Aside from the anecdotes, the bulk of “Our Kids” is an omnibus of social-science scholarship. The book’s chief and authoritative contribution is its careful presentation for a popular audience of important work on the erosion, in the past half century, of so many forms of social, economic, and political support for families, schools, and communities—with consequences that amount to what Silva and others have called the “privatization of risk.” The social-science literature includes a complicated debate about the relationship between inequality of outcome (differences of income and of wealth) and inequality of opportunity (differences in education and employment). To most readers, these issues are more familiar as a political disagreement. In American politics, Democrats are more likely to talk about both kinds of inequality, while Republicans tend to confine their concern to inequality of opportunity. According to Putnam, “All sides in this debate agree on one thing, however: as income inequality expands, kids from more privileged backgrounds start and probably finish further and further ahead of their less privileged peers, even if the rate of socioeconomic mobility is unchanged.” He also takes the position, again relying on a considerable body of scholarship, that, “quite apart from the danger that the opportunity gap poses to American prosperity, it also undermines our democracy.” Chelsea is interested in politics. David has never voted.

The American dream is in crisis, Putnam argues, because Americans used to care about other people’s kids and now they only care about their own kids. But, he writes, “America’s poor kids do belong to us and we to them. They are our kids.” This is a lot like his argument in “Bowling Alone.” In high school in Port Clinton, Putnam was in a bowling league; he regards bowling leagues as a marker of community and civic engagement; bowling leagues are in decline; hence, Americans don’t take care of one another anymore. “Bowling Alone” and “Our Kids” also have the same homey just-folksiness. And they have the same shortcomings. If you don’t miss bowling leagues or all-white suburbs where women wear aprons—if Putnam’s then was not your then and his now isn’t your now—his well-intentioned “we” can be remarkably grating.

In story form, the argument of “Our Kids” is that while Wendy and Dick were building a fifties-style diner for their kids in the basement of their lakefront mansion, grade-grubbing with their son’s teachers, and glue-gunning the decorations for their daughter’s prom, every decent place to hang out in Port Clinton closed its doors, David was fired from his job at Big Boppers, and he got his girlfriend pregnant because, by the time David and Chelsea were born, in the nineteen-nineties, not only was Standard Products out of business but gone, too, was the sense of civic obligation and commonweal—everyone caring about everyone else’s kids—that had made it possible for Don and Libby to climb out of poverty in the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties. “Nobody gave a shit,” David says. And he’s not wrong.

“Our Kids” is a passionate, urgent book. It also has a sad helplessness. Putnam tells a story teeming with characters and full of misery but without a single villain. This is deliberate. “This is a book without upper-class villains,” he insists in the book’s final chapter. In January, Putnam tweeted, “My new book ‘Our Kids’ shows a growing gap between rich kids and poor kids. We’ll work with all sides on solutions.” It’s easier to work with all sides if no side is to blame. But Putnam’s eagerness to influence Congress has narrative consequences. If you’re going to tell a story about bad things happening to good people, you’ve got to offer an explanation, and, when you make your arguments through characters, your reader will expect that explanation in the form of characters. I feel bad for Chelsea. But I feel worse for David. Am I supposed to hate Wendy?

Some people make arguments by telling stories; other people make arguments by counting things. Charles Dickens was a story man. In “Hard Times” (1854), a novel written when statistics was on the rise, Dickens’s villain, Thomas Gradgrind, was a numbers man, “a man of facts and calculations,” who named one of his sons Adam Smith and another Malthus. “With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.”

Numbers men are remote and cold of heart, Dickens thought. But, of course, the appeal of numbers lies in their remoteness and coldness. Numbers depersonalize; that remains one of their chief claims to authority, and to a different explanatory force than can be found in, say, a poem. “Quantification is a technology of distance,” as the historian of science Theodore Porter has pointed out. “Reliance on numbers and quantitative manipulation minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust.” It’s difficult to understand something like income inequality across large populations and to communicate your understanding of it across vast distances without counting. But quantification’s lack of intimacy is also its weakness; it represents not only a gain but also a loss of knowledge.

Corrado Gini, he of the Gini index, was a numbers man, at a time when statistics had become a modern science. In 1925, four years after Gini wrote “Measurement of Inequality of Incomes,” he signed the “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals” (he was the only statistician to do so) and was soon running the Presidential Commission for the Study of Constitutional Reforms. As Jean-Guy Prévost reported in “A Total Science: Statistics in Liberal and Fascist Italy” (2009), Gini’s work was so closely tied to the Fascist state that, in 1944, after the regime fell, he was tried for being an apologist for Fascism. In the shadow of his trial, he joined the Movimento Unionista Italiano, a political party whose objective was to annex Italy to the United States. “This would solve all of Italy’s problems,” the movement’s founder, Santi Paladino, told a reporter for Time. (“Paladino has never visited the U.S., though his wife Francesca lived 24 years in The Bronx,” the magazine noted.) But, for Gini, the movement’s purpose was to provide him with some anti-Fascist credentials.

The story of Gini is a good illustration of the problem with stories, which is that they personalize (which is also their power). His support for Fascism doesn’t mean that the Gini index isn’t valuable. It is valuable. The life of Corrado Gini can’t be used to undermine all of statistical science. Still, if you wanted to write an indictment of statistics as an instrument of authoritarian states, and if you had a great deal of other evidence to support that indictment—including other stories and, ideally, numbers—why yes, Gini would be an excellent character to introduce in Chapter 1.

Because stories contain one kind of truth and numbers another, many writers mix and match, telling representative stories and backing them up with aggregate data. Putnam, though, doesn’t so much mix and match as split the difference. He tells stories about kids but presents data about the economy. That’s why “Our Kids” has heaps of victims but not a single villain. “We encounter Elijah in a dingy shopping mall on the north side of Atlanta, during his lunch break from a job packing groceries,” Putnam writes. “Elijah is thin and small in stature, perhaps five foot seven, and wears baggy clothes that bulk his frame: jeans belted low around his upper thighs, a pair of Jordans on his feet.” As for why Elijah is packing groceries, the book offers not characters—there are no interviews, for instance, with members of the Georgia legislature or the heads of national corporations whose businesses have left Atlanta—but numbers, citing statistics about the city (“Large swaths of southern and western Atlanta itself are over 95 percent black, with child poverty rates ranging from 50 percent to 80 percent”) and providing a series of charts reporting the results of studies about things like class differences in parenting styles and in the frequency of the family dinner.

“Next time, do your thinking out loud to yourself.” Facebook

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In “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power” (Little, Brown), Steve Fraser fumes that what’s gone wrong with political discourse in America is that the left isn’t willing to blame anyone for anything anymore. There used to be battle cries. No more kings! Down with fat cats! Damn the moneycrats! Like Putnam’s argument, Fraser’s is both historical and nostalgic. Fraser longs for the passion and force with which Americans of earlier generations attacked aggregated power. Think of the way Frederick Douglass wrote about slavery, Ida B. Wells wrote about lynching, Ida Tarbell wrote about Standard Oil, Upton Sinclair wrote about the meatpacking industry, and Louis Brandeis wrote about the money trust. These people weren’t squeamish about villains.