Economic inequality: A matter of trust? (cites Sean Reardon)

“I’ll just give you a few statistics,” President Barack Obama said in a speech Wednesday in Washington, D.C. He had a lot of them, demonstrating America’s growing economic inequality (“The top ten per cent no longer takes in one third of our income—it now takes half”) and the concurrent loss of mobility (“A child born in the top twenty per cent has about a two-in-three chance of staying at or near the top. A child born into the bottom twenty per cent has a less than one-in-twenty shot at making it to the top”). Inequality hurt the economy, making growth more fragile and susceptible to speculative bubbles—and unfair. “Rising inequality and declining mobility are bad for our democracy,” Obama said, leaving “a bad taste that the system is rigged,” and “bad for our families and social cohesion—not just because we tend to trust our institutions less, but studies show we actually tend to trust each other less when there’s greater inequality.”

One of the people watching Obama’s speech was Robert Putnam, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who is intimately familiar with such studies. (He is working on a book on the topic, to be called “Our Kids”; he is also well-known for his book “Bowling Alone.”) He and his team have done some, and he cited others by Sean Reardon, of Stanford Graduate School of Education; Tim Smeeding, of Wisconsin; and Sara McLanahan, of Princeton. Putnam has met with and talked to Obama about inequality for some time; before he became a senator, Obama took part in Harvard’s Saguaro Seminar, on civic engagement, which Putnam runs. “The President is convinced that this is the defining problem of our age—and he’s not the only one,” Putnam told me. He added that he had talked to other politicians, too, in both parties. (“Paul Ryan, for example.”) There appeared to be some resonances from those talks.

“The part about democracy is relevant,” Putnam said. There was a cohort of “lost kids we see in our data, who have no opportunity for economic mobility”; what’s more, “those kids know.” They also know, he said, that there are other people who do have those chances.

Read the full story here.

Read Sean Reardon's paper on the academic achievemnt gap here.

Read Sean Reardon's article "The Widening Income Achievement Gap" here.