Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America

The item I ordered was in better condition than described for a used book.

Schorr documents some of the success stories in our attempts to overcome economic and social disadvantage and fight the dissolution of real world communities. But almost all of these are small-scale and depend for their success on unique individuals. The difficulty, she says, is that we don't know how to scale up these micro-social experiences. Almost invariably, successful models are bureaucratised when they are expanded and government funding spread so thin that the intensive effort applied at the micro-scale is incapable of reproduction society-wide.Schorr's analysis is telling, but her solutions are unconvincing. She is unable to extract general lessons from the few exceptions she has been able to locate.There is one outstanding lesson here and it is that successful social welfare schemes depend on an intensive effort and a huge injection of funds. What Schorr never tells us is where government will find the huge sums of money necessary to correct for early family breakdown.The challenge is to discover how we can correct for poor socialisation in these early years when family and community fail. The effort is so intensive and time-consuming the first time around, that it is difficult to think how society could afford to reproduce it later, after the first attempt has failed.