Robert Putnam on Inequality and Opportunity

you choose college-educated parents you're set for life but if you're asleep on the day when parents were being chosen or you you know kind of blew it off and said I don't care I'll take whatever you got there and you end up with a high school educated parent your goose is cooked and that's sort of the basis that's the bottom line but rather than telling you about all the data that show that what I want to do is tell you a story it's a story of the history of a small town in the middle of American says town in Ohio its town called Port Clinton Ohio it's called poor Clinton because it's on Lake Erie mostly white about 5,000 people I know a lot about the history of this town because it's my hometown and I'm imposing that on you I assure you not because my hometown is bizarre but because it turns out shockingly that my hometown is perfectly representative of what's happened in America over these years so when I was growing up in parkland in the 1950s no there was nobody very rich in town nobody very poor in town was a modest town I graduated from poor Clinton High School in 1959 of my classmates parents nearly half had not completed high school they had not completed secondary school so this was a pretty modest town and as I say nobody very rich nobody very poor and now 50 years later we know how well that class did and what we know startlingly is that that class was amazingly successful 80 percent of us got more education than our parents and and did better economically than our parents and the kids coming from the wrong side of the tracks have done just about as well as the people coming from the right side of the tracks there was very little class by as it turns out in the results of these low-lives of these kids one of the most startling examples of that are the two black kids in my class this is the 50s so when they did face to face racism serious racism in poor Clinton both of them came from very modest homes nobody in either of their homes had ever gotten past the third grade that is basically eight years old education both these kids graduate from high school that's a big deal from third grade to high school in one generation both of them got fellowships to go to college both of them went to graduate school Bolden graduated from graduate school and had profession areas professional careers but I'm trying to illustrate Portland in those years in fact empirically this is not my golden glow' remembrance is what the data show was a remarkably equal opportunity place so I went to college met a girl there we've now been hanging out together for the last 55 54 years so far so good we had two terrific kids both of whom went to Harvard and they in turn had seven wonderful grandchildren I want to show you the pictures of my seven grandchildren all of our grandchildren without exception are either now in one of America's best universities or headed there um one of them is a young woman named our oldest granddaughter named Miriam Miriam is is in her last year at a great college in America and she's saying French literature she spent summer before last in Paris studying horse so she said studying French cuisine and and French architecture meanwhile back in Port Clinton there was another guy named Joe Joe decided not to go to college but he got a really good job one of the factories in town Portland was a town that had some small auto parts factories and some mines and people the days of my classmates were were fishermen on Lake Erie or manual workers or small businessmen like my dad Joe's came from a working-class background and in fact became a very successful member of the working class he had two kids just like me his kids graduate from Portland high school and then the bottom fell out of the poor clinton economy and the bottom fell out of the american working class Joe's kids have never held a steady job they've never gotten married but that hasn't stopped them from having children and I want to just read to you the field notes from one of from one of my colleagues Jen Silva on this research team failed us from meeting with one of Joe's grandchildren now I've told you about my granddaughter Miriam Mary Sue is his granddaughter that's not her real name but that's what's what we call her and Mary Sue and Miriam are exactly the same age they're both granddaughters here's the notes Mary Sue tells a harrowing tale of loneliness distrust and isolation her parents split up when she was five and her mother turned to stripping and left her alone and hungry for days her dad hooked up with an woman who hit her refused to feed her and confined her to her room with baby gates caught trafficking marijuana at 16 Mary Sue herself spent several years several months in a juvenile detention center failed out of high school her experiences have left her with a deep-seated mistrust of anyone and everyone embodied in the scars on her arms which we saw where a boyfriend had burned her in the middle of the night just a few nights earlier Mary Sue wistfully recalls her stillborn baby born when she was 13 since breaking up with the baby's dad who left her for someone else and with the second fiance who cheated on her after his release from prison Mary Sue is currently dating an older man with two infants born two months apart two two other women and two Mary Sue this feels like the best she could hope for the story is actually even worse Mary Sue not long after told us what she thought was good news her older friend had found her a job working as a model in Toledo which is a nearby industrial town very supported on Facebook not long ago that she figured out her problems her problems she said is that no one in the world loves her and she's figured out how to solve that problem Gracie was gonna have a baby because the baby will love her and if you think that Mary Sue is in a pickle imagine Mary Sue's baby I can list if we have time six or seven things that we know would work to begin to help poor kids in America and to begin to narrow the opportunity gap this is a case in which the most important challenge I think is developing political will putting this higher up the national agenda now in the last time we faced this problem it was not Washington that fixed it it was small towns all across America and that's my image of what we need now we need a grassroots mobilization to begin to narrow the opportunity gap to give all of our kids a fair chance at the American dream and in the process help the whole country move forward music

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Keywords: The RSA, Royal Society of Arts, RSA Events, Economic Inequality, Robert Putnam (Author), event, talk, lecture, live event, discussion, Chairmans lecture, annual lecture, opportunity gap, Inequality (Quotation Subject), upbringing, childhood, education, working class, middle class, RSA replay, RSA Spotlight, Class, future, culture, economy

Id: ACve-N_6KJc

Length: 6min 56sec (416 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2015