said to me when we go out and do stories on unemployment from the traditional PBS point of view we keep getting this even though we aren't looking for us again and again in places which have high unemployment and employers are saying I know the unemployment rate in this area is X but I'm also telling you I can't get people to fill these jobs so there's my solution a really hot economy good-paying blue-collar jobs and I'm telling you we've been there done that and it does not address the cultural changes that have happened for whatever original causes and so I think we have to initially focus on a common description of the problem and the fact that Bob and I can do that so completely I think it's a step forward Bob let me let me ask follow that up because I wonder to what extent the changes that have come have now imbued into the young younger members of the workforce or the potential younger members of the workforce isn't this attitude that work is sort of beneath me in some fashion or I don't want to do long hard work hi I've been startled in three different occasions in the last two years to be with a group of CEOs from around the country who didn't know each other but we're just having a conversation about what they face were in their company and this theme has come up every time among the CEOs that when they hire the when they provide jobs and hire a young white guy in his 20s or early 30s frequently the guy is much more interested in what's going on his iPhone he does not want to work overtime hours and he does not regard it as a long-term job it is something he does on the side he will do temporarily and there's a very high turnover rate and there is something that's infecting the way people approach jobs even if they're there that I have heard about again again I'm curious how you see that and how it fits into sort of what we should be doing well first of all David this is not an audience in which I want to impugn CEOs as as as witness as tests as witnesses on the question of the outlooks of working-class guys thus I'm not at all trying to say that this is only a problem caused by joblessness I think it was originally caused by joblessness I think that it's now seeped into the white working class culture but not the actually not at all David what you said about work is beneath me these are people for the most part who have tried so hard and other people who tried so hard they've just given up on the whole society not it's not they what they think they can relax on welfare or unemployment and and and and work is beneath them that's not there I'll look at all from talking to them not talking to CEOs but talking to the key people who would you know the people were talking to but this is I don't want to get too deeply involved in a debate about the relative importance of economics and the relative importance of culture because this is why this is quintessentially a purple problem the problem we're talking about here if you see it only through red conservative lenses as I would argue Charles does you see you only see it through blue lenses no but that's but wait a minute Charles let me finish my sentence let me finish my sentence at least if you see it only through red conservative lenses you see correctly some parts of the problem that was what I was going to go on to say and can I finish the rest on sentence and and if you see it through blue progressive lenses you see correctly other parts of the problem but if we I desperately hope we don't have a question I don't have a debate about this is what the structure makes them like we're supposed to have a debate about is it really a red problem really brewpub it's really a purple problem but it's really a problem and we quick you're great you're grooved absolutely okay okay that's that's important that's that fundamentally important but before we go and I wanted to open this to the audience and but I've got a question about the group the large proportion of the population is left out of this conversation and that is a minority population if you look at the Hispanic population of black population are they more like Fishtown or they more like Belmont or how what sort of proportions because I think that describes a puts us in a bigger context I might say among CEOs recently I talked to they said the young Hispanic guys who come in want to work harder and longer and are willing to bust their tails to get it done and this was quite striking to me well by the way I dealt with that in the book is in the penultimate chapter I say okay I've been showing you all these graphs limited to non-latino whites I'm now going to replicate those graphs for the entire population and I was kind of surprised actually the degree to which the lines just we're incredibly close together because what happens is even if you have for one indicator let's say a different problem in the black community the Latino community came may very well be on the other side of that and it all averages out and so there are as Bob said still important racial and ethnic disparities no question about that but if you take a look at the profile of the problem we're both describing and you extend it to the country as a whole the whole picture is is really in the aggregate quite similar I agree with that but let me just add one more thing I can do on a number of measures including out of wedlock births but also other other all the other things we've talked about there's an interesting pattern you can look at race and class are correlated America but what you want to know is how important is the race part of that controlling for class and how important is a class part controlling for race if you do that analysis it turns out that racial differences controlling for class are declining in America and class differences in America controlling for race are increasing what does that mean if I stop the statistical explanation what it means is that college-educated non-whites in America are looking more and more like ecology - educated and high school graduates or high school dropouts who are white are looking more and more like high school dropouts or high school graduates who are non-white the for most of my life with America we've talked about racial differences and we should have been but if you impose a racial framework on this problem now it's increasingly distorted because both for blacks and for whites and for other races too it's the class differences and not the skin color differences that are increasingly most important in accounting for the pathologies we're talking about well that that actually can be helpful in terms of thinking about responses yes oh yeah yeah it frees up the conversation enormously yeah you always have to add in this important to add I'm neither of us I'm sorry not saying that racial differences have disappear a tional differences still existed support we pay attention to those but if we focus only on that we're missing this larger story right right right let's open this up there yes that act please please stand if you would so I think everybody can and here's a mic I think this is mainly to you mr. Putnam but it is the the issue of education I mean you talk about the disappearance of the park wrecks people and all the other civic institutions that have been a kind of social safety net for the kids that fall out of the net out of the nest but in all of this aren't our schools really failing these kids I mean if we had such a strong emphasis on public education so schools could could catch the the Mary Sue's of the world in a in a way that was more generous and helpful but this seems to be at least one institution across the country that could be much more helpful if we really thought that public schools and public school teaching were the most important thing that the United States should be investing in I didn't yesterday my talk I went through a list of six things we might do about the problem I skipped that here because I was running out of time the high on that list is education that's right I want to be careful about the language we use because I don't think the problem is the schools have started failing I think it is that a lot more social problems are now be you dumped into schools because kids are coming with much less so I I think you know you live with the problem you've been given and I think that requires us to do a lot more stuff in school that in earlier your era or for my kids my grandchildren is being done at home and that means we're going to have to think more and more about schools not just as places where you learn to read and write but it's where you you'll learn a lot of the kinds of human social skills that in other settings would be would would have been handled by families you might say well that's letting Mary Sue's family off the hook but how what about Mary Sue its Mary Sue you got to worry about if we're going to ask her first-grade teacher to solve this problem we got to be thinking a lot more about the training and motivation of teachers and that's going to be costly this is not cheap just think it's going to be more costly if we don't help Mary Sue the second thing is a lot of this these differences that I'm talking about you can see in the data occur very early way but these class differences are visible in the data long before kids go to school they're not getting the this divergence because of school they're arriving school with that and what does that mean we've got to focus a lot more energy on high quality early childhood education the hour our grand children my grandchildren your grandchildren get that right because we pay for that but Mary Sue can you imagine her going to her mom the bomb or her stepmom the mom who who who beat her up and saying I ain't know the three-year-old saying please I'd like to have a little money so I can get preschool education it's an it's not going to happen over the long run we've got to also worry about how to fix that family I agree that that's true but in the short run it's Mary Sue I'm worried about I'm much less worried about the Fishtown adults I'm worried about the kids in Fishtown so education both preschool and in school are important parts of the problem there are other things we need to do we do need to lift up the importance of a family I agree with a lot of that from a Charles we do need to think about providing decent more decent well decent jobs for working-class kids for working-class adults that is part of the solution here there are other things we could do too but I've gone on too long again if your microphone where you have a mic come on back there because one two hands back here three judy Allen from Houston Texas I just want to share with you briefly that we are probably our Houston Independent School District is perhaps the second largest in America and it's highly ethnic because the lights have gone somewhere else and we discovered in Houston the Mary Sue's were in school and there would be the little boy that would come that would have the same shirt on day after day after day and by the end of the week of course it was dirty and he showed up on Monday in the same shirt so the community got together and founded something called communities in school and it privately funded and every hopefully every of one of the independent schools you know starting elementary middle school high school now has a counselor in that school so that when the teachers see little Johnny in the same shirt the teacher tells the community in Schools counselor and the community in school counselor begins to get to know Johnny Johnny where do you live well on Mondays I live with my grandmother and on Tuesdays sometimes I live with my dad and so that we can begin to wrap ourselves around that kid's life and it has been a successful expensive program but successful I just wanted to share that thank you this Communities in Schools is a rapidly growing national program now there there there's another hand back there behind them there laughing there's the hand way down the right hello I am Candace Joyner and I'm a basil scholar and my question is what is the first step that must be done to break the generational cycle that we see so many people falling into like Mary Sue because this isn't just a purple problem it's a global problem okay I don't I don't have a good answer for it but I'm not trying to monopolize the discussion of solutions here I'm trying to get my partner here to come up with some positive positive ideas I evaluated the predecessor of communities in schools called cities and schools then back in the late 1970s the people were this is when I was working for a nonpartisan research organization that did this work on contract to the government called cities and schools it was run by absolutely dedicated people loved him and we were trying to find evidence of positive impact and we could not find it in any of the numbers even though I said we know we're making differences in the lives of our kids and I said look I can't you know come up with anything the numbers that but but why don't you just tell us your success stories qualitatively and we will put those in the report go to your files and so they would do that and they gave us the success stories where such and such a child had dropped out and then came back and so forth but then of course we had to look at what happened to the success story a year later there was not a single solitary one of the success stories they told us that had not gone back to baseline by the next year not one and and they were devastated by this and I was devastated by this actually was one of the major incentives to write losing ground the reason I am telling this story relates to the question was just asked what's the first step and here is where I am going to I'm afraid they'll fill a lot of stereotypes I spent my professional life before I became a right-wing ideologue evaluating social programs done by the government it is not that we found only a minority of the more successes the evidence for important impact on the lives of children was incredible hard to find and so the answer the question is what is the first step the first step in my view is that we start talking openly and honestly about the importance of bringing a child into the world as a moral act the most important moral act we do and it is wrong not just a mistake it is wrong to bring a child into the world that you are not prepared to care for we have to say that out loud and one of the problems with this of course is your demonizing single mothers and I understand why people don't want to do that but I'll tell you what is there any reason we can't demonize the guys - to impregnate a woman knowing that you are not going to play a role in the life of that child that you are not going to do you're not going to take any responsibility I don't see any reason at all not to start speaking openly about that and this goes to the new upper class because you know what is one of our major problems we do not preach what we practice we we get married before we have kids we invest a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with money and a lot to do with time but what we won't say is this is not just our individual lifestyle choice this is absolutely essential if we're going to come to grips with this problem it's essential across class so that's your first step thanks for prompting me to give an answer back here sorry can I get please move the microphone here my BOB speak um there's a little bit of a double standard we're trying I'm trying to have this be a friendly let's figure out solve the problem together but there is a little bit of a double standard because Charles asking for hard-nosed evidence that communities and schools for example works their eyes there is some evidence despite what Charles said that the programs like that actually do make a difference but Charles didn't offer any evidence not a scintilla of evidence that preaching of the sort he wants makes any difference at all and in fact the studies have been done of programs that involve preaching are completely clear that preaching alone does not have a scintilla of impact on this I'm in favor of this is a purple problem but let's not say that the sort of blue solutions have got to pass some statistics statistical stringency test and that the and that the red solutions don't have a price okay let me let me clarify what I meant by preaching I don't mean taking a bullhorn and going down in a street corner I I do mean changing the nature of conversations and and that's it has to be done on an individual conversational basis yeah let me just add to that Bob III dis experience with Isabel Sawhill who I think is respected and the herbs are sets of things and she had a purple answer on something very similar to this because I was very involved in the teen pregnancy effort some years ago we had a national committee to reduce teen pregnancy and actually came down by half and Isabel told me you know the reason I think it came down by half was that both sides had something to contribute to this debate that the distributions of condoms made a big difference but so did yet just say no that the just say no campaign was in her view as equally important as a condoms and I'm wondering whether that in fact suggests there may be purple solutions as well as purple ways to diagnose I actually I agree that it is it is important that we not stigmatize the single moms but I do think that part of the culture that's evolved here is that among a significant number of white working-class guys it's now okay to walk away from the results of your sexual activity didn't used to be and we've got we have to address that but doing that only from a from a reaching point of view is not going to be so we've also got a part by the positive option for those guys hi I'm hello I'm Jeff Weiss I'm from Connecticut the data is what the data is we've heard a lot this year from both the aisle about class can you give your opinions on the communication and policy that's come out of the white house over the past year or so I don't have an answer for that one well I don't have any for better or worse I don't have any connection with the white house I I think that there was a so I don't have any connection with the white house but this is my reading from outside I think there was some discussion the white house clearly understands the difference between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity and I think there was a time last winter when they were thinking maybe we should frame this issue as about about equality of opportunity rather than about equality of outcome I think that got swamped in the politics of this by a focus more on the current distribution of income and mr. Romney is talking about opportunity that's great and but he's not talking about equality of opportunity he's talking about a who knows what that means exactly and I kind of have a hope that if they got talking about these issues one of them talking about equality and the other talking about equality of opportunity and somebody said how about the intersection of those if we might have it this is a little optimistic but we might actually have an enlightening discussion of the kinds of problems the kind of problem that we're talking about here I think the downside of that is or not this is why I'm ambivalent about the question I desperately wear my single biggest worry is that this problem will get turned in will get so caught up in the polarized politics of America that we end up having an argument that you and I are trying to avoid here about whether it's really a purple red pop or a blue Club could I just interject something since we're about at the end of the time yes isn't it interesting that we've had no questions about the new upper class right because we're pretty problematic on our own about it but it's fascinating the greed of which we focus on the most disadvantaged and I can understand some of the reasons for that but it is still I think something I hope that people walk away from here saying you know what we got to start thinking deeply about the new upper class and the implications of its isolation for the future of the country those which is not a political play don't either we've got to think of those kids as our kids right let me as good as to weep and we promise thee as possibly be damned here soon I'm someone and I'm sorry we can't get to all the hands because it's been a very rich discussion good because by Charles you've written about the fact that the upper class now has to choose back but the weather it's going to get engaged with the rest of America or be isolated from it and I think the civic engagement is exactly what Bob Putnam has been writing about it for a long time there is this movement afoot now as we all know among young people especially going to good universities to become social entrepreneurs as they call it and we've had this external volunteer effort I'm on the board for Teach for America and you know we have where we have an avalanche of kids who want to now go out and teach you in tough schools and you know at Harvard nine percent three years ago nine percent of seniors applied for Teach for America this last year was 18 percent it's one out of five kids at a lot of major universities say I want to go work in tough urban places for at least two years and 60% stay engaged in public education reform they've started charter schools the Kipp schools what's going on in Houston with Kipp schools and going on elsewhere is is a pretty remarkable change it should that be something that should national service volunteer national service be something that we push hard I happen to believe in it or do you think it's just trimming where do you go if you say volunteer I have no problem with it I guess I would just interject this it's fine kids Teach for America go work for Habitat for Humanity reporter but you know what we tend to do we again talking about the new upper class we tend to make certain that our kids leave their private school one night if we can go work at the soup kitchen or we send them off to Habitat for Humanity for a month we give them some contact as kind of tourists into the most disadvantaged parts of America but they have no idea of what life is like in an ordinary working you know solid working-class middle-class community where people are holding their lives together running their communities they have no idea what that kind of happy have you've been out in this Harlem in some of these schools where these charter schools the Kipp schools if you say I'm not I'm not I'm not they're not this is not tourism no no I'm making okay I will withdraw that I will say I do know of some upper middle class other people who have their kids be tourists yeah I am making a different point I'm all in favor of community service to the most disadvantaged parts of America I am really worried about the extent to which the new upper-class hasn't a clue of what ordinary Americans are like sure know Bob Bob you final work I'm about a hundred years ago our cafes to somewhat similar kind of set of problems and one of the pundits of that era made a distinction I think is relevant this context between doing for and doing with doing for is maybe a nice thing to do it it makes you feel good but it doesn't change your sense of what the reality in that other world is like doing with does and so the test I have of these schools of these these volunteer programs is do they actually involve our kids or our grandchildren doing with people from another background not just a kind of a lady bountiful a man doing for a men but isn't this where your granddaughter gets a chance to work with the Mary Sue yeah I David I know I'm your preacher the choir yes I agree very much with that yeah well listen I what the interested may get coming out of this what inspired me coming to this these two fellows are coming from different places as you can tell actually come out in much the same place on the fundamentals here and I think unlike some of the other arguments that are going on in this country which are so split and so acerbic and so stupid now this is this is actually this is actually very very fruitful in promises we thank you both for being here you

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 66,607

Keywords: aif12_119, Charles Murray, Robert D. Putnam, David Gergen, income inequality, Poverty In The United States (Literature Subject), Poverty (Field Of Study), Culture Of The United States (Quotation Subject), class divide

Id: eB5kQ2XDbAg

Length: 67min 11sec (4031 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 18 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/pdxp2b]

Thanks for the video. It's refreshing to hear two people put down their swords and agree that no matter what the cause of societal and economic ruin, we need to change how we operate as an economy and society if we want different outcomes.

Do you have any background fienhe event? They were speaking to a lot of CEOs in Ohio, that's about all I could glean.