A New York Situations bestseller and “a separate, urgent” (THE BRAND NEW Yorker) study of the growing inequality gap from the bestselling writer of Bowling Alone: why fewer Us citizens today get the chance for upward mobility.

Central to the very idea of America is the principle that we are a nation of opportunity. But during the last quarter century we’ve seen a disturbing “opportunity distance” emerge. We Us citizens have always believed that those who have talent and try hard will succeed, but about OUR CHILDREN: The American Dream in Problems this central tenet from the American Wish seems no more true or at the very least, much less accurate than it was.

In Our Kids, Robert Putnam offers a personal and authoritative understand this brand-new American crisis, beginning with the exemplory case of his senior high school class of 1959 in Slot Clinton, Ohio. The vast majority of those students went on to lives better than those of their parents. But their children and grandchildren possess faced diminishing potential clients. Putnam tells the tale of lessening opportunity through poignant existence stories of rich, middle class, and poor children from towns and suburbs in the united states, brilliantly combined with the most recent social-science research.

“A masterful quantity” (Financial Times), OUR CHILDREN offers a disturbing account of the American wish that is “thoughtful and persuasive” (The Economist). OUR CHILDREN offers a uncommon combination of individual testimony and thorough proof: “No one can surface finish this book and feel complacent about equal chance” (The New York Times Book Review).