[Vision2020] The Opportunity Gap

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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July 9, 2012
The Opportunity Gap By DAVID
BROOKS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html>

Over the past few months, writers from Charles Murray to Timothy Noah have
produced alarming work on the growing bifurcation of American society. Now
the eminent Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his team are
coming out with research that’s more horrifying.

While most studies look at inequality of outcomes among adults and help us
understand how America is coming apart, Putnam’s group looked at inequality
of opportunities among children. They help us understand what the country
will look like in the decades ahead. The quick answer? More divided than
ever.

Putnam’s data verifies what many of us have seen anecdotally, that the
children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly
different ways and have different opportunities. Decades ago,
college-graduate parents and high-school-graduate parents invested
similarly in their children. Recently, more affluent parents have invested
much more in their children’s futures while less affluent parents have not.

They’ve invested more time. Over the past decades, college-educated parents
have quadrupled the amount of time they spend reading “Goodnight Moon,”
talking to their kids about their day and cheering them on from the
sidelines. High-school-educated parents have increased child-care time, but
only slightly.

A generation ago, working-class parents spent slightly more time with their
kids than college-educated parents. Now college-educated parents spend an
hour more every day. This attention gap is largest in the first three years
of life when it is most important.

Affluent parents also invest more money in their children. Over the last 40
years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their
kids’ enrichment activities, like tutoring and extra curriculars, by $5,300
a year. The financially stressed lower classes have only been able to
increase their investment by $480, adjusted for inflation.

As a result, behavior gaps are opening up. In 1972, kids from the bottom
quartile of earners participated in roughly the same number of activities
as kids from the top quartile. Today, it’s a chasm.

Richer kids are roughly twice as likely to play after-school sports. They
are more than twice as likely to be the captains of their sports teams.
They are much more likely to do nonsporting activities, like theater,
yearbook and scouting. They are much more likely to attend religious
services.

It’s not only that richer kids have become more active. Poorer kids have
become more pessimistic and detached. Social trust has fallen among all
income groups, but, between 1975 and 1995, it plummeted among the poorest
third of young Americans and has remained low ever since. As Putnam writes
in notes prepared for the Aspen Ideas Festival: “It’s perfectly
understandable that kids from working-class backgrounds have become cynical
and even paranoid, for virtually all our major social institutions have
failed them — family, friends, church, school and community.” As a result,
poorer kids are less likely to participate in voluntary service work that
might give them a sense of purpose and responsibility. Their test scores
are lagging. Their opportunities are more limited.

A long series of cultural, economic and social trends have merged to create
this sad state of affairs. Traditional social norms were abandoned, meaning
more children are born out of wedlock. Their single parents simply have
less time and resources to prepare them for a more competitive world.
Working-class jobs were decimated, meaning that many parents are too
stressed to have the energy, time or money to devote to their children.

Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other energetic,
intelligent people. They raise energetic, intelligent kids in
self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and have
less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.

The political system directs more money to health care for the elderly
while spending on child welfare slides.

Equal opportunity, once core to the nation’s identity, is now a tertiary
concern. If America really wants to change that, if the country wants to
take advantage of all its human capital rather than just the most
privileged two-thirds of it, then people are going to have to make some
pretty uncomfortable decisions.

Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say
marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it.
Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or
benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and
other programs that benefit the working class.

Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit class
divisions and more time trying to remedy them — less time calling their
opponents out of touch elitists, and more time coming up with agendas that
comprehensively address the problem. It’s politically tough to do that, but
the alternative is national suicide.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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