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<div class="timestamp">July 9, 2012</div>
<h1>The Opportunity Gap</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by DAVID BROOKS">DAVID BROOKS</a></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
Over the past few months, writers from Charles Murray to Timothy Noah
have produced alarming work on the growing bifurcation of American
society. Now the eminent Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and
his team are coming out with research that’s more horrifying. </p>
<p>
While most studies look at inequality of outcomes among adults and help
us understand how America is coming apart, Putnam’s group looked at
inequality of opportunities among children. They help us understand what
the country will look like in the decades ahead. The quick answer? More
divided than ever. </p>
<p>
Putnam’s data verifies what many of us have seen anecdotally, that the
children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly
different ways and have different opportunities. Decades ago,
college-graduate parents and high-school-graduate parents invested
similarly in their children. Recently, more affluent parents have
invested much more in their children’s futures while less affluent
parents have not. </p>
<p>
They’ve invested more time. Over the past decades, college-educated
parents have quadrupled the amount of time they spend reading “Goodnight
Moon,” talking to their kids about their day and cheering them on from
the sidelines. High-school-educated parents have increased child-care
time, but only slightly. </p>
<p>
A generation ago, working-class parents spent slightly more time with
their kids than college-educated parents. Now college-educated parents
spend an hour more every day. This attention gap is largest in the first
three years of life when it is most important. </p>
<p>
Affluent parents also invest more money in their children. Over the last
40 years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on
their kids’ enrichment activities, like tutoring and extra curriculars,
by $5,300 a year. The financially stressed lower classes have only been
able to increase their investment by $480, adjusted for inflation.
</p>
<p>
As a result, behavior gaps are opening up. In 1972, kids from the bottom
quartile of earners participated in roughly the same number of
activities as kids from the top quartile. Today, it’s a chasm. </p>
<p>
Richer kids are roughly twice as likely to play after-school sports.
They are more than twice as likely to be the captains of their sports
teams. They are much more likely to do nonsporting activities, like
theater, yearbook and scouting. They are much more likely to attend
religious services. </p>
<p>
It’s not only that richer kids have become more active. Poorer kids have
become more pessimistic and detached. Social trust has fallen among all
income groups, but, between 1975 and 1995, it plummeted among the
poorest third of young Americans and has remained low ever since. As
Putnam writes in notes prepared for the Aspen Ideas Festival: “It’s
perfectly understandable that kids from working-class backgrounds have
become cynical and even paranoid, for virtually all our major social
institutions have failed them — family, friends, church, school and
community.” As a result, poorer kids are less likely to participate in
voluntary service work that might give them a sense of purpose and
responsibility. Their test scores are lagging. Their opportunities are
more limited. </p>
<p>
A long series of cultural, economic and social trends have merged to
create this sad state of affairs. Traditional social norms were
abandoned, meaning more children are born out of wedlock. Their single
parents simply have less time and resources to prepare them for a more
competitive world. Working-class jobs were decimated, meaning that many
parents are too stressed to have the energy, time or money to devote to
their children. </p>
<p>
Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other
energetic, intelligent people. They raise energetic, intelligent kids in
self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and
have less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.
</p>
<p>
The political system directs more money to health care for the elderly while spending on child welfare slides. </p>
<p>
Equal opportunity, once core to the nation’s identity, is now a tertiary
concern. If America really wants to change that, if the country wants
to take advantage of all its human capital rather than just the most
privileged two-thirds of it, then people are going to have to make some
pretty uncomfortable decisions. </p>
<p>
Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say
marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it.
Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or
benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit
and other programs that benefit the working class. </p>
<p>
Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit
class divisions and more time trying to remedy them — less time calling
their opponents out of touch elitists, and more time coming up with
agendas that comprehensively address the problem. It’s politically tough
to do that, but the alternative is national suicide. </p>
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<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br><br>