[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 115 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 115-69
WHAT WE DO TOGETHER: THE STATE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL IN AMERICA TODAY
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE
CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MAY 17, 2017
__________
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JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE
[Created pursuant to Sec. 5(a) of Public Law 304, 79th Congress]
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES SENATE
Patrick J. Tiberi, Ohio, Chairman Mike Lee, Utah, Vice Chairman
Erik Paulsen, Minnesota Tom Cotton, Arkansas
David Schweikert, Arizona Ben Sasse, Nebraska
Barbara Comstock, Virginia Rob Portman, Ohio
Darin LaHood, Illinois Ted Cruz, Texas
Francis Rooney, Florida Bill Cassidy, M.D., Louisiana
Carolyn B. Maloney, New York Martin Heinrich, New Mexico,
John Delaney, Maryland Ranking
Alma S. Adams, Ph.D., North Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota
Carolina Gary C. Peters, Michigan
Donald S. Beyer, Jr., Virginia Margaret Wood Hassan, New
Hampshire
Whitney K. Daffner, Executive Director
Kimberly S. Corbin, Democratic Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Opening Statements of Members
Hon. Mike Lee, Vice Chairman, a U.S. Senator from Utah........... 1
Hon. Martin Heinrich, Ranking Member, a U.S. Senator from New
Mexico......................................................... 2
Witnesses
Statement of Dr. Robert D. Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin
Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of
Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.................. 5
Statement of Dr. Charles Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar in Culture &
Freedom, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy
Research, Washington, DC....................................... 7
Statement of Dr. Yuval Levin, Hertog Fellow, The Ethics and
Public Policy Center and Editor of National Affairs,
Washington, DC................................................. 9
Statement of Dr. Mario Small, Grafstein Family Professor,
Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA..... 11
Submissions for the Record
Prepared statement of Hon. Mike Lee, Vice Chairman, a U.S.
Senator from Utah.............................................. 36
Prepared statement of Hon. Martin Heinrich, Ranking Member, a
U.S. Senator from New Mexico................................... 36
Prepared Statement of Hon. Margaret Wood Hassan.................. 37
Prepared statement of Robert D. Putnam........................... 38
Prepared statement of Dr. Charles Murray......................... 57
Prepared statement of Dr. Yuval Levin............................ 59
Prepared statement of Dr. Mario Small............................ 69
Response from Dr. Putnam to Questions for the Record Submitted by
Senator Margaret Wood Hassan................................... 84
Response from Dr. Putnam to Questions for the Record Submitted by
Senator Amy Klobuchar.......................................... 85
Response from Dr. Small to Questions for the Record Submitted by
Senator Amy Klobuchar.......................................... 86
Response from Dr. Small to Questions for the Record Submitted by
Ranking Member Martin Heinrich................................. 87
Chart titled ``Real Hourly Wages by Education'' submitted by
Senator Cotton................................................. 89
Report titled ``What We Do Together: The State of Associated Life
in America'' prepared by Vice Chairman Lee's staff of the Joint
Economic Committee............................................. 90
WHAT WE DO TOGETHER: THE STATE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL IN AMERICA TODAY
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WEDNESDAY, MAY 17, 2017
United States Congress,
Joint Economic Committee,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:02 a.m., in Room
106 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, the Honorable Mike
Lee, Vice Chairman, presiding.
Representatives present: LaHood, Maloney, Beyer, Jr., and
Paulsen
Senators present: Lee, Cotton, Cruz, Heinrich, Klobuchar,
and Peters.
Staff present: Daniel Bunn, Kim Corbin, Connie Foster,
Martha Gimbel, Heath Hansen, Colleen Healy, Adam Hersh,
Christina King, Paul Lapointe, Justus Myers, Thomas Nicholas,
Matthew Nolan, Kwabena Nsiah, Victoria Park, Ernesto Rodriguez,
and Scott Winship.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MIKE LEE, VICE CHAIRMAN, A U.S.
SENATOR FROM UTAH
Vice Chairman Lee. Welcome. We call this hearing on the
Joint Economic Committee to order. The title that we have
selected for this hearing is ``What We Do Together: The State
of Social Capital in America Today.''
I want to thank each of our witnesses and our Committee
members for joining us today.
Our Nation today faces very real economic challenges. As we
heard during our Committee's hearing last month, economic
growth during the recovery has been meager and uneven. The U.S.
economy has become less dynamic and innovative than in recent
decades. We miss the strong productivity growth America enjoyed
in the mid-twentieth century and the unusually large wage gains
it brought.
However, in historical and comparative perspective most
Americans enjoy unprecedented material living standards. Our
economic problems often take the form of unsatisfactory rates
of improvement. We are growing richer less quickly than we did
when we were poorer.
Nevertheless, many Americans--poor, middle class, and
wealthy--feel that something in our society is amiss. It is a
feeling that cannot be reduced to economic anxiety. Rather,
there is a sense that our social fabric in America is fraying.
And these concerns are reflected in objective measures of
family and community health. To cite just a few of the trends
that may be grouped under the rubric of ``social capital'':
marriage and church going have declined; distrust of the
Nation's institutions has grown; mixed-income neighborhoods
have become rarer; regional polarization has increased; and
young men who are neither working nor looking for work have
become more numerous and more isolated. We do less together
than in the past, and we are worse off for it, economically and
otherwise.
Today's hearing, along with a new report released on
Monday, launches the Social Capital Project, a multi-year
research effort that I have established in the Vice Chairman's
office. The project will investigate the health of the bonds of
family, faith, community, and work that define our lives.
An emphasis on social capital complements the economic lens
through which we typically view national challenges today. Many
of our ostensibly economic problems reflect the withering of
our associational life. For example, the fragility of so many
families today reduces upward mobility. And diminishing trust
has implications for the decline in business dynamism since
risk-taking requires confidence in each other and our
institutions.
Economic trends in turn affect the extent to which we
cooperate to achieve our desired goals. The project's inaugural
report, ``What We Do Together,'' concludes that rising
affluence has reduced the economic necessity of having close
ties with neighbors and traditional institutions. It also
highlights the extent to which the growth in two-worker
families has affected investment in social capital. These
economic changes have conferred valuable benefits to be sure,
but by depleting social capital they have also come with costs.
The twin pillars of economic--of American freedom--a free
enterprise economy and a voluntary civil society--exist and
operate within the vital space between the government and the
individual where organic communities form and networks of
economic opportunity and social cohesion are built.
It is my hope that the Social Capital Project will start a
new conversation for our country that emphasizes social
solidarity and mutual cooperation. As we face today's economic
challenges, policymakers should ask how we can empower civil
society, and what government should or should not do to thicken
the middle layers between the individual and the State.
I will now turn to the Ranking Member, Senator Heinrich,
for his opening statement, and then I will introduce our
witnesses. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Vice Chairman Lee appears in the
Submissions for the Record on page 36.]
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MARTIN HEINRICH, RANKING MEMBER, A
U.S. SENATOR FROM NEW MEXICO
Senator Heinrich. Thank you, Senator.
The topic of Social Capital is an important one, especially
when it is used to build communities up. I worry, though, that
this conversation can be used to blame disadvantaged
communities for not already being successful.
It is easy to generalize about people and communities, but
I believe we must resist doing that. Because otherwise,
Congress, instead of building communities up, risks
institutionalizing stereotypes and discrimination. It is
offensive and, frankly, not constructive to blame communities
for the challenges that they face today. Blame is no substitute
for a strong economic foundation, and smart investments in our
children and our workers. Social networks help, but investments
in individuals and communities are key to building a better
future and a more vibrant economy.
I think we would all agree that Congress cannot and should
not force people to marry, become friends with their neighbors,
or even join civic organizations or churches. We need to be
both strategic and realistic about the policies that we pursue.
When I was a child, both of my parents worked. For my
father, his union job helped him to earn a higher wage, and
protections at work. Belonging to a union is a source of social
capital and my family benefited from that. I benefited from
that.
My mother, on the other hand, did not have a union job and
at one point her factory schedule was three weeks on, one day
off, plus overtime nearly every day. Her wage under-valued her
work and under-valued her, leaving her with little time to
spend building those networks.
So as we prepare to hear about the role of social capital,
about ways to help working families get into the middle class,
to even have the time to make community connections and shore
up social capital, it is important that we not lose sight of
investing in people like my mother.
Right now the deck is stacked against some and in favor of
others. Children of wealthier parents start with a leg up. Good
schools are increasingly concentrated in high-income areas,
leaving millions of our children behind. While a college
education has long been thought of as the path to the American
Dream, that path is financially out of reach for far too many
Americans.
As Americans we have a deep commitment to everyone getting
a fair shot. To achieve that, government has a significant role
to play. It must provide the essential building blocks:
affordable child care and pre-K; quality K through 12
education; comprehensive health care and access to affordable
post-secondary education.
We can break the cycle of poverty by simultaneously
providing programs and supports to parents and their children.
The two-generation approach is evidence-based. It is data-
driven bipartisan policy with a history that works.
I have seen the power of 2Gen models in New Mexico with
initiatives like the United Way's Early Learning Center in
Santa Fe, which offers year-round full-day services for
children right next to technology, employment, and social
service assistance for parents under one roof.
Helping parents and children in these programs develop
supportive networks is an important component of helping these
families achieve success and building stronger communities. We
must expand proven programs like the EITC and the Child Tax
Credit that lift almost 10 million people out of poverty each
year.
We need universal pre-K starting at age 3. We have long
known that investments in early education boost education
outcomes and increase earnings. Government cannot and should
not go it alone. In Gallup, and Carlsbad, Silver City, and
throughout New Mexico it is the schools, the churches, the
nonprofits, the businesses, the philanthropic groups that
define the community. They are the community anchors, but
government must provide the basics.
Professor Small's research on Head Start attendance reminds
us that limited, inexpensive interventions can have deeply
meaningful impacts. His research found that when parents of
Head Start students develop networks, attendance improved. Just
one example, but we can learn two important things from this
research. First, that social networks can strengthen an already
effective program. And second, that without that government
program we would not have the foundation on which to build.
I look forward to your testimony.
[The prepared statement of Senator Heinrich appears in the
Submissions for the Record on page 36.]
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you, Senator Heinrich. Now I would
like to introduce each of our witnesses.
Dr. Robert Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor
of Public Policy at Harvard University. He is also a member of
the National Academy of Sciences and the British Academy, and a
past president of the American Political Science Association.
He has received a number of scholarly honors, and has written
14 books, including ``Bowling Alone'' and his latest book,
``Our Kids: The American Dream In Crisis.''
Dr. Putnam graduated from Swarthmore College where he won a
Fulbright Fellowship to study at Balliol College, Oxford, and
earned Masters and Doctorate Degrees from Yale University.
Dr. Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute. He has written a number of
books, including ``Coming Apart,'' and his most recent, ``By
The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.'' His first
book, ``Losing Ground,'' has been credited as the intellectual
foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996.
Dr. Murray holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor's Degree
in History from Harvard University.
Dr. Yuval Levin is the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, and a contributing Editor to National
Review and The Weekly Standard. He is the founding Editor of
National Affairs, a quarterly journal on domestic policy in
politics.
He served on the White House Domestic Policy staff under
President George W. Bush, and was also a Congressional staffer.
He is the author of a number of books, including ``The Great
Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and The Birth of Right and
Left.'' And most recently, ``The Fractured Republic: Renewing
America's Social Contract In The Age of Individualism.''
He earned a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science at
American University and holds a Ph.D. from The Committee on
Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Dr. Mario Small is the Grafstein Family Professor of
Sociology at Harvard University. He has authored a number of
award-winning books, including ``Villa Victoria: The
Transformation of Social Capital In A Boston Barrio,'' and
``Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality In
Everyday Life.''
He is also an author of numerous articles on urban poverty
and support networks, and he is currently writing a book on how
people decide to whom to turn for social support.
Dr. Small holds a Bachelor's Degree in Sociology and
Anthropology from Carlton College, and a Master's and Doctorate
from Harvard University.
Thank you all for your willingness to be here today to
testify. And with that I would like to turn to Dr. Putnam for
testimony, to be followed by Dr. Levin--to be followed, rather,
by Dr. Murray, Dr. Levin, and Dr. Small.
Dr. Putnam.
STATEMENT OF DR. ROBERT D. PUTNAM, PETER AND ISABEL MALKIN
PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY, JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF
GOVERNMENT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, MA
Dr. Putnam. Thank you. Vice Chairman Lee, Senators,
Members, I welcome this opportunity to discuss the topic of
social capital with you, as I have done in recent years with
grassroots groups in virtually every district and virtually
every State represented in this entire Committee. I am sorry
that there is not everybody here, because I would like to talk
to them about their home districts. I have visited them and
talked with people in their home districts about these issues
of social capital.
Policymakers often focus on hard economic factors, ignoring
softer social factors. In the last 25 years, scholars have
collected hard evidence on these softer factors under the
rubric of social capital, making this one of the fastest
growing areas in social science.
The literature is reviewed in the excellent staff report,
so I can be succinct. Social capital refers to social networks
and the associated norms of trustworthiness and reciprocity. We
all intuitively recognize the importance of social capital
because we are all immersed every day in many such networks:
our families, friends, neighbors, work colleagues, folks from
church, folks from the bowling league, even someone you met
last night while celebrating the Celtics victory.
Scholars have learned in recent decades just how deeply
such networks influence our health, our happiness, prosperity,
the safety of our streets, the productivity of our firms, the
performance of our schools, and even the quality of our
democracy.
To illustrate the importance of social capital, I want to
focus briefly on two policy issues, the first rooted in the
early stages of life, the growing opportunity gap between rich
kids and poor kids in America; and the second, an unnoticed
problem that will arise when the Bowling Alone generation
becomes the aging alone generation.
First, the opportunity gap. As I described in my book ``Our
Kids,'' the last several decades have witnessed a growing gap
between rich kids and poor kids in the resources and the
opportunities they have for upward mobility and personal
success. In a perfect social storm, the opportunity gap causes,
including as Charles Murray has pointed out, growing economic
inequality, increasing class segregation, and the collapse of
the working class family.
Social capital contributes to the opportunity gap. For
example, families in the lower third of the population of all
races and ethnic groups, in that part of the society the
families are increasingly fractured and fragile, as illustrated
in J.D. Vance's ``Hillbilly Elegy.''
Scholars from various sides of the political divide
disagree about exactly why this has happened, the collapse of
the working class family, but all sides now agree that fragile
families are bad for kids.
Poor kids are also isolated from community life, from
neighbors, clergy, civic associations, and even extracurricular
activities like sports and music. This extracurricular gap in
turn contributes to a gap in mentors, like coaches, and in soft
skills like teamwork and grit, and even, eventually,
differences in lifetime income, attributable to the
difference--to this extracurricular gap.
This class gap in football and band and so on is new to our
history, and the explanation is simple and yet shocking: pay to
play. When cost-cutting school boards in response to our
pressure as voters began charging parents hundreds of dollars a
year for a kid to play sports, it is no surprise that poor kids
dropped out.
In short, ignoring social capital has led directly to the
opportunity gap. My second example is this:
Bowling Alone is leading to aging alone, and that matters a
lot. Providing care for aging Americans is a growing challenge.
We all recognize the massive number of Baby Boomers now
retiring, but few understand that per person Boomers will enjoy
much less informal elder care than their parents. Many aging
Americans now rely on paid elder care like nursing homes and
home health care aides, but an estimated three-quarters of all
care for Americans over 65 is provided by family, friends,
neighbors, and civic organizations.
Crucially, however, that statistic--three-quarters of all
care--is based on the experience of the Greatest Generation, a
now-vanishing cohort that had very high levels of social
capital. By contrast, Boomers are now entering their sunset
years with much less social capital. Compared to the previous
generation as they, the previous generation, approached
retirement, Boomers have roughly 12 percent fewer spouses, 36
percent fewer children, 30 percent fewer close friends, and 40
percent fewer religious and community ties of the sort the
Chairman referred to--sorry, Vice Chairman.
In round numbers, in short, Boomers are entering retirement
with one-third less social capital than their parents enjoyed.
And that is not an academic matter. Social isolation is a
strong predictor of morbidity and mortality, especially among
the elderly. Less recognized is that lower social capital among
Boomers compared to their parents will make it harder for
Boomers to count on informal care as they age.
Consequently, the need for paid elder care will rise
sharply above current expectations, not simply because there
are more Boomers but because fewer of them will be able to rely
on informal care. Over the coming decades, paid elder care per
Boomer will on average have to double as compared with the
previous generation.
Now I know this is a policy discussion, but one could
imagine progressive or conservative approaches to this problem,
or a combination of both, but the problem itself will not
vanish. This threat to our Nation's health, both fiscal and
physical, stems directly from the Bowling Alone in the 1970s,
which will lead to Aging Alone in the 2020s.
As with many other public institutions, including the
opportunity gap, social capital is an under-appreciated
dimension of this problem.
I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Putnam appears in the
Submissions for the Record on page 38.]
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you.
Dr. Murray.
STATEMENT OF DR. CHARLES MURRAY, W.H. BRADY SCHOLAR IN CULTURE
AND FREEDOM, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY
RESEARCH, WASHINGTON, DC
Dr. Murray. I welcome the chance to testify before this
Committee, and especially I welcome the chance to emphasize
something in this polarized age. The staff of the Committee
produced a report that I think Professor Putnam and I both
agree is a really terrific report.
Professor Putnam and I are on very different points of the
ideological spectrum. I consider him to be the world's greatest
authority on social capital, and whereas we have some
differences in policy recommendations the differences are
overwhelmed by the ways in which we agree. I think that is
heartening, and I hope that we can take advantage of that in
dealing with this problem.
In terms of what I can add to the discussion today, I have
decided to try to focus on some of the ways in which this
problem is so complicated, because I think that when we talk
about statistics like the falling marriage rate, or the rising
drop out from the labor force by males, that it lends itself
to, well, the solution is we need higher working class wages so
that it's easier for people to get married. Or, we need more
job opportunities and guys will come back into the labor force.
I am not saying that such solutions would have no good
effects; I think they would. But the actual ways, and the
actual problems reach deeply into the ways that humans are
socialized into institutions such as marriage and the labor
force. And a good way to get a grip on those actual problems is
``Our Kids.''
Bob Putnam's book that I think is just terrific, as I have
said in print. It is at the heart of that book, and the reason
I urge the Members of the Committee to read it, are these
wonderful, beautifully told and beautifully researched stories
of real people and real families. And what I admire most about
the way these are told is, the narratives have not been
sanitized to make them easy to deal with.
We hear the voices of the unemployed whose manufacturing
jobs were exported abroad. That is a real problem. And the
voices of people who quit good jobs because they did not feel
like working, or who got fired because they showed up late,
shirked their tasks, and got in fights with co-workers--another
real problem.
We hear stories of unmarried low-income parents who are
fiercely devoted to their kids, and of other parents who
created children casually and walked away from them casually.
If I had to pick one theme threaded throughout all of these
stories, it is the many ways in which people behaved
impulsively but were oblivious to what would happen to them if
they made the wrong step.
This theme also appears in steroids in J.D. Vance's
``Hillbilly Elegy.'' In many ways he describes a life history
which was full of opportunity--prodigiously squandered
opportunities. You read Vance's account and keep saying to
yourself: Why are they behaving so destructively?
I respect Mr. Heinrich's caution that we must not blame
people for things beyond their control. It is also true that
the real stories of real people and real communities get very
messy in these kinds of ways. It comes down to the age-old
problem of getting people, especially young people, not to do
things that are attractive in the short term but disastrous in
the long term. And, conversely, get them to do things that are
not fun right now but that will open up rewards later in life.
This is not a problem confined to any one socioeconomic
class. The mental disorder known as adolescence afflicts rich
and poor alike. And adolescence can extend a long time after
people have left their teens.
The most common way that the fortunate among us manage to
get our priorities straight--and by ``fortunate among us,'' I
am not really talking about money--is by being cocooned in the
institutions that are the primary resources for generating
social capital: a family consisting of married parents and
active membership in a faith tradition.
I did not choose that phrasing lightly, even though I
realize it pushes buttons. I am not implying that single women
are incapable of filling this function. Millions of them are
heroically trying to do so as we speak, nor that children
cannot grow up successfully if they don't go to church.
With regard to families, I am making an empirical
statement. As a matter of statistical tendencies, biological
children of married parents do much better on a wide variety of
life outcomes than children growing up in any other family
structure, even after controlling for income, parental
education, and ethnicity. And they do so, I would argue,
because of the ways in which they keep adolescents from doing
destructive things.
With regard to religion, I am making an assertion about a
resource that can lead people, adolescents and adults alike, to
do the right thing, even when the enticements to do the wrong
thing are strong: a belief that God commands them to do the
right thing. I am also using religion in terms of its role as a
community, a community of faith, another borrowing from Robert
Putnam.
For its active members, a church is far more than a place
where they go to worship once a week. It is a form of community
that socializes the children growing up in it in all sorts of
informal ways just as the family socializes children. This is
not a prelude to a set of recommendations. I do not have any.
Rather, I am just trying to argue that it is not a matter
of ideology but empiricism to include that unless the
traditional family and traditional communities of faith make a
comeback, the declines in social capital that are already
causing so much deterioration in our civic culture will
continue, and the problems will worsen. The solutions are
unlikely to be political, in my view, but cultural.
We need a cultural great awakening akin to past religious
great awakenings. How to bring about that needed cultural great
awakening? It beats the hell out of me.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Murray appears in the
Submissions for the Record on page 57.]
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you. Dr. Levin.
STATEMENT OF DR. YUVAL LEVIN, HERTOG FELLOW, ETHICS AND PUBLIC
POLICY CENTER, EDITOR, NATIONAL AFFAIRS, WASHINGTON, DC
Dr. Levin. Vice Chairman Lee, Ranking Member Heinrich,
Members, thank you very much for the opportunity to testify.
And more than that, thank you for taking up this subject this
morning. It is very encouraging to see the Joint Economic
Committee turning its attention to the question of social
capital, which I think is a crucial economic question. And I
commend you and your staff for excellent work already evident
in the report that you just released, and for the promise that
it suggests about the Committee's continuing efforts on this
front.
In my written testimony I suggest why I think this question
of social capital or associational life has to be part of any
discussion of the country's economic prospects, and especially
of the challenges that are confronted by the most vulnerable
Americans.
In these brief remarks this morning, let me say a few words
about the challenges of making this a part of our policy
conversations and how I think that might be undertaken
responsibly.
Maybe the best thing about the report that your Committee
staff has produced is that it is unabashedly diagnostic. Too
often those of us who are engaged in these debates are afraid
to be dismissed as political radiologists. The radiologist will
look over your scans very carefully and tell you half your ribs
are broken. I hope somebody can help you with that. Good luck.
And move on to the next patient.
And I think many of us who study this subject often feel
that way. We tend to respond to that by ending our discussions
of this, or ending books and articles about it that offer a
valuable diagnosis with prescriptive conclusions that are
frankly often less valuable.
The characteristic book on this subject, and I genuinely do
exempt present company from that description, will offer
profound and subtle analysis of what has happened to American
associational life and why, and then will tack on some general
ideas about how tweaking various social programs might make a
difference at the margins.
If the problems are as profound as we say, those solutions,
although they can be valuable, are unlikely to cut it. And yet,
if more comprehensive and radical reforms are needed, we do not
have real evidence of what will work on a large scale. And in
some cases we lack evidence even of what will work on any small
scale.
Obviously, stopping a diagnosis is unsatisfying and
insufficient, particularly for policymakers, but we do need to
make sure that we start at diagnosis. And we have to make sure
that we do not simply see that diagnosis as an excuse to double
down on policy preferences that are not actually rooted in it.
That is what happens a lot of the time, I'm afraid. Our
social policy debates between the left and the right today
usually amount to arguments about whether we should do more or
less of what we are already doing. The left wants more and
calls for increasing our investment in the model of social
policy that we have. Generally speaking, the model built up
around the Great Society.
The right wants less, and argues for pulling back on those
investments and letting other actors fill the space. And
evidence about social capital is generally just stuffed into
these boxes so that some progressives will say that stronger
associational lives are only possible when basic material wants
are met, which is certainly true, and that it is not happening
sufficiently for too many Americans. So the evidence about
social capital supports the case for greater investment in the
existing safety net, or the case that inequality is the root of
our problems.
Some conservatives will say there are social programs that
sometimes actively undermine our associational lives in the
amassing of social capital by substituting for work, and
family, and community, rather than reinforcing them, or by
undermining personal responsibility.
These sets of arguments are both correct, up to a point,
but neither is sufficient. The evidence regarding social
capital can support both views, but I think it actually
gestures toward a rather different view.
It is true of course that meeting basic material needs is
essential, and that our society has an obligation to help those
who need help doing that. But it should be clear by now that
this alone will not address the deep social dysfunction that
results from the loss of social capital in American life.
It is also true that there are ways in which our social
policy contributes to that loss of social capital, but that
does not mean that rolling back that policy will reverse the
loss. More importantly, it does not mean that the past half-
century of social policy has been a failure. The War on Poverty
has not failed. It has dramatically reduced extreme poverty in
America, and it would be a perverse reading of the evidence on
social capital to suggest that we should undo that important
progress against poverty.
But what the evidence does suggest is that the approach we
now have to social policy is not adequate to helping revive
associational life in America. It does not do a good job of
either building on what works, or uprooting what does harm, and
neither doing more nor doing less of it would by itself amount
to a prescription that is responsive to the diagnosis when it
comes to social capital.
In part, that means that we should accept that public
policy in general is not going to solve the problems of
associational life in America. It could do more to help. It
could do less to hurt. But it will not be the core of the
solution.
But that cannot be all that we say. We have to also think
about how policy might help more and hurt less, and that
requires us to look beyond the familiar model of our social
programs and think about what genuinely different approaches
might look like.
We need an approach to social policy that is rooted from
the start in some understanding of the problem of social
capital. And we do not have that approach, which means that we
will need to seek it by some experimentation and some period of
learning.
To me, for one thing that points in the direction of
empowering local institutions to attempt different approaches
to our foremost social problems as they present themselves in
different parts of our society. That is not because we know
that local works better. In some instances it may. It is
because we do not know what works, and experimentation is what
you do when you do not have the answers.
As my written testimony suggests, I think that this argues
for some devolution of policy design, and not just policy
implementation in welfare, and in labor policy, to a degree
also in education and other arenas. And some work along these
lines has been attempted over the years of course, so we can
learn from both its successes and its failures. But above all,
even more than arguing for local power, all of this argues for
humility. And it argues for proper diagnosis, which has to
precede any attempt at using public policy on a large scale.
And so it adds up to commending the work that you are
beginning here, and again to thanking you for inviting me to
participate this morning. I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Levin appears in the
Submissions for the Record on page 59.]
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you.
Dr. Small.
STATEMENT OF DR. MARIO SMALL, GRAFSTEIN FAMILY PROFESSOR,
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, MA
Dr. Small. Vice Chairman Lee, Ranking Member Heinrich, and
other Members of the Committee, I thank you for the invitation.
I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the discussion of
social capital and economic opportunities.
Social capital is something that nations can have, and
something that individuals can have. A nation's social capital
is its degree of connectedness, sense of community, and
participation. And as you all have read, there is an ongoing
debate over whether these conditions have declined in the
United States over the last 50 years.
Today I will focus instead on the social capital of
individuals, which is the resources that people have access to
by virtue of their networks. These resources can be of many
different kinds. There are three that are especially important:
information, social support, and the reinforcement of norms.
To be clear, I will use an example. Consider someone who
has decided to improve his health by beginning to lift weights.
This person can go it alone, but having a partner on hand will
provide access to the three resources:
First, information as the partner is likely to have access
to different sources of information on nutrition or lifting.
Second, social support, as the partner can serve as a
literal spotter to assist while pressing heavier weights.
And third, the reinforcement of norms, as the partner will
be a source of motivation. You are far less likely to skip
going to the gym at six o'clock in the morning if your partner
is going to be there waiting. These three resources will
increase the odds that the new venture will succeed.
The benefits suggested by this analogy are supported by the
literature. For example, there is abundant evidence that the
information available through networks helps people move up the
economic ladder and get jobs. There is also evidence that the
social support available through networks helps people avoid
the worst mental and health consequences of major life
stressors.
Having noted these benefits, I must clarify two things.
First, some commentators have used the term ``social capital''
to refer to core values such as hard work, marriage, and
education. However, ``social capital'' and ``values'' are
different things.
Values are beliefs. Social capital is a tool. Just as the
weight lifter is more likely to fail not because he lacks the
values but because he lacks the partner, so may a highly
motivated person pursuing work or education have difficulty
meeting her goals because she lacks the information or support
or reinforcement that is available to social networks.
Information is especially important. For example, many
talented low-income students do not apply to elite colleges
because they do not know that such colleges can provide grants
to cover the costs of their own tuition charges. This kind of
information is well known in middle class networks and easily
taken for granted, but it is often missing among lower income
kids.
Second, I clarify that social capital is no panacea. Often,
economic resources are necessary. Just as the lifter must be
able to afford the necessary nutritional supplements and new
clothing and expensive gym membership, so must low-income
children have access to proper nutrition and school supplies
and higher quality education to have good odds of success.
Social capital alone is not enough. I will conclude my
comments by focusing on the role that effective policy can have
in helping people build valuable social capital. One of the
best sites to do so I believe is early education programs which
can be mobilized to help not only children but also their
parents.
Many child care and early education programs help parents
build social capital. A national survey recently found that 60
percent of mothers whose children are enrolled in child care
centers made at least one new friend there, and as a result had
networks of close friends more than 30 percent larger than
those of statistically comparable mothers whose children are
not in centers.
These networks matter for both mental and material
hardships, for example. Low income mothers whose children are
enrolled in centers and who made friends there had 40 percent
lower odds of depression. The material hardship scores, or the
extent to which they had their utilities cut off, or went
hungry for lack of food, or showed other indicators of true
economic difficulty, were more than 20 percent lower.
The promise of social capital has motivated early education
centers to experiment with different ways of improving their
work. One randomized controlled trial managed to increase Head
Start attendance by 7 percent in the winter months just by
nudging parents into mobilizing their own social capital, thus
maximizing their return on tax dollars already spent while also
helping improve school readiness among low-income children. The
intervention itself, I should say, cost almost nothing.
Improving and expanding early education have been topics of
debate in recent years. I believe thinking more expansively
about the role of parents may prove valuable. Parents of
children are part of a unit, and social capital is a great tool
through which effective policy can provide all members of the
unit true access to opportunity.
I recommend that Congress explore the potential of
interventions focused on social capital in contexts such as
early education programs.
Thank you, very much.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Small appears in the
Submissions for the Record on page 69.]
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you. I appreciate your opening
statements. We will now begin five-minute rounds of
questioning, and I will begin with that. Then we will alternate
between Democrat and Republican Members of the Committee.
I would like to open by asking each of the witnesses a
question, and this time we will start with Dr. Small and move
over to Dr. Putnam.
We are trying to use this project as an opportunity to
expand Congress's horizon, to look at things that Congress
tends to overlook. We have metrics that Congress is constantly
looking at, things like GDP, the rate of GDP growth, the
percentage of GDP coming into the Federal Government through
the Tax Code, and so forth. But limits on time and resources
sometimes create blind spots for us as lawmakers, sometimes
resulting in us not exploring perhaps as we should new
perspectives on things like family stability, opioids, the
decreased workforce participation rate, and so forth.
So as the Social Capital Project develops its research
agenda, what are some of the issues that you would recommend
that we take a look at from our vantage point as policy makers,
paying special attention of course to anything that might
potentially garner bipartisan support.
Dr. Small.
Dr. Small. Sure. I think it certainly makes sense. If the
question is what aspects of capital should we pay more
attention to beyond the economic questions that we typically
pay attention to, I think one issue is paying a great deal of
attention to the things that have probably declined, but also
the things that have probably increased.
So there have been many--there has been substantial
evidence of a decrease in certain forms of social capital, as
you have all seen in the report, but there have also been new
forms of community connectedness and engagement that simply did
not exist 50 years ago that we now have to start measuring: The
extent to which people can connect with people beyond their
local communities, for example, has increased.
Some forms of volunteering, for example, have also
increased. Political participation beyond your local town has
increased in many respects because the internet and social
media make things possible that were not possible in the past.
I think one of the most important things to do, if we are
interested in collecting believable evidence on these
questions, is to make sure that the nostalgia we all tend to
face for certain kinds of things does not cloud the chance of
looking at the new ways in which young people are finding ways
of creating social capital. I think that is going to be an
important part of the conversation.
The second thing I think is also going to be an important
part of it is looking not just at collective measures of social
capital, and just of measures that tell us what the country as
a whole is doing, or how the country as a whole has changed,
but also the extent to which there are differences among
individuals, among people of different class groups, or
different racial groups, for example, different genders, and
the extent to which they have access to the kinds of
opportunities that social capital may provide.
So I think that would be the second set of issues I would
look at: heterogeneity within the country, as opposed to only
trends within the country as a whole.
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you.
Dr. Levin.
Dr. Levin. Thank you for the question, and I would really
very much second what Dr. Small has said in a number of ways. I
think first of all this kind of project has to engage in some
kind of sociology of success. That is, thinking about what
works, especially amid circumstances where so much is failing.
So in communities where there are profound problems, the
question of how the exceptions happen, what drives them, what
makes them possible, is a very important question to explore
and to think about. Both because it's simply not the case that
people simply live with failure. People respond to failure. And
I think we in Washington are not very good at seeing the ways
in which a statistical disaster is actually also home to some
examples of human thriving that we need to learn from. And the
ability that people have to thrive amid circumstances where
social capital is absent is going to help us learn how to help
other people succeed.
Secondly, I also think that the sheer diversity of the
challenges people face means that policy makers in Washington
have to think about how to empower Americans to help each
other. We obviously have to think also about how to use public
policy to help individuals in difficult circumstances. But part
of what it would mean to think about social capital as both a
target and a means, both an end and a means, is to look for
ways in which public policy can help people help one another,
by empowering community institutions through which people help
each other, and seeing that those institutions are not just
ways of delivering benefits. They are also ways of creating
culture.
And ultimately what you find is that in the areas of life
where people are not able to make decisions that are
constructive for themselves, they change those habits because
the culture around them changes, or because the culture around
them drives them to change.
You know, I was involved when I worked in the Bush White
House in an initiative to look at ways of improving marriage
rates in some communities, for example. And I would say that
initiative was a failure. We tried many things. We tried it in
ways that produced a lot of data, and the data showed that most
of what we tried did not succeed. And by ``most,'' I mean
really almost everything.
The few exceptions involved circumstances where people are
affected not by incentives that they see out of the corners of
their eyes, but by cultures in which they live fully. And
obviously there is a great limit on how much government can do
in that respect, but I think we should look for ways to be
helpful to communities that are finding ways to help their
members succeed in difficult times.
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you.
Dr. Murray.
Dr. Murray. [Microphone is off.]
Vice Chairman Lee. Please hit the button so we can hear.
Dr. Murray. You have got a real problem with getting a
bipartisan set of measures, because even though the scholarly
end of this there is a growing consensus, I think that when I
talked about the family, the traditional family and communities
of faith as being major sources of social capital, I know very
well that Bob Putnam and I could talk about this and find
ourselves in the same page on virtually everything, not because
ideologically we think families are great and religion is
great, but in terms of the concept of social capital these are
two huge sources of it.
And so if you were going to have an index of social
capital, like you have an index of poverty, you would have to
have those in there. But that would mean saying, well, actually
married families are a good thing, and unmarried families are a
worse thing in some measurement sense with regard to social
capital, and the same thing with regard to religion. That ain't
gonna be bipartisan no matter what you do.
What Bob Putnam successfully did with ``Bowling Alone'' was
to get people of a very wide divergence of views to accept that
we had a problem there. But I am going to turn it over to him
right now so he can speak for himself. But he did this by
having a whole lot of indicators.
So he had in the book a statement that half of all social
capital is religious in origin. That is a simplification. He
could say that in the book, but he could still appeal to a lot
of readers because he talked about lots of other things, too.
So if you want somebody that will solve this problem for
you, he is sitting to my left.
Vice Chairman Lee. Dr. Putnam.
Dr. Putnam. I am not sure whether that last comment was a
friendly comment or not--that is, that I am going to solve all
the problems. I will try to be telegraphic.
First, social capital is a purple concept. It encourages us
to think of problems that are intelligible not just through a
blue lens or not just through a red lens; it requires us to
think across ideological lines.
And a lot of problems in the real world are purple
problems. And as I have talked to your constituents over the
last three or four years, ordinary people in America understand
that problems are not either neatly red or neatly blue. It
requires a--and I am extremely sympathetic to the initiative of
this Committee--but it requires a certain willingness to think
in purple terms, to understand that not every problem is either
just a red problem or a blue problem.
Now I will try to be brief in answer to your specific
question, sir. I think that how to understand the internet,
which emerged actually just after I wrote Bowling Alone, is a
complicated question. And the question is: Will the internet
make the problem better or worse? And the answer to that
question is: Yes.
That is, it will make both better and worse, and there is a
lot of debate among experts and in the literature about the way
social capital is affected by the internet. The crucial idea
here I think is to think in terms of alloys. An alloy is a
metal that is composed of two other metals, but the mixture of
the two has properties different from either one.
And most of our networks, most all of our networks are
alloys. That is to say, nobody now lives solely with face-to-
face ties, and nobody now lives solely with electronic ties.
And so you have to ask about what are the natures of the alloys
that are mixtures of social media and face-to-faceness. Not all
the alloys are the same, but I am urging the Committee first of
all to focus on that.
Secondly, do not go into it thinking that the internet is
either the solution to all of our problems, or the root of all
of our problems. But, thirdly, to think not in those
dichotomous terms, either face-to-face or electronic, but
rather to think about different forms of alloys.
My last point is, I do think that the Committee can make a
major contribution in providing or encouraging the executive
branch to provide better measures at a local level for social
capital. We do have--and I am agreeing here--we do have good
national data about these trends. That is what I draw on, and
that is what all of us draw on. It is much harder to be able to
say, as I said before I have talked to almost all of your
individual constituents. I have been in Peoria, and in Decatur,
and I have been in actually everybody's constituency, and at
those levels there are differences in the character of social
capital, but we cannot talk about them in a rigorous way
because we do not have good local-area based measures of social
capital.
That is not impossible; it is just not being done.
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you.
Senator Heinrich.
Senator Heinrich. Thank you, Mr. Vice Chairman.
I am going to yield for just a few seconds of my time to
Senator Klobuchar. She has a meeting at the White House she
needs to get to.
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you very much. Thank all of you. I
have read your book, Professor Putnam, and enjoyed it. And
thank you for being here today.
Today's hearing really provides a chance to look at how to
build social capital and why it is important to look at
policies about how we can do a better job, especially in this
isolating time. As someone who reads their Twitter feed every
so often, I would say it can be an isolating time with people's
reactions to things.
But at the same time, as I know from my State of Minnesota,
and Representative Paulson knows from our State, is that we
build social capital every day. It is built in the church
basements over a hotdish on Friday nights at a raffle to raise
money for a good cause; at the Hmong marketplace where many in
our Hmong community and others from around the Twin Cities get
together to shop; or the Brian Coyle Center where many in our
Somali community--we have the biggest Somalian community in the
country in Minnesota--gather together; or in the spaghetti
dinner on Minnesota's Iron Range.
So that is how I see us still building social capital. And
now more than ever I see this isolating time of polarization,
and I have actually seen more people turn out, whether it is
the Jewish community center event, or an expansion of our
Dorothy Day Center in St. Paul, than I have ever seen since I
have been in political office.
So it is possible that people are reacting to what they
hear in a good way. One troubling aspect of this hearing today,
we are here to discuss a very important issue that impacts our
society, and I think there are many constructive ways in which
we should examine the issue of social capital. And it is our
responsibility to seek a wide range of expertise.
I do want to express concern that I do not believe it is
constructive to engage on this matter with individuals whose
theories are drastically polarizing and have been discredited.
And I will leave it at that, and I will submit my questions on
this point on the record, but thank you very much.
[The questions referred to appear in the Submissions for
the Record on page 85.]
Senator Heinrich. Thank you, Senator. I am going to get
started with my questions. I want to start with you, Dr. Small.
We have heard some different theories today about why some
people succeed, why others do not. Are you aware of any
evidence that inherent genetic differences drive those economic
outcomes?
Dr. Small. No.
Senator Heinrich. Would it be wise for Congress to make
policy predicated on either gender or genetic or racial
stereotypes?
Dr. Small. No. It would be counterproductive.
Senator Heinrich. Alternatively, would it be wise for
Congress to focus on policies that invest in both people and
communities, irrespective of race, religion, creed, and also
irrespective of how diverse, or even how remote or rural they
are?
Dr. Small. Absolutely. That is what I am hoping we do
today.
Senator Heinrich. So you have done a lot of research about
the benefits of investing in early childhood education--for
example, Head Start. As the Congress works to invest in our
Nation's children, not only because it is the right thing to do
but because investing in our kids actually means investing in
our collective economic future, what lessons would you hope
that members of this Committee would learn?
Dr. Small. Thank you for the question, Senator. Yes, I
would say a couple of things.
One is that we pay special attention to the evidence
concerning the importance of early education. The evidence that
both high-quality organized early education programs work, the
evidence that also from a cost/benefit perspective they are a
wise investment. And the evidence that children in low-income
communities both in the poorest inner city neighborhoods but
also in rural parts of the country, tend to respond positively
to those.
The second thing I would add is that new evidence that is
emerging from actually local experiments in multiple parts of
the country suggest that thinking more expansively about the
potential role of social capital and improving the benefits of
these early education programs suggests that we could do more,
and more effectively, by thinking a little bit more broadly
about such programs.
I guess the third thing I would say is that one common
theme across many of these new experimental programs I have
seen is the idea of no longer thinking about children and
parents separately, but thinking about the family holistically.
This is an issue where I found commentators on both the left
and the right make a version of the same point: that if you
think not just about whether you're taking care of the kid, but
thinking about a child as part of a family unit with a
collective, not an individual set of problems, and therefore a
collective not individual set of solutions, you are likely to
get far better results. And you are likely to use far better--
make far better use of taxpayer dollars.
Senator Heinrich. Thank you for bringing that up, because
that is one of my other particular interests in this, is the
sort of two-generation approach to trying to deal with poverty.
And we have seen great leadership in very diverse states from
Utah, to New Mexico, and others, with that approach. And we
have seen real positive outcomes from it. I have certainly seen
that work in a number of my communities in New Mexico.
I have actually introduced some legislation with Senator
Collins to try and increase opportunities, and get out of those
silos. And I think it may have been Dr. Levin who mentioned the
War on Poverty and the progress that was made in the 1960s in
some of these programs. But we need to recognize where we are
today. And one of the things that I think the two-generation
approach does is it recognizes that many of those things are in
silos. And if they are in silos and you cannot access them,
then they are not actually supporting the family network.
So we will start with Dr. Small and go right across to Dr.
Putnam because I know he has an interest in this, as well.
What are your thoughts on the two-generation approach and
its potential for sort of weaving these two things together, of
basic foundational support, along with the importance of social
capital?
Actually, let's start with Dr. Putnam and then we will come
back to the left.
Dr. Putnam. I think for all the reasons, I think it is a
terrific idea. I think for all the reasons that you alluded to,
treating just the needs of a child--and of course that is
important--but thinking of the child as part of a family unit
and therefore providing coaching, and all around what is often
called in the field wrap-around support for the family, is a
really--the evidence says that is synergistic. You get more out
of combining early childhood education and family support than
you would get out of either of those taken separately.
Senator Heinrich. Dr. Murray, do you have----
Dr. Murray. I am not familiar with the literature on the
two-family support work, so I am really not competent to
respond.
Senator Heinrich. Dr. Levin.
Dr. Levin. I think it is an important innovation in
thinking about public policy to understand that one of the
problems that we have had in social policy in America is that
it has been overly individualistic in how it thinks about
people in need. That it has tended to isolate individuals even
within a family, let alone within a community, and approach
them as needing resources on their own.
The fact is we are all dependent on one another. And I
think any approach to social policy that recognizes that and
that helps people help people who are dependent on them, that
it be responsible, while also helping them meet needs, is an
improvement.
I would say that it is important not to force a model from
the Federal level all the way down to the local level; to be
supportive of different approaches, including this kind of
approach, but not to assume that one size is going to fit all
in a country that is as vast as is ours.
Senator Heinrich. Dr. Small, do you have anything to add?
Dr. Small. Largely that I would agree. I think the point
that philosophically it is difficult to tell people to worry
more about family but to create programs that only target their
kids and not the parent does not make a lot of sense.
I think also from a practical perspective what we have is a
situation where there are out there very strongly skilled
professionals who are specialists on children, or who are
specialists on parents and workforce development, or early
education, and therefore they do what they do best. I think in
the absence of an outside intervention of the kind you are
describing where there is an incentive for these different
kinds of specialists to think about the family as a unit, it
will be difficult for them to be naturally inclined to do so.
So I actually find that with the idea that you are
proposing to be very promising both from a philosophical but
also from a practical perspective.
Senator Heinrich. Thank you. Dr. Putnam, you have talked
extensively about how weaker social networks among Baby Boomers
could make their care dramatically more expensive as they age.
And I have seen in my own family the importance of the
interaction between being able to access health care, be it
through the VA, private insurance, or Medicare, and then being
able to have the social connections and the support that make
life valuable.
Would cutting health care coverage, for example--you know,
we saw a bill emerge from the House in the last few weeks that
cuts Medicaid by I think $800 billion, if I have my figures
correct--does that, how does that make those social support
challenges either more or less acute?
Dr. Putnam. Thank you for that question. I first of all
have to say I am not a gerontologist, so this is not a field
that I--unlike some of the other stuff where I am willing to
present myself as an expert, my work in this area is based just
on looking at the implications for gerontology of what we
already know. Namely, the Baby Boomers at every stage of their
life have had just much less connection.
I think too the policy options that flow from this are
pretty clear, and I do not need much explanation for me. We are
going to have to spend a lot more money than we currently
realize on caring for aging Baby Boomers. Not just because
there are a lot of them, but because they do not have the
social support that the Greatest Generation, their
predecessors, had.
Whether that comes from public sources, Medicare--Medicaid,
I mean, and Medicare, but Medicaid is the relevant portion
because that is supporting the long-term care, or through
private sources, that is a debate that both sides of this
Committee are familiar with. And I do not have anything
particularly to add to it, except to say the problem is real.
It is not going to go away.
I think that is all I can add to the conversation.
Senator Heinrich. I am going to yield back the rest of my
time so we can get to some of the other members.
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you.
Representative LaHood.
Representative LaHood. Thank you, Vice Chair Lee, for
having this hearing. And I want to thank the witnesses today
for your valuable testimony and for being here.
There are really two statistics that jump out when I look
at the materials today. One is the statistic that shows between
1970 and 2016 the share of children in America raised by a
single parent or by neither parent rose from 15 percent to 31
percent. So doubled.
And the second one is, between 1970 and 2015 births to
single mothers rose from 11 percent of all births to 40 percent
of all births.
In looking at both of those statistics and the societal
effects and the costs that it has on our country, and I think
about that in a number of ways, and I think it affects rural as
well as urban, I spent 10 years as a State and Federal
prosecutor and in that role as a prosecutor before every
sentencing we get a presentence report with the details of the
defendant we are going to sentence. And 95 percent of them read
the same when it comes to early childhood or background: born
into a single family home. Did not have any of that upbringing
that we are used to in a conventional family upbringing. And
wound up early getting involved with the criminal justice
system, drugs, alcohol, and led to, you know, further crimes in
the system.
And I think about the societal costs of these stark
statistics: the public education system, particularly in our
urban areas, how much money we throw at to increase graduation
rates and drop-out rates. Not only the court system, but our
jails and prisons and how they are full of kids in some ways
and adults that are affected by a single-family upbringing, or
no parent.
And then of course health care costs, which we do not talk
enough about, but mental illness, behavioral health that we
have to pay money for, and drug and alcohol rehabilitation. And
then of course our welfare system and how it drains on that.
And as I listen to the testimony here today on what are the
remedies, what from a public policy standpoint can we look at
to help stem this tide? And it is difficult to find real
success stories.
And I know, Dr. Putnam, you talked about it being a purple
issue. Dr. Levin, you talked about trying to increase marriage
rates, and that was a failure. And trying to have more
community input.
But I guess from a public policy standpoint, sometimes
throwing more money at it perpetuates the problems in many
ways. And so trying to figure out, are there success stories
that each of you can point to that have worked in specific
areas? And are we--is the trajectory changing as we move on? Or
is it going to continue? And I will start with Dr. Levin.
Dr. Levin. Well thank you for the question. It is a vitally
important question. I would say a couple of things.
First of all, there are stories to tell about genuinely
significant reversals in dangerous social trends. I think the
example of teen pregnancy over the past 15 years is an under-
appreciated and under-studied example of a genuinely disastrous
cultural trend genuinely turning around in a meaningful way.
I would not say sitting here that I can give you an exact
description of why and how that happened, but it certainly
included some combination of bipartisan agreement about the
existence of the problem, of frank discussion of ways of
addressing it, ways of taking it on that made both sides of our
politics uncomfortable, and ultimately a culture change that
made a big difference.
Now I do not think that there is in that a model for
dramatically changing rates of family formation that could have
the same kind of effect, but I think that again place by place,
community by community there may be something to learn there.
I would also say--and this is a challenging point to make
in a way that does not diminish the significance of the
problem--if you had told an American in 1950 that the rates of
out-of-wedlock births would rise from 5 percent that year to
almost 50 percent in 2017, and asked that person what our
country would look like as a result, they would describe a
country that looks much worse than our country. They would have
described a hell scape that we would not recognize.
The fact is that we have dealt with this problem in ways
that can help us think about what success can look like. I do
not think it is possible to return to the family formation
rates of the 1950s. Those were very unusual. It is not the case
that that is how things always were in America until the 1960s.
It was a very unusual moment in post-War America, and it is a
moment that we should be careful about using as a standard and
a norm in all of our cultural discussions.
People have found ways of thriving despite enormous
disadvantages, including being born into broken families, which
is an enormous disadvantage. I think we have a profound
obligation to try to help people build stronger families for
their children, and to try to help children grow up in stronger
families.
We also have an obligation to deal with the reality that a
lot of Americans will not grow up in intact families, and to
try to find ways of allowing them to thrive nonetheless. That
is not to offer solutions, right? That is an answer in search
of a final sentence that resolves the problem. But I do think
that we need to think realistically about what problems we are
looking for solutions to, and to define that in as broad a way
as we reasonably can in public policy.
Representative LaHood. Thank you.
Dr. Murray.
Dr. Murray. You asked specifically about marriage rates and
out-of-wedlock birth rates and turning those around, are there
any success stories?
I am not familiar with any. Also, one has to recognize the
degree to which this is a class-based phenomenon; that marriage
rates for those in the upper middle class are still very high.
They stopped declining in the 1980s. Divorce has gone down for
the upper middle class since then. Marriage is alive and well
in the upper middle class, and the bottom has fallen out of it
in the working class. And the statistics I used in ``Coming
Apart'' I focused specifically on non-Latino whites for a very
clear reason. I do not want people to be under any illusion
this is related to ethnicity. This is an American social
problem.
And at the time I was looking at those numbers, the ones
for 2010 were that among white working class folks that you had
48 percent married, down from the more than 80 percent in 1960.
It has been essentially a collapse. And if you go to white
working class communities, or I am sure black working class
communities, or Latino ones, I do not know of any examples
where marriage rates have risen.
And if others on the panel have, I would love to hear it.
Representative LaHood. Thank you.
Dr. Putnam.
Dr. Putnam. Actually I agree with the preceding two
speakers. The statistics you quoted are of course right. The
one you probably meant to include but did not is this one about
class differences, the growth in out-of-wedlock births and the
growth of fragile families is entirely concentrated in the
working class. And that only makes the problem worse because it
means that kids from one side of the tracks are not getting the
same support at home.
There is a surprising amount of consensus actually among
experts here. There would not have been 10, 15 years ago, but
there now is. And I think there is consensus on the following
points:
One, this is happening. That is, there is a growing class
gap in family formation.
Two, it is important. It does matter for the kids.
Three, everybody recognizes that there are single moms who
are doing a bang-up job against big challenges. So it is not a
matter of blaming the moms. But nevertheless, it is a problem.
Four, the change probably has been driven by a combination
of cultural and economic factors. That is to say, you ask me, I
am mostly on the left. I think there is a big cultural change
that has happened, but I also think there have been big
economic changes that have happened. And I think if we frame
this as if we have to choose between why has this happened, is
it really economics, or is it really culture, that is going to
get in our way of trying to fix it.
And the last point, I think we agreed that we can think of
things on the economic side that might make a difference. That
is, providing EITC or there are other ways in which you could
provide greater economic support to families in this situation.
But I think there is broad agreement, and you have all said
that, that even though there are clear cultural causes of this,
we do not know how to turn that dial except with respect to the
teen pregnancy issue. It is important that we understand this.
The teen pregnancy problem is--I do not want to say it is
solved, but there has been a huge decline in teen pregnancy at
the very same time that there has been a growth in out-of-
wedlock births. How could that happen? Because most of these
out-of-wedlock births are not happening to teenagers, they are
happening to people, couples in their 20s and 30s. And exactly
how you begin to address that is, honestly, the cultural side
of that is not so clear to me.
I mean I think it would be great if we could figure out how
to do that, but I do not know of any success stories at that
level. And I think that is actually what I have said, most
experts in this field would agree with what I have just said, I
think.
Vice Chairman Lee. Representative Maloney.
Representative Maloney. Thank you.
And, Dr. Putnam, thank you. Thank you for your books.
Mr. Chairman, let me begin with a few thoughts on this
hearing. Dr. Murray has rather infamously written, and I quote,
``No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of
the world's great philosophical traditions.'' End quote.
Let us think about that for a moment. It is not only
grossly unfair, it is demonstrably untrue. From Hypatia the
great Greek mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who was
the head of the Neopelatonic School during the Byzantine
Empire, to Maria Mitchell, the first woman to discover a comet,
to Grace Hopper who wrote COBAL, one of the first computer
programming languages, to the now-famous mathematicians from
the Academy Award winning nominated movie ``Hidden Figures,''
who helped America win the space race, Katherine Johnson,
Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson, to Maria Mayer who won the
Nobel Prize in Physics, and Speaker Ryan's all-time favorite
philosopher Ayn Rand, these are just some of the lucky few, the
women who defied the odds and the structural barriers to
succeed in philosophy and science.
Just think about how many more could have joined their
ranks. Women solve problems, cure diseases, and invent the next
great thing over and over again, yet we must continually combat
the stereotypes in Dr. Murray's work.
Offensive views about a woman's capabilities are wrong-
headed and hold women back from their full potential. These
ideas keep women out of STEM fields in schools, out of
executive positions at work, out of the board room, and out of
Congress.
We even see them in Presidential politics when one
candidate claimed that a woman did not have, quote, ``the
stamina,'' end quote, for the Presidency. These biases are a
crutch and an excuse to not address the real barriers women
face in our economy, under-investment in child care, the lack
of any paid parental leave, unequal pay, and so on, and so on.
In my humble opinion, Congress should not give these ideas
a platform, and our Committee should not seek to elevate
offensive claims that rely on spurious evidence.
I would like to ask Dr. Small and Dr. Levin, we like to
think about America on the cutting edge. But our policies hold
back today's working families in so many ways. New parents are
not guaranteed working families paid leave for the birth of a
child. We are among two nations in the world that do not
provide this safety net guaranteed to our families.
Many eligible young people cannot access Head Start. Our
Family and Medical Leave Act, a very important bill, but it
should include other important family challenges such as
conferences with teachers on a child's performance in school.
And millions of low-wage workers do not have predictable
schedules. They cannot even count on knowing when they are
going to be working even a few days ahead of time, a situation
that Senator Heinrich pointed out was a challenge his own
mother confronted.
So, Dr. Small, how would addressing these policies--these
are concrete policies that we could address--how could
addressing these shortcomings enable America's working families
to build a better, stronger social capital and social network?
Dr. Small. Congresswoman, thank you for that question. It
actually provides a great opportunity to connect the prior
conversation to this one.
I would like to make an important observation about the
rise in the rate of birth to unmarried mothers, which is that
it is not so much the case that working class parents are
driving the trend. It is that upper middle class parents are
the exception. In other words, it is really only among upper
middle class parents where this trend has not risen.
In fact, to put this in perspective, you might remember
that in the 1960s the old Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put
out a report on ``The Negro family: A Case of National Action''
it was titled, and he pointed out that among African Americans
birth to unmarried mothers were extremely high.
Well today, births among middle class whites are higher
than they were to unmarried--than they were, excuse me, to
African Americans at the time Moynihan was writing. It is a
trend that has happened across the board. Again, not upper
middle class. But there are not just upper middle class and
working class people. There are lots of middle class people out
there, and among the middle class the trends are high, and they
are higher than they were when Moynihan sounded the alarm.
What this tells us is not that this is not an issue, but
that the core problem was the lack of resources to manage
giving birth as an unmarried mother, rather than just giving
birth as an unmarried mother, because many middle class parents
who are doing so today seem to be doing fine.
In that context, I think the point you have made about the
importance of opportunities for those mothers is essential. We
are unique among the developing countries in the paucity of
resources and opportunities we give to mothers early and
shortly after--during and shortly after the birth of their
children to participate fully in the economic system.
This includes insufficient opportunities for paid leave.
Also, insufficient support for full-time early education for
their children. And also not fully effective or efficient
enforcement of anti-discrimination legislation.
I think if you saw support for these three things, you
would find that those families who choose to do what
increasingly everyone is doing will find that their mothers
participate as fully in the economic system as their inherent
abilities would naturally allow, and in many other countries,
provide them the opportunity to do so.
Vice Chairman Lee. Senator Cotton.
Senator Cotton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for convening this
very important hearing. And thank you to our extremely
distinguished panel of witnesses for appearing today, and for
all the important work you have done over the years.
I would like to start with Dr. Putnam and your written
testimony. On page 5 you write: ``This cherished American Dream
is evaporating for over 25 million children born to low-income,
less-educated parents in the last three decades.'' A little bit
later you write, ``Rich kids and poor kids are now growing up
in separate and unequal Americas.''
That is the case across racial and ethnic lines, correct,
Dr. Putnam?
Dr. Putnam. Yes, sir.
Senator Cotton. And you tell a story that I have seen with
different names on it, most of us have, very poignant about
Alissa and Layla. Alissa, a rich kid in Southern California
whose parents can afford a fancy private school, and swimming
lessons to get her into a better college, and Layla whose
mother is out of work, who has to work at an entry-level job
and go to a for-profit college hoping that she can get ahead.
Those disparities that you write about I think we have all seen
back home in our home towns and states with depressing
regularity.
You go on on page 6 to say further, ``Rich kids enter
kindergarten almost a full year ahead of bottom-third kids and
rich kids increasingly attend schools with other rich kids, and
poor kids with other poor kids.''
You have what you call ``Scissor Graphs'' on page 7 and
page 8, which also tell the tale of the amount of time that
richer parents, better educated parents, are able to spend time
with their children and developmental time in what you call
enrichment experiences like swimming lessons or summer camps,
time spent together at family dinners and in extracurricular
activities.
I want to explore that further with a chart that we have
here, and I will orient the audience to that chart. This is
real hourly wages by education. So over here (indicating) you
start at 1973. It is normalized to 100 where basically
everybody is the same.
And you see over time coming out to just after 2003. So
this does not include continued disparities. The growth in
wages or decline based on education. And you see a very strong
correlation. Those with the most advanced degrees have seen the
highest wage growth. College degrees nearly as high. But then
here (indicating), some college but not a degree, barely any
growth at all. High school graduation, a decline. Less-than-
high school education, a collapse in wages.
Does this reflect what you write about in your written
testimony, Dr. Putnam? Is this one of the driving causes of the
decline in social capital and social trust among more stressed
families and stressed communities?
Dr. Putnam. Yes, sir. It is not the only cause, but it is
an important background factor. And then, if I can add----
Senator Cotton. Yes, please.
Dr. Putnam [continuing]. What the work that I summarized in
my testimony that I wrote about in ``Our Kids'' suggests is the
translation of that graph into the scissors graph in individual
families means that increasingly family status is inherited. It
is passed from--increasingly, and that makes it even worse.
Senator Cotton. And is that because in part divisions along
educational and class-based lines become more self-reinforcing
and perpetuating than older ethnic, or racial divisions did in
the mid-20th Century?
Dr. Putnam. Yes, sir.
Senator Cotton. You write a little bit further in your
testimony on page 10 about ``areas of interest that were left
aside: successful economic and job development policies in
communities are likely to have important positive effects on
the local opportunity gap, but assessing such strategies was
outside the scope of our expertise.''
So the point there would be finding some way for people who
have less than a college degree to once again partake in the
American Dream that increasingly is out of touch for them?
Dr. Putnam. Yes, sir. Can I add just two quick
qualifications? One is, I used, quickly, rich and poor, but I
was not comparing Bill Gates' kids to homeless kids. I was
comparing kids coming from the upper third of American
society--that is, kids coming from college-educated homes. My
grandchildren are in that sense ``rich kids,'' although they
are not rich. And I was not comparing them to the poorest of
the poor. I am comparing them to what we used to call the
working class. That is, people who did not get past high
school.
So I know you understand this, but I do not want the quick
terms ``rich'' and ``poor'' to get misunderstood. We are
talking about a basic----
Senator Cotton. I come from Darnel, Arkansas, where $18,000
makes me a millionaire.
Dr. Putnam. Yes. Secondly, the passage of my testimony that
you, written testimony that you referred to, came from a report
that I chaired that was produced by 50 experts from across
disciplines and across party lines and so on. We tried to
figure out how can we begin to narrow the opportunity gap?
And I have no doubt that local economic development
strategies of the sort that you all explored in your previous
hearing a month ago are important.
I also think, however--and we did not talk about those
here, but we did talk about a lot of ways in which individual
kids coming from disadvantaged backgrounds could be helped to
get back onto what we call ``on ramps,'' things like
apprenticeship programs, and community college reforms and so
on that would enable poor kids, kids coming from the bottom
part of that graph, themselves to move up the ladder.
That blockage, increasing blockage of circulation upward is
I think a really grave problem for America.
Senator Cotton. Thank you very much for those answers and
the testimony, Dr. Putnam. And my apologias to other witnesses.
My time expired. But I do want to just conclude by saying, to
me one of the most important policy challenges we face as a
Congress is to help find a way to increase the wages of people
in our country who do not have college degrees, or who do not
have advanced degrees.
I would submit one of the easiest policy levers that we
have is our immigration policy, to reorient our immigration
policy towards supporting higher skilled workers as opposed to
the current policy which is heavily skewed towards unskilled or
lower skilled workers which directly competes with the workers
in this area here.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you.
Representative Beyer.
Representative Beyer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank
all of you for coming to be with us today.
As we engage in the conversation on social capital, I
believe it is important that we remember that racism in our
society is still very real. Just this weekend Alt-Right leader
Richard Spencer, whose headquarters are right down the street
from my house, led two white supremacist rallies, one by
torchlight, in Charlottesville, Virginia, my own Commonwealth.
The United States Congress itself has a long and ugly
history on matters of race and gender. We are reminded of this
every day as we walk past statues of by-gone bigots and
misogynists. It is also worth remembering that those racist
luminaries whose views and policies which were rejected by all
535 Members of Congress, often turn to pseudo-science to
justify hatred and exploitation.
Cognizant of this history, we would hope that we would do
everything in our power to make a clean break with that foul
part of our legacy, as opposed to dressing it up in new clothes
and returning it to these marble halls.
Vice Chairman Lee, I am fascinated by the stated topic of
this hearing today, and I found your past comments on social
capital very valuable. But as I sincerely looked forward to
discussing this issue in depth with Dr. Small, Dr. Levin, and
Dr. Putnam, but I am dismayed that instead we are creating a
forum for the discussion of critical economic issues in the
best traditions of this Committee, the decision to invite
Charles Murray risked turning this hearing into a sideshow.
I cannot imagine, Senator, that a man of your intelligence
and political acumen was unaware of the meaning and
consequences of inviting Charles Murray. I will note that this
seems no accident that Chairman Tiberi has taken the unorthodox
step of abdicating this hearing to you, and that many of your
Republican colleagues have chosen to avoid this hearing
altogether.
I am aware that arguments about free speech are often
offered when defending invitations made to Dr. Murray, but I
want to be clear: This has nothing to do with the First
Amendment. The Constitution guarantees his right to write and
say and publish whatever he wishes, but there is no
Constitutional right to testify before a Congressional
committee. And I do not believe that this Committee's time and
resources should be used to burnish his reputation.
After all, this is unconstrained exercise of his
Constitutionally protected right of free speech that gave him
his toxic reputation in the first place.
Dr. Small, I found your testimony and your scholarship
interesting, and I hope we have time to discuss it later in
future depth, but I think we have to address the elephant of
bigotry in the room. Can you give me your professional opinion
of ``The Bell Curve'' as a matter of scholarship?
Dr. Small. It's not a very good book. There are many
reasons I could offer. I do not know how much time you have,
Congressman. If you would like a longer answer, I would be
happy to provide it.
Representative Beyer. Well let me phrase it a little
differently. What is your opinion of the utility of a book that
argues that African Americans are born with lower IQs than
White Americans? That there is a racially based genetic
difference in IQ? Can this really be a guide for policymakers?
Dr. Small. Not a very effective one, no.
Representative Beyer. Let me move on, then.
Dr. Putnam, I am in the heart of the Baby Boom. And at
least the culture I was raised in, which was pretty mixed, like
the one that you write about in your book, your most recent
book, but we all went to church. We were all in the Boy Scouts,
Little League, summer camp, dinner together at six o'clock.
How come we don't have any friends? And why do we have
fewer friends and fewer spouses and fewer children? Not the
kids that are 25 and 30, but the ones that are 55 and 65?
Dr. Putnam. Thank you for that question. I have spent a lot
of time in the book building room, which was written now 20
years ago, trying to understand why this had happened. And I
teased out a variety of things that contributed to that, things
that were happening in the years when you were growing up.
Suburbanization, for example, is part of the problem.
Television, I thought, was a big part of the problem
because it privatized our leisure time. But then there was a
big, unexplained part of why it happened. That is, there is
clearly a big difference between the generation before the
Boomers, that is, what other people call the Greatest
Generation, who had very--sort of the parents of the Baby
Boomers, had very, very high levels of social capital in every
respect that we are talking about here: more family stability,
more community involvement, more friends, and so on, than the
Boomers.
But why that is was a puzzle to me, and it is actually a
bigger puzzle now. And the easy thought would be to think well
it was World War II that created that sense of civic
obligation, solidarity, and so on, and I think there is
something to that. Forgive me now for alluding to coming
attractions in response to that question. I am now at the
moment up in the woods of New Hampshire trying to finish a book
on that question: Why? Because it had not been happening
forever.
In the previous half of the 20th Century we were getting
more and more connected. And then sometime in the 1960s there
was a turning, and we began to be less and less. All of those
things.
And why that it is is still a mystery to me. When I finally
crack the mystery I will finish the book and then I will be
glad to come back and testify. I am sorry not to be helpful in
the answer to that question.
Representative Beyer. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I yield
back.
Vice Chairman Lee. Senator Peters.
Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate you
calling this hearing.
But before I begin my questioning, I just want to briefly
address a troubling aspect of this hearing, which we have heard
from some of my other Members as well. Essentially we are here
to discuss a very, very serious and valid issue in American
society, the issue of building social capital in our
communities. And I believe that many people on this dais today
would agree that there is both declining trust in the
institutions and a declining trust between fellow citizens.
And we as lawmakers will play a very important role to help
bridge these divides. However, before us today we have a
witness who serves no purpose other than to bring divisiveness
to this body. And while I am sure all of us here believe deeply
in freedom of speech and expression, as well as the need for
Congress to seek a wide range of opinions and expertise, a
witness who has written extensively to promote racist and
sexist stereotypes is a needless distraction from what we need
to be doing here.
To have someone who holds these views elevated alongside
actual policy experts before us today is disrespectful to our
other witnesses and members of the Committee in the important
topics we have to discuss.
So with that, I would like to take a look, a very broad
look at what we are facing in this country that I am very
concerned about. And that is, obviously declining social
capital, but I look at it as just declining trust; that we are
seeing this erosion of trust in our society that I think has
very ominous implications for the democracy that we all love,
and the Republic that we cherish here in the United States.
And I have seen that trust over the years of public service
that I have had. I was a State legislator for a number of
years. Then I got out of politics and loved being out of
politics for a while. And then when I came back in 2009 in
Congress and started holding town hall meetings, this was a
period of a few years between those two experiences. The
reaction that I got from folks, the vitriol, the anger, the
belief in issues irrespective of facts, was pretty remarkable
in that time period.
And we have continued to see it go forward. And I just give
an example. During the health care debate in 2009 as we were
debating the Affordable Care Act, I had town hall meetings, and
some of my colleagues are having town hall meetings today,
dealing with the opposite side of that issue, but I remember
people screaming and hollering, not wanting to trust any
statements that were made.
I would even put statements on the board with the actual
language of the bill, word for word, that you could get from
any source, and people would scream, ``You're lying! You're
lying!'' And I say, ``These are the facts.''
And it seems now that we have gone to a world where facts
do not matter; that we are in a post-truth world; that all
news, if it is not news that people like, then it must be fake
news. If you do not like judicial opinions, it is not because
you do not agree with the judicial thinking behind the judge,
it is because the judge is a ``so-called judge,'' or because of
the ethnic background of the judge and cannot be critical.
This erosion of trust that we are continuing to see, and
seems to be accelerated particularly by particular political
leaders who exploit that, I think has very ominous implications
for the future of our country.
So if our panelists--let's start with Dr. Putnam. Talk a
little bit about what you are seeing as an erosion of trust
broadly, and what you think that means for us going forward.
And these are not issues that are going to be easy to solve as
legislators, and be able to solve with any one particular
Federal policy. You have talked about many policies here today,
which are all great. But this is something much bigger than all
of that. And we are not just seeing it in the United States. We
are seeing it in Europe. We are seeing the kinds of movement,
the kind of post-truth, post-order kind of movements around the
world now. In fact, at the Munich Security Conference that I
was at, one of the themes was how do we live in a post-truth
world?
How do we change that, Dr. Putnam?
Dr. Putnam. Thank you for the question. It is obviously a
fundamental one facing our whole country these days. But it is
important to understand--I said ``these days,'' but it is
important to understand that this trend, the trend in declining
trust, and I would say trustworthiness too, and reciprocity,
and mutual esteem, just being nice to one another, that trend
goes back a long way. That did not begin in 2008. It did not
begin in 2016. Pick your date, your political date. It didn't
begin then. It has been going down for a long time.
And I do not mean that you did, but a lot of commentators
are talking about that and want to put the blame on some
particular political person or ideology or moment----
Senator Peters. And I do not want to do that.
Dr. Putnam. I know that you don't, and I am insistently
wanting to be purple here. This is not caused by particular
political actions.
If I can be a little academic for a moment--that's what I
am--it is important to distinguish, as I lay out in my
testimony, between two different kinds of social capital.
Social ties that link us to other people like us--and that is
called bonding social capital--and social ties that link us to
people unlike us, and that's called bridging social capital.
So my ties to other white male elderly Jewish professors,
that is my bonding social capital. And my ties to people of a
different generation, or a different race, or a different
religion, or a different political party, that is my bridging
social capital. I am not saying bridging good/bonding bad.
Because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup
will represent your bonding social capital. But we need a lot
of bridging social capital. Democracy needs a ton of bridging
social capital. America has in the past been pretty decent
about having bridging social capital. Sorry for the jargon. It
just means you have good friends who do not share everything
about you.
There has been a collapse in bridging social capital in
America. And part of that is because of this growing physical
segregation that Charles Murray has talked about. We are not
even living near other people who have different views from us.
I think that is the right diagnosis. How to change that is
a complicated problem. I could talk a lot about specific policy
things, but actually I think we have to understand that is the
fundamental problem. We are just pulling apart as a society,
and not just with respect to who shows up at town meetings, but
with respect to our daily lives.
Senator Peters. Dr. Small. Dr. Levin. What about bridging
capital? What do we need to do?
Dr. Small. So I guess I would--thank you, Senator. The
first thing I would say is I would agree, first of all, that
trust in government is down. And also trust in media and news
from multiple sources, communication sources, is also down. And
as you all know, political polarization is also up.
In terms of sort of what to do, I guess part of the way I
would think about this question is in terms of the old saying
about sunlight being the greatest disinfectant. I think trust
in government needs an increase in transparency.
While it may not reverse the long-term secular trend Dr.
Putnam just referred to, it would certainly make a difference.
I think strong support from the Federal Government for
science and scientific research that is impartial and objective
would also slowly begin to restore faith in certain
institutions of government.
So I agree that these problems are longer lasting than any
single individual or set of people, but I guess I would have a
more optimistic view about the potential for short-term actions
that are in fact within the power of the Congress to begin to
chip away at the distrust in some of our core institutions.
Dr. Levin. Thank you, Senator, for the question. I think it
is a very important facet of this set of trends that Dr. Putnam
and Dr. Murray have described. And I just think Dr. Murray's
very important book ``Coming Apart'' is one way of
understanding how this has happened.
To me one way of thinking about an approach to rebuilding
trust is to think about how trust is built. And trust is
largely built interpersonally. It is not built at a national
level all at once, generally speaking. It is built between
people. And I think that for us to build up more trust in our
political life would require us to allow more of our political
life and more of our public policy conversations to happen at
the level where people meet each other face to face.
And that suggests allowing more power to flow through local
institutions, and to flow through community institutions. That
is a very general answer. It is not particular policy formula
for addressing this problem, but it seems to me that it would
help us to turn down the temperature in Washington some so that
we do not think of our politics as an endless fight to the
death. And it would allow us to speak to each other face to
face in ways that make it difficult to treat each other as
simply caricatures.
It is not always impossible to treat as caricatures people
who are sitting right in front of you. I think it happens all
the time. I think it is happening now in some respects. But I
do think that it is harder, and that ultimately if we allow
meaningful policy discussions to happen at levels where people
can participate directly, they may be a little more likely to
be drawn in. But, you know, that is an answer at the margins
and I would not pretend that it is a solution to the problem
simply.
Vice Chairman Lee. Senator Cruz.
Senator Cruz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Gentlemen, thank you
for being here. Thank you for testifying. I appreciate your
coming before this Committee.
Dr. Murray, in your testimony you came to the conclusion
that part of the solution for the many challenges we face is
likely to be less political and rather cultural. Could you
elaborate on this point? And in particular, give your opinion
of the importance of strong families, and faith, and community
life towards improving social capital?
Dr. Murray. I am basically going to second what Bob Putnam
said earlier, that if we gathered people together 20 years ago
on issues such as is religion really important social capital?
Is the family, the traditional family really important, there
would have been a huge divide depending on the political
predilections of the people we are talking about.
We have made progress on those fronts. And so now, I am not
speaking as a person of faith, I am an agnostic actually,
although I am wavering in my unbelief, and I have been
divorced. So in all of those ways, I am not speaking as a
``True Believer'' in the institutions of family and faith. I am
speaking as a social scientist, as Robert Putnam is, saying
this thing called social capital is absolutely crucial to the
way that a free society works.
It has been the signature of American exceptionalism,
actually, from the time of Tocqueville, on through the rest of
the 19th Century and into the 20th Century. The way that
American communities worked was different from the way
communities worked anywhere else in the world. And the reasons
we behaved differently are captured in ``social capital'' as
Robert Putnam has described it.
And, that is going down the tubes. And it is going down the
tubes in large part, not entirely but in large part because the
institutions of family and of faith have deteriorated. So once
again I have stated the problem. The progress consists of the
much greater consensus that we have now than we had before.
That does not get us any closer to a solution, with one glimmer
of hope.
The United States has had at least three, and maybe four,
religious Great Awakenings, depending on which historian you
read, and they had enormous consequences. There was one in the
18th Century. There were two in the 19th Century. Maybe one in
the 1970s. They had enormous consequences for the polity as a
whole, and they also came out of nowhere. They coalesced. They
had enormous impact, and you really could not see it coming.
In a way the Civil Rights Movement reflects the same kind
of phenomenon where the Civil Rights Movement really got going
in the mid-1950s and by 1964 we had the Civil Rights Act.
So if the United States has been able to turn culturally on
a dime when the people sensed that things had gone badly wrong
before, it is not inconceivable to me that it will do so again.
And I can go no further in being helpful about how that might
happen.
Senator Cruz. Dr. Putnam, would you care to elaborate or
amplify on any of those themes?
Dr. Putnam. No. As we have said repeatedly, with respect to
the importance of communities of faith and families, I think
there is broad consensus among the experts. There is not broad
consensus about why the problem has happened. That is, there
are different views even probably among us about exactly why
the family has collapsed, and exactly why people have turned
away from communities of faith.
And also I think probably we all agree it is not just those
two institutions. Those are ones that Charles has emphasized,
and I agree with that, but it is also true of Rotary Clubs and
bowling leagues and many, many other examples of social
capital.
If I may, Senator, I would like to piggyback on some
comments that other people have made that I agree with,
actually. I do think that this problem, if we reverse engineer,
if it is 2020 and we have begun to turn this around, the first
signs will be at the State and local level around America. That
is where America has in the past fixed its problems.
And it involved and included exactly the period of the turn
of the 19th to the 20th Century when there was another great
religious fervor during that period, but not only that. It was
also the period where labor unions got started. It was a period
when most service organizations, Kiwanis, and Rotary, and keep
going on. It was a period in which there were grassroots
solutions to problems very much like the ones we face now.
I give as one example, in response to the growing class gap
then, in 1910, Americans in small towns in the heartland
invented the high school. The high school that is free
education for everybody in town, all kids in town, was not
invented by--or if God did it, this is how He did it--in small
rural towns, actually.
Rich folks who had already sent their kids to private
secondary education, boarding schools or something, became
convinced that other people's kids should also have access to
four years of secondary education. It turned out to be the best
decision we've ever made because that, providing all kids in
town with these supports, on the one hand raised the total
productivity of the American labor force so much that that
single decision when it spread nationally accounts for most of
American economic growth throughout the 20th Century, and it
leveled the playing field.
Now I am not trying to say--please do not misunderstand
me--that the high school, or maybe even any educational reform,
is the solution to our problems now. I am trying to say the
process by which we got there was by ordinary folks in ordinary
towns where they were meeting face to face, and there was a lot
of public division then--I am talking about 1900, 1910, big
political turmoils, but people in face-to-face communities were
able to put that aside and say, okay, so let that noise go on,
how can we fix things here?
My hope actually that we could begin as a country to turn
this around is that as I go around the country talking to
people, and especially in local communities, there is a lot, at
the grassroots a lot of hope that things could begin to happen.
Now will all the problems be completely solved at the local
level? Absolutely not. We are going to need--at some point
there are going to be some successes that come out of that
period of new experimentation, and then we are going to say,
okay, that turns out to be really great. Let's do that every
place.
So I am not saying that all these problems in the end are
going to be solved at the national level--at the local level
without national policies, but I am saying that that is where I
think I would look for opportunities for making real progress
outside the--to use language I used earlier--to look for purple
solutions to this problem, not just red or blue solutions.
Senator Cruz. Thank you.
Vice Chairman Lee. Thank you, Senator Cruz. I want to thank
each of our witnesses today. We decided to hold this hearing
because it is on an important topic, and because it is such an
important topic we sought to assemble four of the top experts
in the entire country on this issue. And that is exactly what
we did.
This panel would have been incomplete without any one of
you, and I am grateful to each of you for being here and for
your willingness to reach out and identify issues that have
gone unaddressed for too long, that have not been always
socially popular, that have not always been on the cutting edge
of getting news. They sometimes do get news, but perhaps not in
the ways that anyone had intended at the outset.
I appreciate your willingness to be here today and to
inform us, and for your academic integrity and your objective,
which is to identify issues that too often go unaddressed and
are often ignored in our quest to address other more sexy, more
popular, more palatable issues.
These are difficult questions, and I deeply appreciate your
willingness to shed light on them for our Committee. The record
will remain open for five business days for any Member who
would like to submit questions for the record.
The hearing is adjourned.
(Whereupon, at 11:52 a.m., Wednesday, May 17, 2017, the
hearing was adjourned.)
SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD
Opening Statement of Hon. Mike Lee, Vice Chairman, Joint Economic
Committee
Our Nation, today, faces very real economic challenges.
As we heard during our Committee's hearing, last month, economic growth
during the recovery has been meager and uneven. The U.S. economy has
become less dynamic and innovative in recent decades. We miss the
strong productivity growth America enjoyed in the mid-twentieth century
and the unusually large wage gains it brought.
However, in historical and comparative perspective, most
Americans enjoy unprecedented material living standards. Our economic
problems often take the form of unsatisfactory rates of improvement; we
are growing richer less quickly than we did when we were poorer.
Nevertheless, many Americans--poor, middle class, and
wealthy--feel that something is amiss. It is a feeling that cannot be
reduced to economic anxiety. Rather, there is a sense that our social
fabric is fraying.
And these concerns are reflected in objective measures of
family and community health. To cite just a few of the trends that may
be grouped under the rubric of ``social capital'': marriage and
churchgoing have declined; distrust of the Nation's institutions has
grown; mixed-income neighborhoods have become rarer; regional
polarization has increased; and young men who are neither working nor
looking for work have become more numerous and more isolated. We do
less together than in the past, and we are worse off for it,
economically and otherwise.
Today's hearing, along with a new report released on
Monday, launches the Social Capital Project, a multi-year research
effort I have established in the Vice Chairman's office. The project
will investigate the health of the bonds of family, faith, community,
and work that define our lives.
An emphasis on social capital complements the economic
lens through which we typically view national challenges today. Many of
our ostensibly economic problems reflect the withering of our
associational life. For example, the fragility of so many families
today reduces upward mobility. And diminishing trust has implications
for the decline in business dynamism, since risk-taking requires
confidence in each other and our institutions.
Economic trends, in turn, affect the extent to which we
cooperate to achieve our desired ends. The project's inaugural report,
``What We Do Together,'' concludes that rising affluence has reduced
the economic necessity of having close ties with neighbors and
traditional institutions. It also highlights the extent to which the
growth in two-worker families has affected investment in social
capital. These economic changes have conferred valuable benefits, but
by depleting social capital, they have also come with costs.
The twin pillars of American freedom--a free enterprise
economy and a voluntary civil society--exist and operate in the vital
space between the government and the individual where organic
communities form and networks of economic opportunity and social
cohesion are built. It is my hope that the Social Capital Project will
start a new conversation for our country that emphasizes social
solidarity and mutual cooperation. As we face today's economic
challenges, policymakers should ask how we can empower civil society,
and what government should or should not do to thicken the middle
layers between the individual and the State.
I now turn to Ranking Member Heinrich for his opening
statement, and I'll then introduce the witnesses. Thank you.
__________
Prepared Statement of Hon. Martin Heinrich, Ranking Member, Joint
Economic Committee
The topic of social capital is an important one, especially when it
is used to build communities up.
I worry, though, that this conversation could be used to blame
disadvantaged communities for not being successful.
It's easy to generalize about people and communities. But we must
resist doing that.
Because it is offensive to use this platform here in Congress to
promote the institutionalizing of stereotypes or discrimination. It is
offensive, and frankly not constructive, to blame communities for the
challenges they face.
There is no substitute for a strong economic foundation and smart
investments in our children and workers. Social networks help, but
investments in individuals and communities are key to building a better
future and a more vibrant economy.
I think we'd all agree that Congress cannot force people to marry,
become friends with their neighbors, or join civic organizations or
churches. We need to be both strategic and realistic about the policies
we pursue.
When I was a child, both of my parents worked.
For my father, his union job helped him earn a higher wage and
protections at work. Belonging to a union is a source of social
capital, and my family benefited from that.
My mom, on the other hand, didn't have a union job. Her schedule
was three weeks on with one day off for a wage that undervalued her and
her work, leaving her with little time to spend building networks.
So as we prepare to hear about the role of social capital, about
ways to help working families get into the middle class--to even have
the time to make community connections and shore up social capital--
it's important that we not lose sight of investing in people like my
mom.
Right now, the deck is stacked against some and in favor of others.
Children of wealthier parents start with a leg up. Good schools are
increasingly concentrated in wealthier areas, leaving millions of
children behind.
While a college education has been long thought of as a path to the
American Dream, that path is financially out of reach for many
Americans.
As Americans, we have a deep commitment to everyone getting a fair
shot. To achieve that, government has a significant role to play.
It must provide the essential building blocks -affordable child
care and early learning, quality K-12 education, comprehensive health
care and access to affordable post-secondary education.
We can break the cycle of poverty by simultaneously providing
programs and supports to parents and their children. The two-generation
approach is evidence-based, data-driven, bipartisan policy that works.
I've seen the power of 2-gen models in New Mexico. Initiatives like
The United Way's Early Learning Center in Santa Fe which offers year-
round, full-day services for children right next to technology,
employment and social service assistance for parents. All under one
roof.
Helping parents and children in these programs develop supportive
networks is an important component of helping these families achieve
success--and building stronger communities.
We must expand proven programs like the EITC and the child tax
credit that lift almost 10 million people out of poverty each year.
We need universal pre-K starting at age 3. We have long known that
investments in early education boost education outcomes, and increase
earnings.
Government cannot--and should not--go it alone.
In Gallup, Carlsbad, Silver City and throughout New Mexico, it's
the schools, churches, nonprofits, businesses and philanthropic groups
that define a community. They are the community anchors.
But, government must provide the basics.
Dr. Small's research on Head Start attendance reminds us that
limited, inexpensive interventions can have meaningful impacts.
His research found that when parents of Head Start students
developed networks, attendance improved.
Just one example. But we can learn two important things from this
research: first, that social networks can strengthen an already
effective program. And second, that without that government program we
wouldn't have the foundation on which to build.
I look forward to your testimony.
__________
Prepared Statement of Hon. Margaret Wood Hassan
Vice Chair Lee, and Ranking Member Heinrich.
I want to begin by expressing my disappointment that my
colleagues across the aisle have chosen to give a platform to a man who
has peddled deeply offensive and thoroughly discredited theories
questioning the intelligence of women and racial minorities.
Mr. Murray's work relies upon twisting statistics to
argue that women and minorities are intellectually inferior as a matter
of genetics--and it has no place in the important discussion before
this committee today on social capital.
__________
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Prepared Statement of Charles Murray, W. H. Brady Scholar, American
Enterprise Institute
Members of the Committee have before them the excellent report,
``What We Do Together,'' from the Social Capital Project, and the
presence of Robert Putnam, who knows more about American social capital
than anyone in the world. So what am I supposed to add?
I've decided to emphasize how complicated are the effects of the
deterioration of social capital on human behavior. Statistics on the
decline of marriage and of male labor force participation are
important. But they tend to make the task of solving those problems
sound too straightforward. Fewer people are getting married? Maybe that
can be fixed, or at least ameliorated, by higher working-class wages so
that people can more easily afford to get married. Males aren't in the
labor force? We need more and better job opportunities.
I am not saying such solutions would have no good effects. But the
actual problems reach deeply into the ways that humans are socialized
into institutions like marriage and the labor force. A good way to get
a grip on those actual problems is Prof. Putnam's book, ``Our Kids.''
The heart of that book consists of five accounts of real people and
real families in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Orange County California, Big
Bend Oregon, and Port Clinton Ohio. Those stories provide ammunition
for Bernie Sanders and Charles Murray alike. We hear the voices of the
unemployed whose manufacturing jobs were exported abroad--a real
problem--and the voices of people who quit good jobs because they
didn't feel like working or who got fired because they showed up late,
shirked their tasks, and got in fights with coworkers--another real
problem. We hear stories of unmarried low-income parents who were
fiercely devoted to their kids and of other parents who created
children casually and walked away from them casually.
But if I had to pick one theme threaded throughout all of these
superbly told stories, it is the many ways in which people behaved
impulsively--throwing away real opportunities--and unrealistically,
possessing great ambitions but oblivious to the steps required to get
from point A to point B to point C to point D in life. The same theme
appears in steroids in J.D. Vance's best-selling memoir, ``Hillbilly
Elegy.'' He describes an America that is still the land of opportunity;
we know it is, because his parents and extended family squandered a
prodigious number of opportunities. You read Vance's account and keep
saying to yourself, ``Why are they behaving so self-destructively?''
It comes down to the age-old problem of getting people, especially
young people, not to do things that are attractive in the short term
but disastrous in the long term and, conversely, to do things that
aren't fun right now but that will open up rewards later in life. The
problem is not confined to any socioeconomic class. The mental disorder
known as adolescence afflicts rich and poor alike. And adolescence can
extend a long time after people have left their teens. The most common
way that the fortunate among us manage to get our priorities straight--
or at least not irretrievably screw them up--is by being cocooned in
the institutions that are the primary resources for generating social
capital: a family consisting of married parents and active membership
in a faith tradition.
I didn't choose my phrasing lightly. I am not implying that single
parents are incapable of filling this function--millions of them are
striving heroically to do so--nor that children cannot grow up
successfully if they don't go to church. With regard to families, I am
making an empirical statement: As a matter of statistical tendencies,
biological children of married parents do much better on a wide variety
of important life outcomes than children growing up in any other family
structure, even after controlling for income, parental education, and
ethnicity. With regard to religion, I am making an assertion about a
resource that can lead people, adolescents and adults alike, to do the
right thing even when the enticements to do the wrong thing are strong:
a belief that God commands them to do the right thing. I am also
invoking religion as a community of faith--a phrase that I borrow from,
guess who, Robert Putnam. For its active members, a church is far more
than a place that they go to worship once a week. It is a form of
community that socializes the children growing up in it in all sorts of
informal ways, just as a family socializes children.
This is not a preface to a set of policy recommendations. I have
none. Rather, I would argue that it is not a matter of ideology but
empiricism to conclude that unless the traditional family and
traditional communities of faith make a comeback, the declines in
social capital that are already causing so much deterioration in our
civic culture will continue and the problems will worsen. The solutions
are unlikely to be political but cultural. We need a cultural Great
Awakening akin to past religious Great Awakenings. How to bring about
that needed cultural great awakening is a question above my pay grade.
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Response from Dr. Putnam to Questions for the Record Submitted by
Senator Margaret Wood Hassan
hearing question: opportunity gap in education
To Dr. Putnam:
Dr. Putnam, in your testimony and your book, ``Our Kids:
The American Dream in Crisis,'' you quote a landmark study from
Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon that shows a widening ``class gap''
in both math and reading scores among American kids.
This study, along with your research in the book, and
your testimony today speak to the fact that differences in success are
not race-based, but result from differences in the opportunities
children are provided.
Can you address the difference between a racial gap and a
class gap, and how do we as legislators work to close this opportunity
gap?
Inequality in the United States increasingly operates through
education--a scarce resource in our knowledge based economy and a
measure that is closely correlated with parental socioeconomic status.
As Reardon's work shows, and my work broadly confirms, controlling for
education, racial gaps in income, family structure and test scores,
though still dismaying, are falling. On the other hand, racial gaps in
schooling remain immense. Black parents in America remain
disproportionately concentrated among the poor and less educated, so
black children continue to be handicapped from the start. Whether their
parents are rich or poor, black children live in poorer neighborhoods
than white children at that income level, and black children experience
less upward mobility and more downward mobility than their white
counterparts who started at the same income level. So purely racial
biases remain powerful, but as barriers to success they represent less
burdensome obstacles for minority youth today than they did in the
1950s. By contrast, in modem America one barrier looms much larger than
it did back then--class origins--and that barrier cuts across racial
lines. Most racial disparities in opportunity today operate through
class disparities. Action to address the growing class gap would
brighten the prospects for disadvantaged kids of all races.
As I discussed in my written testimony, the growing class gap in
opportunity has many sources--family stability, parenting, growing
class segregation, access to supportive institutions from day care to
neighborhoods to schools to extracurricular activities to post-
secondary education. A broad menu of policy remedies for these issues
is presented in the report ``Closing the Opportunity Gap,'' prepared by
a national, bipartisan group of experts that I chaired in 2016: https:/
/www.theopportunitygap.com/the-report/. Among the most promising
approaches are high-quality early childhood education, supports for
low-income parents, improved mentoring, enhanced investment in low-
income schools, and greater linking of the worlds of work and
education. Many of those policy options are now being pursued by a
nationwide coalition of scores of community foundations--from Seattle
to Miami and Mobile to Duluth--led by the New Hampshire Charitable
Foundation.
hearing question: women in the workplace
To Dr. Putnam:
One group that may not be reaping the benefits of social
capital in the workplace is women, who can be left out of the network
men are traditionally more able to take advantage of.
Mr. Putnam I know that you've talked about bridging
social capital, the bonds between groups--how should we be thinking
about how we can help women build this capital in the workplace?
Furthermore, what are ways that organizations can, or we
can encourage organizations to bring women into these traditionally
male-dominated networks so that they can be more properly represented
throughout the hierarchy of the organizations?
It is certainly true that access to high-quality social networks is
increasingly essential to career success, as well as to life
satisfaction more broadly. It is also true that while women have
historically been better ``networkers''--that is, more attuned to the
importance of interpersonal connections and social capital--they have
not had equal access to those informal professional networks that have
had the highest economic payoff. Seeing the world through the ``social
capital lens'' highlights the importance of access to such social
networks.
That said, I am not an expert on gender in the workplace, so I do
not consider myself professionally qualified to survey relevant
evidence on this topic, still less to offer specific policy
recommendations.
__________
Response from Dr. Putnam to Questions for the Record Submitted by
Senator Amy Klobuchar
apprenticeships
As a part of your work on social capital, you convened a group of
50 experts to identify possible approaches to narrow the opportunity
gap. One of those areas is building stronger school-to-work linkages. I
have been working to expand access apprenticeships and pre-
apprenticeship programs.
Dr. Putnam, in what ways can apprenticeship model be
expanded to serve more high school students across the country?
In responding to this question, I draw heavily on the report
``Closing the Opportunity Gap,'' prepared by a national, bipartisan
group of experts that I chaired in 2016: https://
www.theopportunitygap.com/the-report/. Professor Katherine S. Newman
chaired the working group on ``On-Ramps for Success,'' and Professor
Newman is herself a nationally recognized expert on apprenticeship.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ For much more depth on what high-quality vocational education
and CTE look like, see K. Newman and H. Winston, Upskilling America:
Learning to Labor in the 21st Century (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2016).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
We need a more effective workforce-training system to equip today's
youth with the skills needed to compete--one that starts early, by
giving our youth more intentional and exciting exposure to the world of
work.\2\ This motivates them for the long educational road ahead and
helps them choose courses or programs that would prepare them.\3\ Other
countries--especially Germany and Austria--do a better job of this, by
(a) exposing all students to demanding career and technical education;
(b) engaging employers, unions, and educational institutions in
training that produces young people with certified, advanced skills;
and (c) enabling serious and sustained exposure to work through
apprenticeships, co-ops, internships, and planned experiences.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ American middle and high schools sometimes have a ``bring your
daughter (or son) to work'' day, but these are haphazard and limit
students' exposure at best to their parents' occupations. Our group
recommends exposing middle and high school students systematically to
the world of work through short-term visits to help shape future
choices and help students understand how academic coursework prepares
them for later careers. This is the norm in Germany, where students
from the eighth grade typically spend two weeks shadowing adults in
factories and offices. Students should get information about career
opportunities and the educational pathways these careers require.
Beyond exposing young people to the work world, institutions need to
develop more robust social networks that will assist kids born to less-
educated families, who are less likely to have personal contacts in
professional careers. Intermediary institutions (either volunteer or
school-run) can help pair kids from less-educated families with a
mentor-shadow in their desired careers. This exposure at a younger age
will help illuminate career pathways and help students in high school
decide if they want to go to college or start career preparation in
high school.
\3\ One example of this are individualized learning plans (ILPs) in
middle school and high school. [This is different than the
Individualized Educational Plans (IEPs) that students in special
education utilize.] Thirty-eight states have begun using ILPs with 21
states mandating them for all. An ILP is a step towards ensuring that
all students leave high school both career- and college-ready. The ILP
should involve discussions and/or diagnostic tests to evaluate student
strengths and career interests. Once student career interests are
established, the ILP links courses and post-secondary plans to a
student's career goals and tracks the skills that a student has already
developed towards being college- and career-ready. This ILP should also
involve discussions of how extracurricular and out-of-school learning
could further this skill development.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many of us today think of vocational education as what it used to
be, involving dull, undemanding classes in ``shop'' and ``home
economics'' that are not strongly connected to future careers. But many
high schools are now pioneering or furthering high-quality career and
technical education (called CTE or CATE).\4\ These programs can also
engage students who learn better by doing, through applied and
inductive learning. This CTE training prepares students for both
college and careers, and should be made available to all (although more
should be required for students immediately going into careers).
Successful examples include Career Academies,\5\ High Schools that
Work/Linked Learning, and Small Schools of Choice\6\:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ See Newman and Winston, Upskilling America, 2016.
\5\ J. J. Kemple, ``Career Academies: Long-Term Impacts on Work,
Education, and Transitions to Adulthood,'' MDRC (2008).
\6\ These 400 schools have considerable variation but all arose out
of an innovation process, and all the schools provide closer student-
faculty ties, stronger community partnerships, and rigorous academics.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Work-based learning: Apprenticeships that coordinate classroom and
on-the-job learning can often create very helpful on-ramps. The
practice is growing in the United States \7\ but is still used far less
than in some other counties (e.g., Germany and the UK). In Germany, and
in most union-based U.S. models, an industry-educational group must
agree on the competencies that a given apprenticeship must develop, and
these competencies must have broader relevance beyond the specific
employer. Non-union U.S. apprenticeships are typically more employer-
specific. Apprentices also benefit because their on-the-job supervisor
often unofficially serves as a career mentor or coach. Apprenticeships
have worked in a wide range of settings in the U.S., including high-
unionization (e.g., Wisconsin) and low-unionization environments (e.g.,
South Carolina).\8\ To be successful, states or localities need to
establish an intermediary to recruit schools and businesses to
collaboratively train the talent needed for existing and new
businesses. Community colleges are an obvious candidate for that role.
In some cases, as in South Carolina or Georgia, businesses are offered
small tax credits to participate as sites for apprentices--the cost of
credits to the State is more than offset by tax revenues from
graduates' downstream employment. Many apprenticeships enable students
to earn college degrees while working, so that they can develop
transferable skills if they decide to change jobs or fields.\9\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ Note: there is a U.S. national office of registered
apprenticeships that sets standards, provides grants, and encourages
employer/education collaboration.
\8\ South Carolina has attracted significant investment in new
factories of German firms hungering for more skilled workers; some
attribute this success to the value of apprenticeships, while others
think it is the prevailing low-cost wage structure and right-to-work
laws.
\9\ For an example, see the Newport News (VA) Apprentice College
described in ND Schwartz, ``A New Look at Apprenticeships as a Path to
the Middle Class,'' New York Times (July 13, 2015).
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Our current ``BA-for-all'' policy has deprived many American youth
of vital on-ramps to jobs. To bring about meaningful change, we
recommend increasing early exposure to potential careers, to make all
young Americans more thoughtful about where they want to head and how
to get there. We also recommend developing pathways of the sort
discussed in this report to help Americans realize the many respectable
ways they can achieve a stable and comfortable living without the need
for a four-year degree.
__________
Response from Dr. Small to Questions for the Record Submitted by
Senator Amy Klobuchar
childcare centers
Dr. Small, in your testimony, you noted that mothers who enroll
their children in childcare centers tend to have greater social
capital. In Minnesota, 75 percent of children live in a childcare
desert, which means that these children do not live near high-quality,
affordable childcare.
Can you discuss the benefits that childcare has for the
parents as well as the children?
For such a high proportion of children to not live near high-
quality, affordable childcare is a serious problem. High-quality early
childcare prepares children educationally at a crucial time in their
development, helps families return to and maintain their participation
in the labor force, and provides parents with the means for more
effective parenting.
The value and significance of early education has been documented
many times over. Education certainly benefits people at any point in
the life course. But quality education in the early years has been
shown to be essential for the long-term educational and economic
success of children, yielding benefits for them and for society as a
whole.\1\
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\1\ See James J. Heckman, 2006, ``Skill Formation and the Economics
of Investing in Disadvantaged Children,'' Science 312(5782):1900-02.
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Childcare also helps parents. Parents of young children often
report that access to daycare helps them return to and participate
fully in the workforce. The need is especially important for low-income
families, where financial needs or work requirements create strong
demand for childcare.
In fact, childcare can help parents become better parents.
Researchers have documented that enrolling their children in childcare
centers provides parents with access to a network of other parents,
teachers, and organizations that provide social support and other
resources from the private and public sectors.\2\ For this reason,
research has shown that low-income households suffer significantly less
material hardship after enrolling their children in childcare centers
than comparable households that do not, even after taking into account
their prior hardship.\3\ Mothers in those households also experience
significantly better mental health, because of the social supports
developed.\4\ As a result, we can expect them to be stronger and more
effective parents.
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\2\ See Mario L. Small, 2009, Unanticipated Gains, Oxford Univ.
Press.
\3\ Small, Chapter 2.
\4\ Small, Chapter 2.
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Any society that hopes to remain competitive in the twenty-first
century must find ways of providing access to high-quality early care
and education.
__________
Response from Dr. Small to Questions for the Record Submitted by
Ranking Member Martin Heinrich
1) We've heard quite a bit of discussion about whether American
culture is in decline, how that could be impacting economic growth, and
what role Congress could play. Could you expand on your views on this
question?
The idea that American culture is in decline owes more to nostalgia
than to a clear reading of the facts. Over the past generation or two,
some forms of social capital have declined, such as participation in
some kinds of activities (e.g., bowling leagues) and some forms of
civic engagement. However, others have increased, such as the extent of
participation with communities far beyond one's local neighborhood or
town. In addition, many forms of cultural acceptance are increasing.
For example, the proportion of Americans who believe that marriage
between people of different races is morally acceptable is much higher
than it was during the 1950s. The extent of support for equal rights
for all groups is also much greater than it was two generations ago.
All of these are signs of cultural enlightenment, not decline.
2) At the hearing, you mentioned how single-parent births are
increasing for all groups, except perhaps those at the top of the
income ladder. Could you expand on this issue and discuss what role
this issue should--and should not--play in decisions before Congress?
Births to unmarried women have increased since the 1960s across
Americans of all class backgrounds. The CDC does not report births to
unmarried women by class, but researchers have found ways of uncovering
the trend. One indicator of class is educational attainment. And one
indicator of the rate is the proportion of mothers who are single and
who have a child less than one year old, which tracks very closely with
births to unmarried women.
In 2015, demographers Sara McLanahan and Wade Jacobsen showed that
between 1960 and 2015 the proportion of mothers in this category has
grown for mothers at all education levels. For those in the bottom
quarter of the education distribution, the proportion has increased
from just over 10% to just under 50%; for those in the middle half of
the distribution, from about 5% to about 40%; for those in the top
quarter, from less than 5% to more than 10%.\1\
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\1\ Sara McLanahan and Wade Jacobsen, 2015, Pages 3-23 in
``Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality,'' edited by Paul R.
Amato, Alan Booth, Susan M. McHale, Jennifer Van Hook, National
Symposium on Family Issues 5, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08308-7--1.
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Notably, the growth has been roughly equally steep for the bottom
two groups, which represent everyone up to the 75th percentile of the
education distribution. In other words, the increases have been steep
for the vast majority of mothers. At the very top of the education
distribution, the increase has been less steep. However, notice that it
has still been an increase, and the rates have more than doubled.
Simply put, giving birth while single is far more common than it used
to be for mothers of virtually all class backgrounds. The idea that
only the working class has seen an increase in single births is wrong.
The rate of births to unmarried mothers is something that Congress
should certainly consider as it examines the expansion or contraction
of the safety net. Paid family leave and early child care are probably
more important today than they have ever been. At the same time, most
researchers would probably be skeptical of efforts to reverse the
national trends in births to unmarried mothers, even as they
acknowledge that the trends are worrisome. Past efforts to reverse
these trends have been costly and have not been successful. Instead,
Congress should devise policies that take into account the new and
diverse composition of the modern family.
3) Discussions about families often focus on a ``Leave It to
Beaver'' nostalgia, highlighting the best of times and glossing over
the hardships and struggles that left many behind. At the hearing, some
witnesses discussed the decline of the ``traditional family'' as having
a negative impact on social capital. Unfortunately, that narrow
definition of a family excludes many and seems to discount the social
capital associated with non-traditional, modern family structures. How
should policymakers be thinking about modern families and ways to
support them?
Many people remember the 1950s fondly. But many also remember the
1950s as a time of unequal protection before the law, of State-
sanctioned segregation, and of high levels of intolerance, as
indicated, for example, by the widespread opposition to interracial
marriage and the meager support for gay rights. When thinking about the
changes that the country has experienced, it is important to take all
cultural changes into account, and to acknowledge that many types of
community and acceptance have, in fact, improved. A wholesale return to
the cultural and social attitudes of the 1950s would not benefit the
country today.
Modern families probably seek the same level of social engagement
that those of the past did. To cultivate that engagement seriously, the
country must, first, acknowledge that most mothers today participate in
the paid labor force. A set of policies that support robust paid family
leave and affordable early childcare represent an essential first step.
Such policies not only allow women equal participation in the labor
force; they also both allow time for and encourage the social
engagement essential to high collective social capital. It is not
surprising that many of the industrialized countries with high levels
of social capital strongly support the family.
4) You testified about how social networks can strengthen already-
effective programs like Head Start. What other programs or policy areas
would benefit from including a focus on building social networks?
Although my expertise lies in the role of social networks among
parents in early education and childcare centers, it is clear that
social networks can make a difference in other arenas. The most natural
extension is the K through 12 system, where many researchers have shown
that schools with effective parental networks work more effectively for
both parents and children. Exploring ways of cultivating parent
engagement--not merely with the school but also with one another--may
help local communities do far more with the resources available.
Another important context is workforce development programs. The
ability to cultivate and mobilize social networks effectively has been
shown repeatedly to affect success in the labor market. Many of the
best workforce development programs have ongoing relationships with
employers, which represents an essential step in securing placement.
But both long-term employment and resilience in the face of layoffs
benefit from the ability to continuously cultivate and mobilize social
networks.
5) Is a decline in social capital the primary driver behind the
limited economic opportunity that some communities are experiencing?
What are the main barriers to economic opportunity?
The decline in social capital is not a primary driver of the
limited economic opportunity that many are experiencing. The evidence
is overwhelming that far more important factors are inadequate public
education, under-resourced or unsafe neighborhoods, and discrimination
in employment, pay, or promotion. There is strong consensus that a
robust increase in high-quality early education, coupled with an
improvement in comprehensive, accountable K-12 education is one of the
most effective investments the Nation can make to improve economic
opportunity for all.
Submitted by Senator Cotton
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