Good afternoon and welcome to the American Enterprise Institute and to whatI hope will be a very stimulating conversation about a set of very important issues. I amRobert Doar, the Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies here at AEI. The most important task of a moderator at an event of this kind with such truly greatand distinguished participants is to say as little as possible and get out of the way,and that is what I intend to do. We are going to begin with Robert Putnam, who will discusshis latest book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” which has received a greatdeal of deserved attention and praise. Dr. Putnam is a professor of public policy atHarvard’s Kennedy School and his previous work has included the widely read “BowlingAlone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. “Then, we will turn to our two respondents, beginning first with AEI’s Charles Murray,whose works have included “Losing Ground: American Social Policy,” 1950 to 1980, and”Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” both essential works for anyoneinterested in what is happening in America’s middle class and poor communities. Dr. Murrayhas also, thankfully for parents like me, written a lovely book called “The Curmudgeon’sGuide to Getting Ahead,” which I’ve given to all of my college age children, hopingthey would take it all – take all of his advice. And by the way, happy Father’s Dayto everyone. (Laughter. )After Dr. Murray, we will hear from William Julius Wilson, who is a renowned sociologistand also a professor at Harvard. Dr. Wilson is the author of very significant works, including”The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy,” and”More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City,” both of which broughtbrave and important insight to some of the hardest issues our country faces. Were I tolist the awards Professor Wilson has earned, we would have no time left for discussion. Now, I have one last thing to say, which may surprise some of you here today, who perhapscame hoping for what that old late night talk radio host on WMCA in New York, Malachy McCourt,used to call a real donnybrook. What I want to say is that I’ve spent a lot of my weekendreading and re-reading some of the works of these three great scholars. And I hope thisdoesn’t make any of you three uncomfortable, but you agree on a great deal. Bob, you start us off. (Applause. )ROBERT PUTNAM: Thanks very much, Robert. I really appreciate this opportunity. I’mgrateful to AEI, to Arthur Brooks for the invitation. And I’m especially gratefulto my two co-panelists here, both of them very distinguished, as Robert has said, butalso both of them people who’ve blazed a trail that I’m, in this new book, following. Bill Wilson, 40 years ago – almost 40 years ago, 1978 I believe it was, Bill – publisheda book that was misleadingly titled but was remarkably prescient, the title was “TheDeclining Significance of Race in America,” but actually the book was about the increasingsignificance of class in America. I don’t know, Bill, whether you’ve ever thoughtabout re-titling the book. (Laughter. ) But it was a remarkable book because a lot ofthe evidence showed the increasing significance of class in America. And then of course, Charles Murray, in 2012, published “Coming Apart: The State of WhiteAmerica 1960-2010. ” And that book does many things, but among other things, it highlightsthree important big trends in American society, first of all increasing inequality of wealthand income. Secondly, in part, following on that, increasing class segregation – America’sincreasingly segregated by social class, as Charles and others have pointed out, bothsegregated in terms of where we live. We’re not segregated in all respects more than we used to be. And I’m now just summarizingsome of what Charles also reported. We’re not more segregated. We’re less segregatedactually than we used to be, certainly in religious terms, but even in racial terms,we’re somewhat less segregated. But we’re more segregated than we used to be in socialclass terms, more segregated in residential terms, more segregated in terms of who wego to school with, and more segregated – and again, Charles pointed this out – more segregatedin terms of whom we marry. And intermarriage rates, although intermarriage religious andracial intermarriage rates have been rising, class intermarriage rates have been fallingfor the last 30 or 40 or 50 years. That’s an important indicator – intermarriage rates are an important indicator basicallybecause we tend not to marry people that we don’t know. (Laughter. ) That’s a joke. Don’t you do jokes at AEI? I’m sorry. (Laughter. ) And that intermarriage rate isa nice reflection of the fact that – or a distributing reflection of the fact thatincreasingly people of marriageable age are more likely to encounter people of other religionsand other races, but less likely to encourage people of other social classes than we usedto be. And those three – and of course, the third big social trend that Charles point out wasthe collapse of the working class family and collapse of the working class community inAmerica – white as well as, or even maybe more than, black. And those three big trendsare, in a way, the starting point of this new book of mine called “Our Kids. ” Inthe book, I mean to ask what are the implications of those trends, the increasing salience ofclass in American society that both Bill and Charles have talked about. What are the implicationsof those for our kids?And in a series of stories and in a series of what I call scissors graphs, I mean tolay out the evidence that over the last 30 or 40 years there’s been a growing gap betweenrich kids and poor kids in America. And I want to emphasize that when I talk about richand poor, I’m not talking about the upper 1 percent and the lower 1 percent. I’m talkingabout basically the upper third of American society, which is college educated Americans,college graduates and kids coming from homes where the parents were college graduates. That’s the up side and down side of all these scissors graphs are people coming fromthe lower third of American society, which are people who did not – parents who didnot get past high school. Would you raise your hands if you have a college degree, please? So when I say rich, I meanyou. And that – and I’m making a comparison. And these scissors graphs in the book showin many different measures of child welfare and investments in children a growing gapover the last 30 or 40 years between kids coming from college educated homes or richkids, and kids coming from high school educated homes or poor kids. Sometimes the scissorspoint up, that is things are getting better for all kids, but getting better faster forrich kids. And sometimes the arrows point down – I mean, the scissors point down,saying that things are getting worse for everybody, but worse faster for poor kids. And let me just – I’m not – I don’t have time to summarize in detail all thesecharts and graphs, but the basic kinds of evidence that I have that I draw on, and muchof this is drawn on from other people, some of it is our own direct research, but I’mtrying to pull together a wide range of evidence on this growing opportunity gap. It showsup in how much money parents invest in their kids. That is the gap in the amount of developmentparents spend on enrichment for their kids. That’s just a – you know – sort of slightlyjargony (ph) term for summer camp and piano lessons and computers – computer games andtrips to the zoo and trips to France and so on. That kind of spending, among kids coming from well off families in America has skyrocketedand it’s now nearly $7,000 per kid per year. Whereas, on the very same measure, kids comingfrom high school-educated homes have had – high school or less educated homes – have hadno increase in that kind of indicator of summer camp and piano lessons and so on. So they’renow just over $7,000 a year, so there’s a – $700 a year. So there’s a huge gapand there didn’t used to be, in the kinds of benefits that parents are able to provideto their kids. And I’m going to call that the summer camp gap. But there’s an even more important gap in terms of the amount of time parents spendwith their kids, especially the amount of developmental time that parents spend withtheir kids, which I call good night moon time. That is the amount of time parents spend readingto their kids or playing pat-a-cake or taking them to zoo – all that sort of thing. Andit didn’t use to be that there was any class gap in the amount of developmental time parentsspend with their kids. But there’s been a sharp increase – it’s actually – there’sbeen an increase, both among working class and among middle class, upper middle classparents. But the trend is so much – so sharp that now kids – my grandchildren, that iskids coming from college educated homes in America get 45 minutes a day more in goodnight moon time than the equivalent kids coming from high school educated homes. And thatmakes a big difference because as we know now from the most recent brain science, thatkind of interaction – direct, personal interaction with kids has a powerful effect on brain development,and especially very early in their lives. But there’re similar kinds of gaps like this in test scores at school, gaps in extracurricularactivities, the amount of – taking part in, you know, band or chorus or football orother extracurricular activities is quite steady and high among upper middle class kids,kids coming from affluent homes, but dropping sharply among kids who are coming from highschool-educated homes. And that matters. I get teased sometimes for hyperventilatingabout high school football, but the reason that that matters is we know, as a matterof fact, that taking part in those extracurricular activities matters for kids. It inculcatessoft skills – I mean, demonstrably inculcates soft skills, teamwork and hard work and Charlessometimes calls virtues of what my mom calls stick-to-itiveness. And that’s – and weknow that employers will actually pay more for kids who – holding constant all theother things, test scores and so on – employers will pay people who had extracurricular activitiesmore than they pay equivalent people who haven’t. And that’s because of those soft skillswhich have great value. And if we had more time, we’d pause on the actual question, well, why has there beenthis drop in extracurricular participation by poor kids in America? And the short answeris pay to play. We’ve now started charging kids. Didn’t use to be. For most of the20th century, all kids in American high schools, rich and poor, got free – got to play footballor band or chorus or whatever free. And that was thought to be by taxpayers all over Americaa proper investment of their money to provide kids not just with the reading, writing, arithmetic,and chemistry, but also the soft skills. We’ve stopped – about 20 years ago, we began chargingpeople for that. And of course, it had the obvious effect, which is rich kids kept ongoing. On average, it costs nowadays in America per kid, per semester about $400 to take partin any extracurricular activity. So if you’ve got two kids, if they want to take part inboth semesters, that’s $1,600, $1,600 if you have an annual income of $200,000, youknow, it’s not a big deal. But if your annual income is $16,000, who in their right mindis going to pay, you know, 10 percent of their total family annual income for their kidsto take part in athletics or a band? And that means that, as a matter of fact, we’ve now,by privatizing what for most of the 20th century we thought of as a right that every kid oughtto have, by privatizing that we’ve taken it out of the hands of poor kids, not ourown – not kids coming from college-educated homes. There’re similarly gaps like that in involvement in religious communities. That’s a veryimportant example of community involvement. Not – at least – I’m not trying to makean argument that that’s theologically bad for poor kids. It may be, but that’s notmy argument. My argument is that religious communities used to be a rich source of socialsupport for kids outside their immediate families. As kids – working class kids have becomeless involved in church activities, therefore, they’re less likely to encounter, you know,youth group leaders or Sunday school leaders or just other parishioners who’d take aninterest in them. So in – and indeed, I think the most important generalization you can make about the implicationof the trends – implication for kids of these trends that Charles and William have- Charles and Bill Wilson have talked about is that increasingly poor kids in America,unlike our kids, unlike kids coming from affluent homes, poor kids in America are increasinglyisolated, alone. They don’t trust anybody. A young woman we interviewed in Portland,Ohio, who’s suffered from a lot of these symptoms that I’ve talked about, recentlyposted on Facebook, love hurts, trust kills. And if you think for a minute about what itmeans to grow up in a world in which you cannot trust anybody, even your own parents. One way to see the importance of that is to begin with the premise, which I think is true,that all kids do dumb things. All – rich kids, poor kids, black kids, white kids, brownkids, your kids, my kids – all kids do dumb things. Raise your hand if as a child younever did any dumb thing. (Laughter. ) Right, I rest my case on that point. But nowadays,if you’re coming from an affluent home and your child does some dumb thing – they getinvolved in drugs or they make a dumb decision in their romantic life, or they get in a fightwith a teacher, or they back the car into the next door neighbor’s garage, when thathappens, instantly, airbags inflate to protect the kid from the consequences. It doesn’tallow the child to learn from that mistake. And if it were my grandchildren involved,of course I’d inflate the airbag. But you have to imagine that if a poor kid does exactlythe same thing, no airbags. So – and therefore, it can ruin a poor kids’ life, an eventthat otherwise would be a learning experience if it’s coming from a rich kid. So the basic argument of this book is that in those and many other ways, increasinglythese broader trends of economic inequality and economic segregation and the collapseof the working class family, those broader trends bear directly on kids. And therefore,pose the likelihood, the challenge that, as these kids age, we’ll see increasingly agrowing gap in the opportunities kids have for moving up. Increasingly, the most importantdecision a child will make is choosing their parents. And that is fundamentally un-American. Because the idea that every – Americans have not always agreed that everybody oughtto have the same outcome, but Americans have historically agreed – from our very founding,we’ve agreed that everybody ought to get a fair, decent chance to get started. We don’tcare how high, you know, Bill Gates climbs or Warren Buffett climbs because, you know,they’re probably better climbers. They work harder, that’s fine. On the assumption thatall kids are getting on the ladder at the same point, but that’s the issue that’sposed by these trends that I’ve been talking about. Now, what’s to be done? Well, here, I think there’s an interesting contrast that maybeCharles will talk about between – we basically agree on a lot of things. I focus a littlemore on the consequences for kids, but we basically agree on the larger changes thathave happened. But we have somewhat different – Charles and I have somewhat differentviews about why it happened and, most important, about what can be done about it. And I’m going to try to be very brief here and try to give him a big target to shootat. (Laughter. ) Basically, Charles, as he once said publicly in another encounter thatthe two of us were involved in, I’m a libertarian. Libertarians don’t do solutions. (Laughter. )I think I’m quoting your – I think I’m quoting you accurately. CHARLES MURRAY: (Off mic. ) – laugh line all the time. (Laughter. )MR. PUTNAM: Well, I try not to use it in your absence, Charles, but I will use it sinceyou’re here. And to the extent that Charles talks about solutions to this, he believesthat we should say to the upper class that they should start preaching what they practice. That is, the upper class, you know, now have stable marriages. They should start preachingthat to poor folks, and there should be a cultural reawakening. And I’m not saying to be dismissive of. That’s a particularly – that’s a goodinterpretation. I offer much more – in the last chapter of my book – you can comparethe two last chapters, actually. The last chapter of my book offers a set of incrementalistchanges, what I call purple policies, that is some of them are going to look red or conservative,some of them are going to look blue or progressive. I’ve been attacked by both sides for thefact that I have suggestions in there from the other side of the political spectrum. Probably I’ve actually been attacked more by liberals for having put some conservativeobservations in the book. But – and they’re all incrementalist. And I – but behind that difference – I mean, what I’m saying by incrementalist?I mean, I think early child education is a no-brainer. I think that would make a bigdifference to leveling the playing field. I think community colleges could provide animportant on-ramp for kids that haven’t had opportunities because of their parents. I think apprenticeships. I think tutoring. I think – including, I think, a big contributionthat the religious groups in America could make is to be much more interventionist, muchmore active in reaching out to poor kids and providing tutoring and social support, andso on. I think that parenting – coaching programs around the country of coaching parentingthat I think would be really helpful, a practical maybe implementation of Charles’ idea ofpreaching what the upper class practices. But behind that, and this is my really last point, I think Charles and I have a differentinterpretation of American history. And it’s worth surfacing that in this context, I think,so that we can have a – we can see how these two interpretations, two big macro interpretationsof America, which agree on what’s happening now, how we differ a little bit about howwe got here and where we might go from here. Charles, I think, and he’ll be able to speak next, so he’ll say what I’m wrong aboutthis, doesn’t talk much about history except to talk about the importance of certain virtuesin American civic cultures that have been in our national DNA since the founding. AndI sort of agree with it that that’s – that those are virtues that they’ve been in ourcultural DNA, or civic cultural DNA since the founding. But then, basically you don’tget much sense of historical change in Charles book until 1963, when Kennedy’s assassinatedand basically the rule goes to hell in a handbasket, and he then offers some interpretations forwhy that might have triggered this increasing class disparity, partly having to do withpermissiveness, partly having to do with public policy that gave incentives to people notto be virtuous. And he – Charles basically sees the alternatives available to us as either libertarianism orwhat he describes, I think fairly, as European social democracy. Those are the two optionswe have. I actually have a different view. I don’t – I think that the history ofAmerica is not a constant, but the history of America is variable. I think there’vebeen periods in American history when we have been very individualistic. And now is probablythe most dramatic instance of that. But there’ve been periods in America when we’ve beenvery egalitarian and also very communitarian. And so I’m going to close with one PowerPoint. Let’s see if I can get it up there. I’mgoing to show you – and then, I’m not going to make a point about, I just want toshow you a series of charts about social change in the 20th century. So I’m going to begin,of course, with the first place that you would begin, which is with “Bowling Alone,”which is a great book, if you’ve not read it, you ought to get it. (Laughter. ) So here’sthe trends in social capital in America over the 20th century. This book – this graphappears in “Bowling Alone. “And you could see, it begins very low, and this is based on associational membership,begins very low, rises, dips during the Great Depression, then rises, reaches a peak inthe middle ’60s, just about the same time that Charles’s change of America begins,and then declines. That’s that “Bowling Alone” part is the last drop down. Now, I’m going to show you a different graph, completely independent methodologically. Thisis a graph of philanthropy, the degree to which the fraction of our personal incomethat we give away to other people and, well, looks like the same graph almost. We becamemore and more generous toward other people, giving away a larger and larger fraction ofour income to other people, until just about the same time actually, 1963. Sorry. Thank you. Do I need to repeat everything I’ve said? (Laughter. ) The first graph showsthe trends in associational membership as one index of social capital over the 20thcentury, rising for the first two thirds of the 20th century and then falling. The nextgraph, methodologically quite independent comes from IRS tax data, which shows givingas a fraction of total personal income. And that rises until just about the same timeand then begins declining. Now, let me show you a different chart. This is a chart of economic inequality. This comesfrom the famous Piketty work about economic – this is income inequality in America. Huh, looks like the same trend. Rising inequality from the – I mean, sorry, this is incomeequality. The graph is income equality. Income equality rises for the first two thirds ofthe 20th century and then sometime in the middle to late ’70s begins to – equalitybegins to decline and that’s, of course – that graph, historically is anchored intwo gilded ages. The gilded age of the end of the 19th – the last part of the 19thcentury, which then led into the – that’s why we had a very unequal distribution ofincome in 1900 – got more and more equal, and then ended in the current gilded age inwhich we’ve had great income inequality. And of course, Charles talks about this inhis – Charles talks about the second part of that, the increase in inequality, in hisbook. Now, I want to show you – let’s see, what’s the next trend? This is a trend in politicalconsensus. Actually, it comes from a book by a couple of political scientists. Theirmeasure is political polarization. And I’ve done is flipped it upside down. So it’sa measure not of polarization, but a measure of non-polarization, depolarization. And justamazingly it begins with a highly polarized political system, becomes less and less polarized,reaches a peak of depolarization in about 1965, ’70, and then polarization. So ifyou just came into the story, in the ’60s, you’d see the depolarization. But if youlook at the whole 20th century, you see this – now, I hope it’s beginning to be puzzling- this U-shaped of the 20th century, which begins in – begins in a polarized period,ends in a polarized period, but in the middle – just as in the middle we were more communitarian,we were more philanthropic, we were more egalitarian in our distribution of income, we were moredepolarized and consensual in our politics in that period. This next graph is union membership. I put that in here just to discombobulate some AEIfolks. But union membership turns out to have exactly the same pattern. And I actually interpretthat as reflecting that we have a solidarity within the working class, but doesn’t matterwhether you have some other interpretation. Nevertheless, that’s what the graph lookslike, reaches its peak in the early – late ’50s or early ’60s. We can look at another chart here, which is – oops, sorry, I went too quickly – past- is this wealth? And amazingly, now you’re going to be shocked, that the trends in inequalityin wealth show the same pattern rises. Inequality in wealth peaks a little later. And actually,let me just pause for one second here to note that I haven’t yet said what’s causingwhat. And it’s an interesting question. I do not know the answer to what’s causingwhat. Most people, when they first begin to see these patterns, they think it must allbe driven by income inequality or by wealth inequality. But if you’ve looked to thegraphs carefully, you’ll see that actually in all cases, the economic variables are thelast to turn. They turn about 15 to 20 years after the other variables turn. And since, for the most part, causes precede their effects – (laughter) – it’s alittle implausible, if you look at these graphs, to think that it’s all being driven by economicinequality because the trends began to go – all these other variables began to godown before economic inequality. That even raises the possibility, which would be interestingto pause over, if we had more time, could the trends in economic inequality, in somesense, be the consequence of these other trends? And if we had more time, I’d try to convinceyou that’s a possibility. All I want to say is that’s a possibility. I’m tryingto have you not jump too quickly to a causal conclusion. And then, the last chart – the last chart comes from another scholar and I can’t statisticallyput them on the same graph because – well, for reasons you’ll see in a minute, he – he’scomposed it of two different datasets, so they don’t yet quite connect with one another,but they show trends in interclass marriage; that is, these are trends in the degree towhich people are marrying one another across class lines. And you see that interclass marriage was rising for the first two thirds of the 20th century,people were more and more marrying people across class lines – and if my interpretationof intermarriage is right, they were more and more connecting, encountering one anotheracross class lines. And then, just about the same time that people began to – you know,we became less equal and we became less philanthropic, and we became all those other changes, wealso began this trend away from interclass marriage. Now, as in many of these cases, Charles actually reports the second half of that chart, butdoesn’t report the first half of the chart. Now, if you put all those together, it’spretty remarkable. That something’s going on – passes the famous statistical test,the Interocular Trauma Test, it hits you between the eyes that something is going on. Now,I don’t know quite what’s going on. You could – every – actually, every singleline in that graph, there’s somebody who says it’s the cause of everything else. Or there’s something that explains just it. If you look at union membership, for example, you know, you could talk about FDR and thenthe Taft-Hartley Act. So I mean, you could find a micro-cause for each one of these trends. But if you step back, it seems maybe something bigger is going on. I actually know the cause- (laughter) – which I’m about to share with you. I first began to vote in 1964. (Laughter. ) And I am now able to reveal that I personallybrought all of this on to America. (Laughter. ) And I want to just quickly finish. If I canjust take a minute. If you look at these charts, one of the things that occurs to you the moreyou think about it is what caused those trends to move in upward direction for the firsttwo thirds of the 20th century? When, I think if we had data going even further back – I’velooked at this, we don’t really have good data – it was not as bad. It had gotten- you know, it was another cycle back there earlier. What caused that turning point?I told you what caused the turning point in the middle ’60s here, ’63-’64. Whatcaused the other turning point? And the answer was, I think, Americans across the countryrecognized how bad things had gotten. There were a lot of parallels between – a lotof parallels between the society and economy and politics of America at the end of the19th century and today’s society and economics and politics. Great inequality of income,big wave of immigration, very high levels of political corruption, very high levelsof political alienation, and of course degradation of the cities. And then, pretty quickly, inabout 10 to 15 years, from about 1890 to about 1910, Americans across the country began torecognize that we had become two societies. A famous book written at that time was called”How the Other Half Lives. ” And “How the Other Half Lives” was simply a descriptionof poverty in the slums of the Lower East Side intended to be read by folks on the UpperEast Side. Now, some of the people on the Upper East Side said, that’s fine. You know, they’reimmigrants. They’re Jews (at times ?), whatever, I don’t care how they’re living. But someof the people on the Upper East Side reevaluated their view and underwent what Charles talksabout actually as something we need now and I agree with this, it’s a sort of a civicreawakening. But you could see it in that period. The most important result of – there’re many, of course, important results, but themost important result relevant to our time is at that time, for that purpose, Americansall over the country, beginning in small towns in the Midwest and then spreading rapidlyacross the country, invented the high school. Invented the high school. That was the firsttime in world history that anybody in any place of the world had agreed that everybodyin town should pay for all kids to get a free secondary education. It was not an easy sale because the rich folks in town, the rich lawyers and bankers andfarmers and so on, already had paid for their kids to get a private secondary school. Andthey were off making money in Chicago. But the deal was you had to sell those rich folksin town on the idea that they would maybe be better off if they helped pay for otherpeople’s kids to have a secondary education. And that turned out to be the best publicpolicy decision America’s ever made. Because it turned out, the economic historians showthat most of American growth of the 20th century came from that decision that everybody shouldpay for everybody’s kids to go to secondary school. It raised the total level of the productivity of American workforce enormously and accountsfor almost all of the American growth in the 20th century. And it simultaneously leveledthe playing field. And that is what accounts for this, I think, this – the upward turn. And all I’m saying now is – and this is what the last chapter of my book is arguing-we need – I don’t want us to become like Sweden. Charles thinks I want us to becomelike Sweden. I don’t want. I want us just to become like America. We’ve done this before and we could do this again. Thank you very much for your time. (Applause. )MR. MURRAY: Policy analysts who write about America’s new lower class hardly ever knowwhat they’re talking about at first hand. Your average professor or, for that matter,think-tank scholar probably came from the middle class or upper middle class. Before talking about people under the age of Bob and Bill, and they probably came fromthe middle class or upper middle class home. They went through their Ph. D. They know thenumbers on labor force participation and on educational attainment, non-marital births,backwards and forwards, but they’ve never actually lived in a working class community. They’ve never hung out with those people. They haven’t the least idea what life islike there. And the great virtue of Bob’s book – and this is a big deal – is that he uses thisbrilliant device to open each of the six chapters in the book, where he has two extended narratives,drawn from field interviews, one with a middle class or upper middle class family that’sdoing OK, and another from a, what I call the new lower class. It’s really hard todo that well. For one thing, if you have somebody going out to the field to interview and they haveno idea what’s going on, they don’t get really open answers. And furthermore, thereis a real temptation when you write up your field notes – if you have a narrative inmind that explains all of this, there’s a real temptation to self-censor. What Bob has in the book, “Our Kids,” are beautiful evocative narratives about what’sgoing on, several of them that just are completely authentic, as far as I can tell. A lot ofthe credit for that goes, as Bob gives in the book, to Jennifer Silva, who conductedmost of the interviews. She must just be a brilliant interviewer. But Bob is the guywho wrote them up. And he wrote them up in ways which preserve that authenticity. Andif for no other reason you ought to buy and read the book. And if you work professionally in this field, as my colleagues do and as a lot of you inthe room do, you’ve got to read this. This is that overused phrase “required reading. “”Our Kids” is required reading. I’m not going to spend a lot of time saying all the things I agree with Bob about becausethat’s not very helpful, but I just want to say in passing, pay-to-play ought to go,absolutely? No airbags, I think that’s a huge factor distinguishing the lives of kidswith privilege and kids without. No airbags if you are a poor kid. Equality of opportunity,even though you end up with unequal outcomes – could not agree more. And for that matter, even when Bob and I disagree probably on the evaluation literature forsomething like Pre-K. Look, if you have a kid who’s in a punishing environment, andfor a couple of hours a day, you put that child into an environment which is genuinelynurturing and loving, well, that’s good in itself, and so outcomes 20 years down theroad may be interesting, but they aren’t the only justification for that kind of expenditure. So in all of these things, if Bob gets his way in and spends huge amounts of money onthe kinds of programs, the purple programs he describes, some of them I will enthusiasticallysupport and others of them I will say to myself I don’t know how much good they’re doing,but the government has lots of worse ways of spending my money, so, you know. (Laughter. )OK, at this point, I must take on my role, which I’ve been taking on for 30 years nowof being a Grinch. Everything, in my view, that Bob recommends could be implemented fullbore with big budgets, far beyond any reasonable hope and little real change in the long term. The reason I say that is that the opportunity gap is driven by larger forces that his policyprescriptions cannot do much about. And three reasons for that pessimistic statement standout in my own mind. First, the standard interventions for improving the lives of poor kids are aimingat a relatively unimportant target. Children’s personal characteristics, everything fromathletic ability to cognitive ability, personality characteristics are the product of three sources:genes, shared environment, and non-shared environment. The shared environment refers to the kinds of things that Bob talked about during hispresentation, things such as family income, parenting style, the money that’s spenton kids to go to summer camp and so forth, exposure to books. When you talk about thisstatistic – everybody likes to talk about a child from a poor family knows about 5 millionfewer words or whatever by the time they’re at the age of five than a child from a privilegedbackground. OK, that’s part of the shared environment as well, so is religious upbringingand parental investments of other kinds. The non-shared environment includes everything from prenatal events in the womb to injuriesand illnesses that affect one sibling but not another. Peer groups are an importantaspect of the non-shared environment, and another 100 other random events, random interms of affecting one sibling in a family, but not the other. Whatever they may be, theelements of the non-shared environment are largely beyond the reach of public policyby their very nature. The surprising, the even counterintuitive but consistent finding, based on a large literatureof high quality studies is that the shared environment has this remarkably small rolein explaining how children turn out. Let me give you two examples. The numbers are comingfrom a recently published meta-analysis of all such studies from 1958 onward. It’sa landmark study actually because it pulls together so much. It was published in Nature,which is not a right wing rag. You can find it yourself if you google, Nature heritabilityof human traits. It comes up online. Anyway, the two important examples of traits we want to affect through interventions, oneof them is cognitive ability. In that one, the role of the shared environment in explainingthe variance is 17 percent, compared to 54 percent for genes and 29 percent for measurementerror in the non-shared environment. For conduct disorders, which includes many, many studies on – focusing on anti-socialand aggressive behavior, the shared environment accounts for only 15 percent of the variance,genes for 51 percent, and 34 percent for everything else. That’s not the whole story obviously. Genes and environment interact, among other things, but my point survives the complications. The roster of standard interventions to reduce the opportunity gap are almost entirely focusedon factors that fall under the rubric of shared environment. Furthermore, a program that only lasts a few hours a day at most is only going to affecta fraction of a fraction of that aspect that causes the problems. If policymakers werereally serious about getting all the juice they can out of altering the shared environment,they would be advocating adoption at birth and high quality orphanages. They don’t. I know just mentioning the word “orphanages,” that’s as, see, he’s like I always saidhe was. He’s – he wants to bring back the Dickensian orphanages and put all thepoor kids into them. That’s not really what I had in mind. But in any case, the second point is that we – the opportunity gap is accompaniedby a substantial ability gap. The graphs in the book are divided into the children ofparents with at least a college degree and those of parents with no more than a highschool diploma. OK, you’ve got educational attainment correlated with IQ. You’ve gotparental IQ correlated with children’s IQ. And the upshot is that if you use the NationalLongitudinal Survey of Youth, which has one of our best databases for this, you have agap in the mean IQ of children of mothers with at least a college degree and those motherswith only a high school diploma of 16 points. That’s a little more than a standard deviation. It’s a big difference. And remember that the role of the environment in creating that16 points is really quite small. Remember that’s 17 percent of the variance that’saccounted for by the shared environment. Again, my underlying point is simple. IQ has a substantial direct correlation with measuresof success in life, including other qualities that lead to success, such as grit or perseveranceand other kinds of things that go under the label emotional intelligence. A lot of thedifferences in outcomes we’re seeing between the upper class and the lower class are theproduct of those kinds of differences and inability. And third, the gap in human capital in working class and upper middle class communities hasbeen widening over time. Bob talked about assortative mating and showed data for it. It’s really stunning. I’ve just had my 50th reunion at Harvard, and so we’ve gotthe Big Harvard Book, where we all write our life histories and so forth. And I’ve beengoing through it. And the degree to which gilt-edged guys have been marrying gilt-edgedgirls in terms of their educational backgrounds and the rest of it is incredible. It’s pretty widely accepted that after the civil rights revolution African-American communitiestook a big hit in their human capital, when the most successful blacks could move out. I think an argument can be made that the same thing is happening in white communities today. Well, Bob has already referred to my takeaway from all this with the ways in which we reallyneed a civic great awakening. However, I got to say that the fact is civic great awakeningshave about as much chance of transforming what’s going on as a full implementationof Bob’s purple program does. The parsimonious way to extrapolate to the trends that Bobdescribed so beautifully in the book is to predict an America permanently segregatedinto social classes that no longer share the common bonds that once made this country soexceptional and the destruction of the national civic culture that Bob and I both cherish. I hope for a better outcome. I do not expect it. Thank you. (Applause. )WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: As Bob Putnam pointed out, in 1978 I published a controversial bookentitled “The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions,”in which I argued that economic class has become more important than race in determiningthe life trajectories of individual African-Americans. My thesis is consistent with one of Bob Putnam’s central arguments; namely, although racialbarriers to success remain powerful, they represent less burdensome impediments thanthey did in the 1950s. By contrast, class barriers in America loom much larger thanthey did back then. And this is revealed not only in growing income inequality among allracial and ethnic groups, but also increasing disparities and many other aspects of wellbeing,accumulated wealth, class segregation across neighborhoods, quality of primary and secondaryeducation, enrollment in highly selective colleges, and even life expectancy. And as I reflect on the powerful arguments in Putnam’s book, I conclude that one ofthe major underlying themes of the declining significance of race, the other theme thateconomic – that racial conflict has shifted from the economic sector to the social-politicalorder I’m not dealing with today. But the changing relative significance of race andclass on one’s life trajectory, that’s consistent with Putnam’s article becauseit has been extended to all U. S. racial and ethnic groups and our kids, with the emphasis,of course, on the trajectories of today’s children. The title “The Declining Significance of Race” lends itself to misinterpretationamong those who have either not read the book or have not read it carefully. For such readers,as I pointed out in the book’s third edition, in 2012, published by the University of ChicagoPress, the title conveys an optimistic view of American race relations and doesn’t reflectthe book’s pessimistic tone about the conditions and future of poor blacks. In many respects, the conditions of poor African-Americans are worse now than when the first editionof “The Declining Significance of Race” was published, almost four decades ago. Andthe gap between the haves and have-nots in the African-American community has widenedsignificant. Now, Bob Putnam captures this growing intraracial divide in our kids, particularly in chapterthree on parenting, when he discusses the growing class and income differences amongAfrican-Americans in Atlanta, Georgia. And I would like to reinforce his arguments byshowing that the divide is even greater – that the divide in the African-American communityis even greater than he discussed. Let me draw upon U. S. Census data using the Gini ratio, which measures the extent to whichthe actual income distribution of a particular group deviates from a hypothetical distributionin which each household of the group receives an equal proportion of the total group income. The measure ranges from zero, perfect equality, to one, maximum inequality. Now I don’t know how many of you can see this figure, but as revealed in figure one,income inequality across the American population as a whole rose from a low of 0. 39 in 1970to 0. 48 in 2013. This is certainly consistent with Putnam’s argument. Even more significant,however, is a high level of intragroup inequality among black households. Although the absolutelevel of black income is well below that of whites, blacks, nonetheless, display the mostintragroup income inequality, reaching a household Gini index of 0. 49 in 2013, followed by white’s0. 47 and Hispanics 0. 45. Blacks in the green bars, whites in the red bar – red line,Hispanics in the blue – is that purple? Yeah, a purple line. OK. Now, research reveals that income inequality is related to income segregation. Figure twopresents data on income segregation by race in metropolitan areas with populations ofmore than 500,000. And the source for this figure is a study by Kendra Bischoff and SeanReardon. Oh, I’m sorry. Now go forward? Nope. There we go. I’ll keep my hands off this. (Laughter. )So as I said, research reveals that income inequality is related to income segregation. This figure presents data on income segregation by race in metropolitan areas with populationsof more than 500,000. And as I said, the source for this figure is a study by Kendra Bischoffand Sean Reardon. Now, this figure reveals that income segregation has grown rapidlyin the last decade, and particularly among black and Hispanic families. And what is notable is that whereas African-Americans in 1970 recorded the least income segregation,they now registered the highest income segregation. Now, please note that we are talking about- we are talking here about residential segregation among black families of differentincome levels, not segregation between black and white families. And another way of talkingabout these trend lines is that they describe the extent to which the exposure of familiesto neighbors of the same race has changed over time. Although income segregation among black families grew considerably in the 1970s and 1980s,it grew even more rapidly from 2000 to 2009, after slightly declining in the 1990s. Andwhen considering a person’s life trajectory or life chances, the differences in the qualityof one’s daily life between residing in a predominantly affluent neighborhood anda poor black neighborhood are huge. And it is important to note that today poor black families have fewer middle class neighborsthan they had in 1970, when I – even before I began writing “The Declining Significanceof Race. “When income segregation is coupled with racial segregation, low-income blacks cluster neighborhoodsthat feature disadvantages along several dimensions, including joblessness, educational attainment,and family structure. Now, to select only one important indicator, in 1978, poor blacksage 12 and over were only marginally more likely than affluent blacks to be violentcrime victims, roughly 45 and 38 per 1,000 individuals respectively, in 1978. However,by 2008, poor blacks were far more likely to be violent crime victims, about 75 per1,000 as compared with 23 per 1,000 for affluent blacks. So despite the continuing intraracial disparities, the socioeconomic gap between better off blacks,including the college educated and poor blacks is wide and growing. However, in order tokeep things in proper perspective, it is important not to overlook the continuing interracialdisparities. For example, even though there has been greater income segregation amongblack families, middle class black families tend to live in areas with a much higher percentageof low income families than do comparable white families. Racial differences in wealth helped to explain some of these patterns. Because white familieshave greater average wealth than black families, they are more likely to afford housing inhigher income neighborhoods. Researchers at the Pew Research Center recently releaseddata showing that the median financial wealth of white households in 2013 exceeded thatof black households by almost $131,000. So despite the sharp increases in income inequality and income segregation among blacks, the interracialdisparities between blacks and whites remain huge and must always be kept in mind whendiscussing and highlighting growing intraracial differences. And Bob, if I have one quibblewith your book, I don’t think you devote sufficient attention to the continuing interracialdisparities. But this is the only criticism I have of this remarkable book. And let me just conclude by saying that I think that Bob Putnam’s thoughtful policyrecommendations, he calls them incremental policy interventions, are really designedto achieve what the social philosopher James Fishkin – F-I-S-H-K-I-N, Fishkin calls equalityof life chances. According to this principle, if we can predict with a high degree of accuracywhere individuals will end up in the competition for preferred positions in society, merelyby knowing their family background, race or gender, then the conditions that affect ordetermine their motivations and talents are grossly unequal. Supporters of this principle believe that a person should not be able to enter a hospitalward of healthy newborn babies and accurately predict their eventual social and economicposition in society solely on the basis of their race and/or economic class origins. Unfortunately, in many urban neighborhoods in the United States, you can accurately makesuch predictions. Supporters of the principle of equality of life chances feel that it is unfair that someindividuals in our society receive every conceivable advantage, while others, from the day theyare born, never really have a chance to develop their talents. This depressing picture isvividly portrayed in Putnam’s excellent book. Thank you. (Applause. )MR. DOAR: OK, so those were excellent presentations, as we expected, and thank you very much. I’vegot a couple of questions, and then we will open it up to some questions from the audience. And of course, I invite panelists to comment anything they’ve heard before. My first question comes a little bit from my background as a social services practitionerin large federal programs that intervene or try to help in families lives all across America. And one of the things that struck me about your book, Dr. Putnam, was the extent to whichthose large programs – SNAP, cash welfare, Medicaid – are very little mentioned, eitherin the wonderful depictions of the families or in your – until the very end, where yousay, protect the social safety net. And I wondered whether the three panels would talk a little bit about the extent to whichthe – and, by the way, a lot of that happened right at the turn of your U-shaped color – theextent to which that had an effect on civic society and on what was going on in communitiesand among families. MR. PUTNAM: Yes. Actually, what I’m puzzling about here is how to reconcile your questionabout the impact of public policies with your colleague’s question about the impact ofpublic policies because Charles basically said this is all determined by things otherthan policies. So I don’t see how you both could be right. MR. DOAR: Well, that’s the thing about AEI -MR. PUTNAM: I want to suggest the two of you talk. If these outcomes are being driven bythings that are impervious to policy, which is what Charles argued, then it can’t – thetrends can’t have been caused by public policies. And my own view is that things like SNAP and Medicaid, for example, have prevented theproblem from getting worse. And I think there’s pretty good actually evidence about that,at least in the case of food stamps, SNAP, that, actually, kids of equal circumstances,whose families have gotten SNAP have actually done better in terms of upward mobility thankids of the same circumstances, whose parents didn’t get SNAP. We may disagree about thedetails of any particular evaluation, but that’s the way – I really intimate that’smy view. I think the problems of poor kids in America would have been much worse if their parentshadn’t benefited from SNAP from – well, I don’t say all transfer programs but atleast from the ones – the ones – that one and probably also Medicaid. I can’timagine that these kids would have been better off if their parents had not had access tomedical care. MR. MURRAY: This gives me a good chance to clarify something that could have been confusingfrom the presentation. When you have a situation where, for example, non-marital births, to take one big statistic,goes from a few percent of children to 40 percent of children over the course of 50years, you’ve clearly had something causing that, and you’ve had policy changes thatmay or may not have been implicated if they certainly could have been. When I’m talking about how children, individual children turn out, I’m talking about suchthings as success in school, the likelihood that they’re going to get arrested, andthose kinds of things. And those are the ones where, when you have targeted interventionsto try to change the lives of children, they’re going after elements in the shared environmentwhich do not seem to be determinative of these kinds of outcomes, except for a small proportionof the variance. So you have some big causes out there. And what I’m really saying, I guess to simplify it a lot, is it’s not whether they hearfive million words more or fewer than other kids. There are large macro-causes that areshaping the culture, shaping the zeitgeist. And those are the things I think we need to think more seriously about and also to recognize- let me just say it this way, OK? I am saying nothing more controversial about therole of the shared environment in shaping outcomes than every parent of more than onechild in this room knows. Every parent of more than one child in this room had majordifferences of one kind or another in their kids. And if any of you were under the impressionthat you could have done anything to have made their personalities or cognitive abilitiesor behaviors more like each other, you are part of a very small number of experiencedparents. And that’s all I’m saying about determining how children turn out. These things goingto the shared environment, aren’t nearly as important as most people think. MR. DOAR: I want to see if – did you want to comment or not?MR. WILSON: Right. I just want to say that, you know, the kinds of income inequality thatwe’re talking about is not unique to the United States. It’s occurring in other Westerndemocracies, maybe not as extreme as in the United States. But we should not lose sightof the fact that all of these societies are experiencing changes in the economy that nowplace a premium on college education, advances in technology, the off-shoring of manufacturingjobs of places overseas. We have to build these arguments in when we’re looking atthe overall picture. MR. DOAR: Did you want to say something?MR. PUTNAM: Well, at some point, I want to respond directly to Charles’ argument thatpolicy can’t really affect the things we care about. I don’t have to do it now, butI want to respond to that. MR. DOAR: You can do it now. (Laughter. )MR. PUTNAM: It’s important to keep in mind what we’re trying to explain. We all agree,or I think we all agree that, increasingly, poor kids are at a disadvantage relative torich kids. “Increasingly” is the important word, not just that poor kids have an advantage- I mean, rich kids have an advantage but that advantage is growing. And it’s thegrowth that we need to focus on. And that’s not the same – and the book, that book, which is a great book, is aboutchange. It’s not about how one individual could do compared to another individual. It’sabout how the – the overall structure is changing. And the question is whether thesorts of factors, especially the genetic factors that Charles now wants to emphasize, couldconceivably account for the change. Now, what Charles wants to argue is because of increasing homophily, that is rich folksmarrying other rich folks and poor folks marrying other poor folks – he doesn’t quite sayit, but what he wants to say is, what do you expect? You’ve got these rich folks marryingone another, they’re smarter, and their kids are going to be smarter. But the question is, as a matter of genetics, could the big changes that are described here,have possibly been produced by genetic factors over two generations? And the answer is theycouldn’t conceivably – something other than the genetic endowment of these kids musthave accounted for the change. And even I don’t doubt for a moment -MR. MURRAY: We agree on that. We completely agree on that. MR. PUTNAM: Well, but then, you can’t argue that policy is irrelevant to the questionof – policy is irrelevant to the question of whether a smart kid is going to, you know,do better than a dumb kid, but here’s the important fact. It didn’t use to be thecase in America but it is now the case in America that rich dumb kids are more likelyto graduate from college than smart poor kids. And that – hey, that didn’t always usedto be the case, and it controls – that statement controls for these genetic things. And allI’m saying is that idea that rich, smart kids have a better chance in life than poordumb kids isn’t fair. MR. DOAR: Thank you. I’m glad there was agreement. One question, Dr. Wilson, I wanted to follow up with you on and just to see if there’sany hope in the revitalization of some of America’s larger cities in terms of middleclass and more affluent and more educated people moving back into the city. Have you- do you see any sign that that can lead to greater social interaction and greaterinvolvement and better outcomes for the poor kids that had been left behind?MR. WILSON: You’re really talking about gentrification. I think of gentrification,I think of the city of Washington, D. C. , which is undergoing significant gentrification. I was on leave this semester from Harvard at the Library of Congress and I got a chanceto talk with a number of the block workers who work at the Library of Congress. And theysaid they can’t afford to live in their neighborhoods anymore. They said they’removing out to some of the poorer suburban areas. Gentrification has certainly had a major effect on neighborhoods in that it significantlyimproves resources in a neighborhood, you know, improvements in – you have first classsupermarkets showing up in these areas, improvements in public schools, and so on. The problem, however, is that gentrification results in sometimes a significant increasein rents, significant increase in housing appreciation, and, unless you own a home tobegin with, it’s very, very difficult to remain in these communities. Local taxes increasesharply, so much so that many local residents can no longer afford to live there. You know, it would be great if we could have gentrification that maintained the kind ofintegration that we would love to see in neighborhoods, that is economic integration, not to speakof racial integration. But unless there is some program to help these families stay there,gentrification results in significant social dislocation. MR. DOAR: No comments. OK. We have a question. Yes. Tim. Wait for the mic. Q: Thank you very much. I found all of this incredibly edifying but when – Mr. Putnam,when you were talking about the invention of the high school being this great advance,I wonder if, in the long run, public schools create the – exacerbate the coming apart. My kids’ parish school, Catholic school is much more racially diverse than the averagepublic school in Montgomery County because we don’t have to be able to afford the propertytaxes, the property values that exist in Bethesda-Chevy Chase or the really good public schools. At the public schools, whether it’s local property taxes or just the costs of the homein the better schools create this class segregation that doesn’t exist maybe so much in, youknow, a church-run school or something like that, where anybody can come in and there’ssignificant financial aid for the lower income. MR. PUTNAM: Well, to begin with, you’ll maybe be pleased to know that in “Our Kids,”I actually talk about the role that Catholic schools have played in narrowing the opportunitygap. So I’m on the same side of that with you. But I do want to address the larger pointthat you raised which is our public schools making the problem worse. And I want to be clear because I think I may provoke some people in the room. I think thatthis is not a problem that – the opportunity gap, I’m talking about in general – isnot a problem that schools created. I think schools are a site where this happens but, in general, public schools in America- I’m not now making any negative remark about Catholic schools, but public schoolsin America marginally narrow the opportunity gap. You can see this in many ways. The gapis actually fully present before kids even get to school. That suggests it’s not beingexacerbated by schools. It’s schools are – and the other evidence you probably knowis the gap widens when kids are out of school in the summer and narrows when kids are inschool in the winter. So schools – I’m trying to summarize my basic position clearly so that people canrespond to it. I think schools did not cause this problem at all. What caused the – the relevance of schools – I mean, the way in which schools serveas echo chambers for factors outside the schools is a different sort. Because of increasingsegregation, economic segregation that we’ve talked about, increasingly rich kids are goingto school with other rich kids, and poor kids are increasingly going to school with otherpoor kids. And, as we’ve known for a long time, the most important thing about schoolquality is who else is going there. So, increasingly, rich kids are able to benefit from the fact that other kids in their classare bringing in their backpack – when they come to school, they’re bringing their parents’resources, their parents’ aspirations, their parents’ civic culture. And that helps allthe kids in school. And poor kids, when they go to school, are increasingly going to schoolin which other kids are bringing in their backpack, family disruption, and depression,and gang violence, and so on. And, therefore, schools are not the origin of that problem. The origin of the problem are these outside factors that we’ve been talking about. Butschools could maybe do more to narrow the gap. I’m not saying that schools can’tdo more to narrow the gap and there’s some suggestions about that in the book. But I am not – I think it’s important to keep distinct two issues, is this anotherproblem that the schools are causing? And I think the answer to that is pretty clearlyno. This is not a problem caused by school but it is a problem that schools could helpfix, in part by following some of the same strategies that Catholic schools have usedeffectively to help poor kids. MR. MURRAY: Just one real quick addition to that is I think you have a big differencein the roles that the schools play in smaller communities and in big cities. In a community with only one high school but that has different socio-economic classes,the schools are a great source of getting kids to know everybody and – well, bothBob and I grew up in such towns. But that’s still true in small towns and small citiestoday. As soon as you get into a large city, the segregation that we’ve all talked aboutis so extreme that the schools act as a bubble, particularly for the elites, that is I thinkvery destructive. MR. DOAR: The guy in red. Q: I’m Harry Holzer from Georgetown and Brookings. I guess my question or questionsare for Charles Murray. Having not looked at the paper in Nature that you’re talking about, but it sounds likethe dependent variable there