ROBERT PUTNAM, Our Kids
I have been a fan of Bob Putnam and his work since he was a young professor and I was a slightly younger graduate student ini the early 1970s.
This is his best book by far both because it tackles the most difficult, intractable issue(s) facing American democracy and because it combines Bob’s uncanny ability to combine issues that touch the heart with hard core social science data analysis.
Others have summarized the key findings, including someone who kindly reposted David Brooks’ op ed from the NY Times the day before the book was published. So, I don’t need to do that here.
Rather, let me just say that Bob gets at one of the most vexing of what I call wicked problems, whose causes and consequences are to intertwined and tangled that you can’t deal with them separately–or easily.
Whether you focus on Bob’s (and Jen Silvy’s) stories about kids or his zillions of scissors charts, it is impossible to come away from this book and not reflect on your role in all of this. In my case, I’m helping organize my 50th high school reunion in a town that is a salt water version of Bob’s Port Clinton OH. I also watch my grandkids grow up with all the privileges of upper middle class life that he describes.
The book also comes out at a time when events in places like Ferguson remind us of the costs inequality–and all our other social problems–continue have on our society.
I’m more of an activist than a scholar these days, so I would have liked to have seen more specific proposals in the concluding chapter, especially ones that get at redefining our political culture, but those are quibbles. Because this is one of the best social science books of my professional lifetime.