{"id":1615,"date":"2015-04-20T16:59:28","date_gmt":"2015-04-20T15:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/?p=1615"},"modified":"2015-07-07T12:06:11","modified_gmt":"2015-07-07T11:06:11","slug":"families-the-key-to-addressing-social-and-economic-inequality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/2015\/04\/20\/families-the-key-to-addressing-social-and-economic-inequality\/","title":{"rendered":"Families: The key to addressing social and economic inequality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Francis Fukuyama delivers an engaging critique of Robert Putnam\u2019s latest book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis<\/em><\/strong> (Financial Times<\/em><\/a>, March 2015). Putnam alerts us to the real reason behind America\u2019s inequality<\/strong>, which is missing in current debates on the subject. His belief is that the gradual decline of the stable, two-parent, mother and father family is at the epicenter of this dilemma<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Putnam wasn\u2019t the first to notice this. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan<\/strong> found a link between the two factors. Even then, there was an obvious relation between the bi-parental family\u2019s disappearance, Afro-American poverty and the resulting increase in drug-use and crime rate <\/strong>in the States. Putnam warns that this trend has now spread to the white population<\/strong> and affects around 70% of families. This figure is alarmingly close to that reported by Moynihan half a century ago.<\/p>\n

Fukuyama, following Putnam\u2019s call to arms, hails the importance of the family structure and the need for parents\u2019 commitment to their children\u2019s future. <\/strong>He insists that early childhood stimulation, appropriate role models, stable expectations and family dinners are all \u201cpart of the environment needed to produce upwardly mobile adults\u201d. But adds that most of these elements are absent in the lives of Americans from less educated backgrounds. He states that economic inequality becomes \u201cself-reinforcing through the mechanism of absent families\u201d.<\/p>\n

Both authors review current solutions, some of which have been in practice for decades. Education reforms, for instance, come under the spotlight with Fukuyama\u2019s critique of the No Child Left Behind Act. He points out that schools have \u201conly a limited impact on life outcomes\u201d when compared to that of friends and family<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, \u201cthe proper workings of democracy\u201d, says Fukuyama, \u201crest on a foundation of habits and virtues that reside in the underlying society and not in the formal political system, or in the economic incentives these institutions create\u201d. Education is as essential as the family unit when it comes to our personal and social development. In fact, he goes on to claim that \u201cstrong families are critical in America as incubators of broader social engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a path that our own society is following too.<\/p>\n

There are certain taboos<\/strong> \u2013 products of society focused on individual gratification \u2013 that make it harder to reconstruct the family unit<\/strong>.<\/p>\nHow can we rebuild the family unit if the need to do so is not recognized or taken seriously? <\/span><\/a>\u00a0In the meantime, the least we can try to do is learn from the more \u201cmodern, advanced and dynamic\u201d societies that came before us\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Francis Fukuyama delivers an engaging critique of Robert Putnam\u2019s latest book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Financial Times, March 2015). Putnam alerts us to the real reason behind America\u2019s inequality, which is missing in current debates on the subject. His belief is that the gradual decline of the stable, two-parent, mother and father […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8010],"tags":[12,90840],"class_list":["post-1615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inequality","tag-family","tag-inequality","megacategoria-mc-economics"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1615"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1674,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615\/revisions\/1674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}