Robert D. Putnam

Generally speaking, lower-tier grandparents mostly donate time, replacing parental resources, whereas upper-tier grandparents mostly donate money, supplementing parental resources

Neighborhoods are important sites of growing class segregation.

investment in poor kids raises the rate of growth for everyone, at the same time leveling the playing field in favor of poor kids.

inequality of opportunity slows growth by keeping disadvantaged potential workers from developing their full capacity.

Without succumbing to political nightmares, we might ponder whether the bleak, socially estranged future facing poor kids in America today could have unanticipated political consequences tomorrow. So quite apart from the danger that the opportunity gap poses to American prosperity, it also undermines our democracy and perhaps even our political stability.

In the quarter century between 1979 and 2005, average after-tax income (adjusted for inflation) grew by $900 a year for the bottom fifth of American households, by $8,700 a year for the middle fifth, and by $745,000 a year for the top 1 percent of households.

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.

Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen.

{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.

Parents with less than a high school education endorse obedience over self-reliance, 65 percent to 18 percent, whereas parents with a graduate education make exactly the opposite choice, 70 percent to 19 percent.

"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."

As inequality has increased,” she writes, “debate about the extent of mobility in American society has heightened. As income gaps have widened, the opportunity that children have to do better than their parents is increasingly important. . . . Whether they do so at a faster or slower rate than they did in the past is not a settled question. But since the rungs of the ladder are further apart than they used to be, the effects of family background on one’s ultimate economic success are larger and may persist for a longer period of time.”2

often within a single school, AP and other advanced courses tend to separate privileged from less privileged kids. Later on, kids from different class backgrounds are increasingly sorted into different colleges: for example, by 2004, kids from the top quarter of families in education and income were 17 times more likely to attend a highly selective college than kids in the bottom quarter.

The decline in religious participation, like many of the changes in political and community involvement, is attributable largely to generational differences.

The sociologist Michael Hout reports that “the affluent were about as happy in 2012 as they were in the 1970s, but the poor were much less happy. Consequently, the gross income gap [in happiness] was about 30 percent bigger in 2012 than it was in the 1970s.”37