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Robert D. Putnam's Our Kids: The American Dream In Crisis

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Rhonda Hammad
Principles of Economics
Extra Credit #1

Read a book dealing with an issue of economic policy and write a review addressing a)why you think the author wrote the book, 2)how effectively he articulated his position and 3)do you agree or disagree with his ideas and why.
It’s the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success.
The book I reviewed was “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” by Robert D. Putnam. In this book Putnam asks a series of questions of the future and economy. He wonders what stance the economy will be and what the future may hold for Our Kids. He answers these questions through a series of analyzed data and speaking to many people about social and economic …show more content…
He predicts that the issues with race and class that we have now will continue to affect us in the future. Putnam emphases the early years of a individual’s life: the roles that our everyday life consists of like family, schools and neighborhood play in social developmental setting. Putnam states that “Some children are raised with two biological parents, others with one, and all too many with none. One of the latter, dubbed by Putnam “Elijah,” has had an especially rough life: beaten by his father after the son was jailed for arson, thrown out of the house by his mother because of drinking and drugs, and unable to escape the lure of the streets. “Desmond” had a radically different life: His parents moved to get him into a better school, encouraged him to read and were there for him when he was accepted into a good college. Both these young men, moreover, spent part of their youth in Atlanta; they ended up in radically different places because one had support from elders and the other did not. Elijah” and “Desmond” are both black, which seems to take race out of the picture: Being raised by caring parents trumps race in determining achievement. But that is true only at the level of anecdote. If it is true that, as Putnam writes, “early life experiences get under your skin in a most powerful way,”” What Putnam is displaying here is though race is a huge

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