A New Era of Civil Rights: Proposals to Address the Economic Inequalities in Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids”

Earlier this year, Harvard University public policy professor Robert D. Putnam published the blockbuster social policy book of 2015: Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. As a supplement to those efforts, this report recaps Putnam’s findings of the changing nature of inequality over the last sixty years and seeks to offer workable policy ideas that logically flow from Putnam’s analysis in four areas: housing, K–12 schooling, higher education, and the workplace. A premium has been placed on policies that are grounded in solid research and are politically attractive to a wide range of people.