Robert Putnam on the gap between rich kids and poor kids | Hacker News Reader

Robert Putnam on the gap between rich kids and poor kids

chronicle.com

56 pointsjeffreyrogers58 comments

The last few decades in the US have seen a shift from 1 parent working sufficing to support a family to 2 parents working beening needed for middle class living, and longer hours than before. And more kids have only 1 parent in the household. There simply isn't time for participating in the community-building activities that filled the gaps before. So we are more isolated, and people's lies are in a more fragile balance.

I know lots of my friends have families where single income would sustain them but both husband and wife go to work.

We have stigmatized staying at home and raising children as a society.

I'd say is a net positive for society that women nowadays are more financially independent compared to the 1960s-1970s. Consider it this way, you're a stay-at-home mom who has decided to focus on her kids in her later 20s, and then you're 40 and divorce happens.

In the happy case your ex-husband and father to your kids still pays for their education and food and relared stuff, but what about you and your own financial needs? Now that you've been out of the work-force for 10+ years you're basically unemployable.

> then you're 40 and divorce happens

Magic happens here?

> what about you and your own financial needs?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alimony

Regardless, there is a sneaky equivocation of women in the workplace & two-income households. Obviously women, as fellow humans, do and should have the choice to work outside the home if they want. But IMO one parent should stay home. Is it any surprise that it takes the salary of two people to buy an average house? Things just get more expensive to take advantage of the increased income, and the net result is we spend more time working. Not a net positive.

I would think that the best solution is both parents work 20-25 hours per week. Less money spent on child care, more time spent with children, spreads the burden of both work and raising children across both parents, and quite frankly would make life more interesting. I'd definitely prefer working less and spending more time with my kids if I had them.

Well, in those days you couldn't be divorced that easily, so it was more viable to be a stay-at-home mum.

California was the first U.S. state to adopt what are now called 'no-fault' divorces in the United States in 1969.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-fault_divorce

???

Those are net positives for divorcing males and females. Which is what it should be. Why should "society" be benefiting???

I think the real issue here... is that we want "society" to benefit from interpersonal relationships. A benefit to "society" is fine if it happens, and sometimes it might happen, but mostly it won't. And that's OK... I don't believe benefiting "society" should be the goal of interpersonal relationships.

I agree. If you have more than one child, one parent's salary will go directly and entirely to pay for child care. It's also likely that one parent will need to work fewer hours and be available to drop off / pick up / emergency pick up the kids at day care -- which means at least one parent will need to be partially not working or at least not advancing in his/her career.

However, raising kids is very difficult and emotionally draining. Personally, I feel parental involvement is much more important than whatever might have been called a middle class lifestyle.

Who is this "we" ? People without kids?

Society, in general.

This is perhaps one of my favorite Bittman quotes. I can't remember it verbatim, but it was essentially lamenting how we have devalued working in your own home. In his case, he was referring to cooking, but I feel the overall point is rather relevant.

"We" is not a who, but rather a "what" - namely, a useful indication of poor thinking.

> The last few decades in the US have seen a shift from 1 parent working sufficing to support a family to 2 parents working beening needed for middle class living

The last few decades have seen an increased marketization of labor such that it is more likely that two parents will need to do wage labor to support a middle class lifestyle, where previously a middle class lifestyle involved one parent working at wage labor and one parent doing labor outside of the market.

Hours worked per worker is slightly down from 1950: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/qr/qr2812.pdf (Table 1). Inflation-adjusted single earner income is flat since 1950: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/pdf/cah_slides.pdf, while HHI for two-income households is up over 15%. In summary, people have made the choice to have more money instead of having one parent stay home.

And who can blame them? I love being a parent, but child care is messy, often gross, and physically exhausting. It's blue collar work. Across the economy, people eschew physically-demanding blue collar work for service jobs, even when the former pays more. So it's totally unsurprising that, given the choice, women (or men for that matter) would rather go work, even if most of the money goes to child care, instead of staying home with kids. You don't need to create a false rationalization about the economy forcing both parents to work to explain the labor trends.

> In summary, people have made the choice to have more money instead of having one parent stay home.

Not really, disposable income has gone down, savings have gone down, while health insurance and mortgage payments (for roughly equivalent housing) have gone up.

It looks like having two earners is more out of necessity than preference for the middle class.

Median house size has increase DRAMATICALLY over the past 50 years.

https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf

I was citing mortgage costs for equivalent sized housing.

Is that actually up on an inflation adjusted basis?

Yes

FWIW some casual web searching says that's not true. shrug

https://youtu.be/akVL7QY0S8A?t=20m28s

She doesn't say that it's for equivalent sized housing. As I said square footage per person has increased DRAMATICALLY over the past 50 years.

She uses # rooms as equivalent, not sq-foot.

Maybe sq-footage has increased, but your data is about new housing across all economic classes and we are interested in median middle class housing. Besides the problem of data skew (richer people live in bigger houses), Warren claims that most of the middle class live in old homes, not new ones. She specifically says that new homes are being built for upper middle class and above.

The chart I linked to way above was for median housing.

It was median new housing developments. Not the housing of a median family, nor the housing of a median middle class family.

Again, Warren's claim is that median middle class families live in old homes. And even if they didn't median middle class homes are potentially smaller than median homes.

But before that the majority of human history has either both parents or both parents and the children (as they are able) helping out to sustain the family. We need to be sure to survey a long-enough time-line to understand the actual norms and what may have been a relatively small period of recent fortune.

> But before that the majority of human history has either both parents or both parents and the children (as they are able) helping out to sustain the family.

For most of that history, much of that "helping out to sustain the family" did not mean "working in wage labor".

In two parent homes of, say, the 1950s with one parent working outside the home, the other one was also engaged in work to "sustain the family", it just wasn't work for an outside capitalist that sustained the family through a paycheck.

Indeed, I'm saying the period of the 1950s up until recently was an _anomaly_ that allowed one parent to work for wages while the other stayed at home to manage the home while the children had relatively little responsibility compared to thousands of years previous.

Yet some people here think it would be feasible to skip completely over one working parent all the way to no working parent, via guaranteed income. I personally think it's not, but I can see how it's appealing since it sidesteps the fear that a single worker household would cause a reversal of women's liberation, without appearing to be in favor of equality of suffering under wage work.

Average annual hours actually worked per worker has decreased over the past few decades, not increased [0,1]. Household size is decreasing as well [2], lowering the percent of households with multiple workers.

[0] http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

[1] http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

[2] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0884238.html

This is capitalism failing humanity.

I suspect that all the programs meant to help people are actually a part of the problem. Not directly, because helping people doesn't really hurt (except maybe in a "don't feed the wild animals" sort of way, but most consider that negligible). But more in a "somebody else's problem" or a "bystander effect" sort of way.

In other words, the existence of programs to help people in need -- and worse, large federally funded and administrated programs -- make people feel as though it's not their problem and also that they're already doing something to help: paying their taxes and not voting against these programs. I say large federally funded programs are worse only because that makes the responsibility far more diffuse and the ability to influence ever more limited.

So the programs to help aren't directly bad, but the knock-on psychological effect is that they absolve people of any personal need to help (since they're already helping in a very vague and miniscule way) and that leads them to not take any (additional) direct action.

It feels like the inverse case of the tragedy of the commons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

You are making the assumption that without these programs people would actually do something themselves to solve other's problems.

In my opinion most people would just try to rationalize it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

Government funded programs might be inefficient and open to abuses, but are better than the real alternative that would be doing nothing at all.

So I'm not railing against government programs because they're "bad" and in fact I'm not necessarily even opposed to them. I'm trying to explain a set of psychological effects that I suspect influence the way our society approaches these kinds of problems.

But we've had thousands of years of testing of your hypothesis, and no, individuals do not step up in any great number to solve massive societal problems of poverty.

Which is why we invented governmental action to solve them. Which has proved extremely effective.

We also had thousands of years where basically everyone was poor and there wasn't anywhere near enough production so that there was a hope or a prayer of not everyone being poor. The middle class is a relatively recent phenomena. A great example of this is "The $3500 shirt" article that made it to HN a while ago: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-l...

> Which is why we invented governmental action to solve them. Which has proved extremely effective.

I was under the impression that the whole point of the article -- and also the book -- was that the programs in place currently are not effective. If they were, there would be no "Mary Sue"s, there'd be only "Miriam"s and there would be no problem.

Do you believe that our population would effectively self-educate without gov't funded education?

Does anyone have good sources of information on historical levels of "learnedness" in the United States? And it might be interesting to compare that measure to the number of years of formal education.

http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/01/were-colonial-americans-m...

As to the specific question of self-education, for some reason I'm inclined to believe that post-civil war literacy among the former slaves skyrocketed, and this wasn't because of compulsory education. Maybe someone has an interesting source to confirm or falsify my vague recollections? Sounds like that would make a good book.

Do you believe our population is effectively educated with government funded education?

No, I don't. However, I believe this is a problem associated with how we approach education as a task rather than how we fund it.

If it were merely an example of "gov't funded education" causes poor education then we would likely see significant gains when private education models are used to replace public schools. Currently, gains with private/charter schools are flat compared to public schools.

I do, however, believe that in absence of a publicly funded education system a large segment of our population would simply be locked out of educational opportunities. How is a family that already struggles for basic necessities going to find an extra ~6-10k a year to pay for private school fees?

> How is a family that already struggles for basic necessities going to find an extra ~6-10k a year to pay for private school fees?

You do realize that those people already do pay for their children's education right? It's just indirect through property taxes.

Yes people who don't have kids in school also contribute but it's not as though there are 10x as many people without kids as with kids, it might be 50/50 kids/no kids meaning that the best you can get is a 50% "discount" over directly funding instead of funding via taxes.

Setting aside that progressive taxation probably means that the population I was discussing isn't significantly funding their children's education (and would likewise not be able to cover the actual cost of education if they were called on that burden) -- I was responding to mrwarn's comment asking if gov't funded education is working, to which I responded that public schooling is not working, but that the problem is not dependent on the source of funding.

When we turn public schools into private schools (as Chicago has done by the dozens in the last few years) we don't see educational improvements when the students population remains the same. When we do, it's modest or an outlier (and education is filled with outliers).

Education is almost 100% funded by property taxes and sales taxes. Property taxes are a tax on the value of the property, not on your income or your equity in the property, but based on the "fair market value" of the property. Sales tax is based on the value of the transaction.

Everyone lives somewhere, and somewhere basically always has a value attached to it. Maybe run down apartments aren't worth as much as fancy new ones, but property tax still has to be paid.

Even if you rent, you still pay property taxes. The owner of the apartment considers property taxes as a part of his/her expenses the same way a mortgage, insurance, maintenance, etc are expenses. Those expenses get rolled into the rent.

Sales taxes are largely regressive, because any money saved is by default not going to get any sales tax applied. And poor people spend a larger portion of their income on things which are taxed than wealthier people do; look at the whole "buying experiences" advice that well-to-do participate in. Those are generally arranged as "services" which aren't taxable, rather than products, which are.

Progressive taxes are generally based on income, not property value or transaction value. As a result, funding for education is currently borne fairly evenly amongst people who both have an address and buy things, no matter their income level.

A strong, common culture is the only historically verified way to escape the prisoners dilemma of social interactions. We've done a pretty good job of destroying that for the last fifty years in the west.

"We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Yet violence has dropped impressively in the west in the last 50 years, both in crime statistics and in the absence of wars between major powers. And the last 50 years mark many incredible advancements in society: civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, the first attempts to take sexual violence seriously, etc. etc. etc. I'd much rather be a random American today than 50 years ago.

Agreed.

I cringe when people say how things are going for the worse constantly.

Sometimes it's because things are objectively worse. Cringing doesn't change the facts.

The original claim that we're less violent is easy to debunk, and has been debunked by many people. See e.g.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/john-gray-steven-...

But more than that, it's clear that economics and politics have become prime vectors for social violence in the 'developed' West: particularly economics, which has been used as an ideological excuse to destroy the possible future prospects and current living conditions of entire generations now.

Unemployment in - say - Spain for the under-25s is more than 50%. The rate in the US is around 12%, but that disguises the fact that many 'jobs' barely pay a living wage now, where fifty years ago even starter jobs offered comfortable salaries.

The destruction has been justified by a steady stream of clearly wrong 'economic theories' that don't stand up to even the most basic undergraduate-level scrutiny. See e.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt

So yes - things are objectively worse for many people.

The fact that some people are doing okay and a tiny minority are doing really well doesn't change that.

Getting this stuff wrong has very real long-term social and political consequences. It's irrational to ignore that.

Thanks for making my point. I live in Spain.

Fifty years ago there was a dictatorship here, people weren't even able to speak their minds freely, without fear for their personal safety.

Castillan language and identity were forced upon Catalans, Galicians an Basques, that hold grudges for that even now.

No longer than ten years ago there were still regular terrorist attacks by ETA, with dozens of innocent victims.

Saying that things are worse now, regardless of the employment rate, it's just idiotic, sorry if I'm being blunt.

In general, the EU, which is seen by some (especially far right and far left parties) as the cause of all evil, has given Europe 70 years of peace, in a continent that has been at war for all of its history.

I'll gladly weather the occasional economic crisis for the privilege.

That's hardly a debunking of the thesis that violence has decreased. It cites no data, but simply declares in vague terms that some parts of the world are still violent and the sum of those parts is non-negligible, which is completely unrelated to the claim that violence has decreased.

The notion that fifty years ago "even starter jobs offered comfortable salaries" will come as a shock to people who lived then, barely getting by on piecework or similar marginal occupations. There were certainly classes of jobs where entry-level positions paid "comfortable salaries" but those jobs weren't much use to you if you were non-white, female, gay, or even from the wrong nominally-white ethnic group.

Things aren't as good as they could be, but they are still a lot better than they were by many, many measures. They are worse by a few measures, and we should be concerned about that, but in general the trend is in the right direction.

> even starter jobs offered comfortable salaries.

Source?

one good metric: minimum wage used to be 40% higher http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-minimum-wage-falls-e...

That drop may have more to do with removing lead from gasoline than any social changes.

Biological factors are staggeringly huge.

Violence and civil rights in the U.S. are also much better than they were 150 years ago, well before we used gasoline widely at all.

So is nutrition, preventative medicine, and FDA enforcement of various public health ordinances.

The fallacy here is that you are acting as though these things are all fungible.

Would you rather be a random American today who is unable to form satisfying emotional relationships because of the lack emotionally available parents during development or would you rather be a random American 50 years ago who has warm loving connections?

That's what's being compared here.

Why should we have to trade one for another? This should make us recognize that there is a problem. Otherwise the apparent celebration of progress is actually just a defeatist 'be grateful for what you have'.

Well children were also being beaten and abused 50 years and previous to that. Let's not act like everything was homogenous in one regard or another in different time periods.

Nobody is doing so except for the people who state "things are better now" based on their own set of metrics.

The key to well functioning kids is involved parents.

The key to involved parents is less time spent working.

Americans need to get over their fetish for hard work and start staying home more. Or just stop having kids altogether and use work as the primary source of joy.

That sounds great from where you may sit but what about those families where the parents have to work long hours just to provide?

I know there are some that are definitely not in a financial position where they can do that. Working less is just not an option when you are barely making ends meet. And trust me, they would love to spend more time with their kids.

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