Robert D. Putnam > Quotes

“People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“Social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“We all know that the way to get something done is to give it to a busy person.”
― Robert D. Putnam , Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“Poor kids, through no fault of their own, are less prepared by their families, their schools, and their communities to develop their God-given talents as fully as rich kids. For economic productivity and growth, our country needs as much talent as we can find, and we certainly can’t afford to waste it. The opportunity gap imposes on all of us both real costs and what economists term “opportunity costs.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“Financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has steadily replaced social capital - that is, grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“Social dislocation can easily breed a reactionary form of nostalgia.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone

“Parental wealth is especially important for social mobility, because it can provide informal insurance that allows kids to take more risks in search of more reward.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“TV-based politics is to political action as watching ER is to saving someone in distress.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone

“Schools themselves aren't creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and does not grow as children progress through school. The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age 18-powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not - are mostly present at age 6when children enter school. Schooling plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“If we think of politics as an industry, we might delight in its new "labour-saving efficiency", but if we think of politics as democratic deliberation, to leave people out is to miss the whole point of the exercise.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“Busy people tend to forgo the one activity - TV watching _ that is most lethal to community involvement”
― Robert D. Putnam , Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“Upper-class parents enable their kids to form weak ties by exposing them more often to organized activities, professionals, and other adults. Working-class children, on the other hand, are more likely to interact regularly only with kin and neighborhood children, which limits their formation of valuable weak ties.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“Many people have a stereotype of what it means to be poor. And it may be somebody they see on the street corner with a sign: “Will work for food.” And what they don’t think about is that person who’s struggling every day. Could be the person who waited on us, took our bank deposit, works in retail, but who is barely above the poverty line.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“Serendipitous connections become less likely as increased communication narrows our tastes and interests. Knowing and caring more and more about less and less. This tendency may increase productivity in a narrow sense while decreasing social cohesion.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“Generally speaking, lower-tier grandparents mostly donate time, replacing parental resources, whereas upper-tier grandparents mostly donate money, supplementing parental resources”
― Robert D. Putnam

“Contemporary discussion of inequality in America often conflates two related but distinct issues: • Equality of income and wealth. The distribution of income and wealth among adults in today’s America—framed by the Occupy movement as the 1 percent versus the 99 percent—has generated much partisan debate during the past several years. Historically, however, most Americans have not been greatly worried about that sort of inequality: we tend not to begrudge others their success or care how high the socioeconomic ladder is, assuming that everyone has an equal chance to climb it, given equal merit and energy. • Equality of opportunity and social mobility. The prospects for the next generation—that is, whether young people from different backgrounds are, in fact, getting onto the ladder at about the same place and, given equal merit and energy, are equally likely to scale it—pose an altogether more momentous problem in our national culture. Beginning with the “all men are created equal” premise of our national independence, Americans of all parties have historically been very concerned about this issue.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“Light-touch government works more efficiently in the presence of social capital. Police close more cases when citizens monitor neighborhood comings and goings. Child welfare departments do a better job of “family preservation” when neighbors and relatives provide social support to troubled parents. Public schools teach better when parents volunteer in classrooms and ensure that kids do their homework. When community involvement is lacking, the burdens on government employees—bureaucrats, social workers, teachers, and so forth—are that much greater and success that much more elusive.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“Caring for kids was once a more widely shared, collective responsibility, but that ethic has faded in recent decades.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“while race-based segregation has been slowly declining, class-based segregation has been increasing.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“{The Progressives] outlook was activist and optimistic, not fatalist and despondent. The distinctive characteristic of the Progressives was their conviction that social evils would not remedy themselves and that it was foolhardy to wait passively for time's cure. As Herbert Croly put it, they did not believe that the future would take care of itself. Neither should we.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“The timing of the Internet explosion means that it cannot possibly be causally linked to the crumbling of social connectedness described in previous chapters. Voting, giving, trusting, meeting, visiting, and so on had all begun to decline while Bill Gates was still in grade school.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“teacher flight from the challenges in such schools—violence and disorder, truancy, lower school readiness and English-language proficiency, less supportive home environments—means that students in these schools get a generally inferior education. Many teachers in poor schools today are doing a heroic job, driven by idealism, but in a market economy the most obvious way to attract more and better teachers to such demanding work is to improve the conditions of their employment.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“More plausible suspects in our mystery are the things that students collectively bring with them to school, ranging from(on the positive side of the ledger) academic encouragement at home and private funding for "extras" to (on the negative side) crime, drugs, and disorder. Whom you go to school with matters a lot.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high poverty schools. Every one of ten stressors is two to three times more common in high poverty schools-- Student hunger, unstable housing, lack of medical and dental care, caring for family members, immigration issues, community violence and safety issues.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“The decline in religious participation, like many of the changes in political and community involvement, is attributable largely to generational differences.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“often within a single school, AP and other advanced courses tend to separate privileged from less privileged kids.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“Our aim in telling these stories as stories is not to excuse ourselves from the rigor of social science, but to gain the positive advantages of storytelling. We believe that stories, with their specificity and ability to express the complex realities of particular people and places and their possibly unique ability to express thought and feeling simultaneously, are the appropriate medium for capturing a sense of how social-capital creation works in real life.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Better Together: Restoring the American Community

“inequality of opportunity slows growth by keeping disadvantaged potential workers from developing their full capacity.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“Biopsychiatrists at the Harvard Medical School have shown that mothers who frequently abuse their children even verbally can impair the circuitry of those kids’ brains.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis