Not taking care of the kids: collapse of morality

This week, I finally got around to reading Robert Putnam’s 2016 book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, which has been on my reading list for some time. It is a powerful view of the lives of teenagers of different social classes in towns across America that raises deep questions about what has happened to American culture and society in the past 70 years. I’m sorry I waited so long to read it.

Putnam, a professor of political science at Harvard, compares American society today with what he saw growing up in the small town of Port Clinton, Ohio, in the 1950s. Though acknowledging that there were real problems at that time, he shows that American culture was more caring and offered greater opportunities for kids of all social classes than it does now. Back then, middle-class people and “poor” people lived in the same neighborhoods and went to the same schools and churches. In the ’50s, just about any high school provided a good education that would allow bright kids to go to the best universities or find good work — which is certainly not true now.

Putnam gives many examples of talented young people from relatively poor families who were helped by their neighbors and went on to very successful lives. There were only two African-Americans in his high school class, and both went on to become highly-educated professionals. No one was really rich and, Putnam says, kids from the more affluent families would have been ashamed to flaunt their parents’ wealth.

It is not like that today. David Blair More affluent families now live in elite suburbs or in gated communities along Lake Erie. Their kids go to separate schools and never interact socially with those of less welloff families. Some richer parents now buy their teenagers fancy cars and push teachers to give them unearned high grades.

But the poorer kids are much worse off than they were in the ’50s. Today, they go to failing schools and often get little emotional, educational or financial support from their parents, or from anyone else.

The center of Port Clinton is now a derelict slum. The factory jobs that used to support workers there are gone.

Social mobility, the rate at which poor kids move up in the world, has declined sharply. In the 1950s, almost no kids were born out of wedlock and growing up with little contact with their fathers. Now, most poor American kids grow up that way. In the 1950s, drugs — except for alcohol — were unknown. Now they are an everyday scourge. Crime is a constant threat in poor neighborhoods.

Other statistics are just as bad. Real wages have not risen since the 1970s. The rate of entrepreneurial startups is at an all-time low. The manufacturing jobs that used to support a healthy working class are now mostly gone.

What happened? Maybe it’s that globalization destroyed jobs for high school graduates. Maybe social welfare reduced the incentive to work. Maybe drugs destroyed too many people’s lives. Maybe economic changes transferred a huge portion of US wealth over the last decades to a small elite, concentrated mostly on the East and West coasts. Maybe changes in moral standards hit poor kids harder since their parents’ — often just a mother — cannot bail them out of mistakes.

This kind of thing is happening not only in America. By coincidence, I’ve also been reading There Was a Country, a memoir of the early life of the great Nigerian novelist