Home › Blogs › Sarah Burris's blog ›

Robert Putnam on the Millennial Generation

Recorded at the National Conference on Citizenship, 2005. The kids are alright.

Bookmark/Search this post with:
  • Delicious
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Propeller
  • Reddit
  • Magnoliacom
  • Newsvine
  • Furl
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Technorati
  • Icerocket
September 2nd, 2006 8:35pm

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Rappaports and Breaking the Cycle

Submitted by Michael Connery on Sun, 2006-09-03 18:23.

Great clip, if somewhat choppy. Maybe that's because the tubes on my internets are a little clogged today.

I'm glad to see Putnam recognizing this. Your idea of getting the Rappaports to submit their young voter study to Putnam is a good one. If Putnam comes out and says that young voters are "tuning in and turning out," maybe we'll finally see the end of all these bogus stories about young voter apathy.

If anyone can permanently break the political-media cycle that keeps young voters disengaged and disenfrachised, Putnam might be that person.

a transcription is

Submitted by Fred Gooltz on Thu, 2007-04-26 11:33.

here, courtesy of the full report.

"Now, I want to say just a word about the good news that actually also emerges from this most recent period. It has to do with the emergence, which I now believe is real (when we spoke last year I was not sure it was real, but now I am pretty sure) among America's young people, of a 9/11 generation.

"And even though the spike after 9/11 has disappeared frankly, people of our age are exactly at the same level of civic engagement, joining, trusting and volunteering and so on, almost unchanged from pre-9/11 levels. The exceptions are the young people who were in high school or maybe in early years of college at the time of 9/11, and there we now do see a clear 9/11 generation.

"You can see this very clearly in the data. We all know that voting was up in 2004, for most Americans, but the spurt in voting last year was much greater among young people than it was among older people. Similarly in 2002, relative to older people, younger people were voting more than they had in the past.

"So, that's great news. It's great news because I have long said that if we could begin to change the attitude towards politics and government and social activities and community life among our young people, it would have a revitalizing effect across the whole of the population over the long run. Of course, in the short run, our national averages are being held down by the older folks like me and like many people in this room who haven't changed that much, even after 9/11.

"These young people, for the first time in many years are feeling a sense of "we": "We are in this together." That's what they're saying. They are not a collection of self-interested 'I's."

Blame the low quality one my tiny flashdrive thingy.