[Mb-civic] A friend in need - Thomas H. Sander - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A friend in need

By Thomas H. Sander  |  November 14, 2005

DONALD TRUMP. ''Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Powerball lotteries.

Americans worship wealth and bemoan the material possessions they lack. 
In 2005 (the Year of Rediscovered Class Consciousness?), we seem to be 
waking up to the material class gaps that have grown for almost 40 
years, since 1967.

But attention to this real and important economic class gap could blind 
us to an equally troubling, less visible gap between the classes -- a 
social capital gap. ''Social capital" describes the benefits of social 
networks. Having friends and being involved in groups not only secures 
jobs -- more Americans get jobs through who they know than what they 
know -- but improves one's health, education, and happiness.

Relatively recently our hearts were pained by a sea of black and poor 
victims, trapped on the Gulf Coast pre-Hurricane without an exit. We 
notice that they were carless and lacked money for bus fare, meals, and 
hotels. But far fewer notice that the poor were equally trapped by a 
dearth of these social connections, especially crossing economic lines. 
Specifically, they lacked affluent friends to give them a ride, lacked 
contacts to negotiate heavily discounted hotel rates, and lacked 
out-of-town relatives with extra bedrooms.

Alas, America's rich and well-educated have always had more social 
capital than the poor, and those divides persist. For example, compared 
against Americans with incomes over $100,000, the poor (incomes under 
$20,000) were about half as likely to have befriended a business owner 
or someone they considered a community leader, and belonged to half as 
many nonchurch groups.

But recent evidence, discovered by Rebekah Crooks at Harvard using the 
most reliable long-term surveys of youth, reveals that this civic class 
gap is recently growing among American youth. Youth volunteering is up 
since 1995, but the gap in volunteering between children with a 
college-graduate mother and children with a high-school dropout mother 
increased by almost 50 percent since 1976. Moreover, church attendance 
is decreasing, but youth of dropout mothers are exiting religion at more 
than four times the rate of children with college-graduate mothers. In 
politics the gap between rich and poor youth is also widening in such 
crucial areas as interest in government and intent to vote.

While political interest spiked after Sept. 11 for youth of all economic 
backgrounds, there is no evidence that this class gap is closing. Since 
the roots of adult civic involvement are nurtured in adolescence, these 
ominous findings presage a tale of two civic Americas: an increasingly 
civic ''have" class and a decreasingly civic ''have-not" class.

This is highly alarming in a perceived meritocracy. Class already 
powerfully predicts many societal outcomes, like admission to select 
colleges. And Americans already exhibit substantial subconscious racial 
bias as experiments like the Implicit Association Test demonstrate. Now, 
poor youth will be paying a triple penalty: fewer economic resources, 
fewer opportunities due to biases relating to their skin color, and 
fewer social ties to minimize these impacts.

How can we close the social capital gap between rich youth and poor 
youth? It's too early to fathom the precise policy solutions. While 
people have to make friends voluntarily, one can certainly publicize the 
benefits of such friendships and dramatically increase the opportunity. 
For example, having youth at age 18 perform a year of mandatory national 
or community service in diverse groups would likely increase cross-race 
and cross-class social ties. The military does this well, as do some 
private youth service groups like City Year.

Moreover, we ought to ensure that in our rush to teach the 3 R's in 
inner city schools we don't forget to teach the 2 C's (connections and 
community). Youth, especially poor youth, ought to learn about social 
capital and understand the social cost they'll pay for not building 
these ties. Skills are also important: Institutions like churches and 
unions were cornerstones in teaching poor Americans how to run meetings, 
petition others, mobilize comrades, and build lasting friendships. Given 
the declines in union membership and church-going among poor youth, we 
must find other settings to cultivate such skills. And we ought to offer 
fun at-school and after-school programs that build stronger social ties 
among poor youth and between poor youth and better-off youth. These ties 
may one day, in the face of tragedy, be the difference between life and 
death.

Poor youth may never develop social ties as strong as the affluent, but 
we should ensure that we don't send poor adolescents to life's starting 
line with weights around their ankles.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/14/a_friend_in_need/
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