Word: putnam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Kennedy School Professor Robert D. Putnam, an authority on social capital best known for his essay “Bowling Alone,” will gain a hand with his research on civic involvement, thanks to a grant given to the Kennedy School of Government’s Saguaro Seminar, by the Corporation for National and Community Service...
...Putnam and fellow researcher Thomas H. Sander plan to use the $275,618 grant to study how social context affects volunteering and civic participation. Both men are involved with the Saguaro Seminar, which works to improve the measurement of social capital—the set of resources, available in social networks, that lead people to help and get help from their connections—and studies this information to develop ways to improve civic involvement...
...found some evidence of a growing ‘class gap’ in civic involvement in America, with younger Americans from well-off backgrounds increasing their participation in politics and society, while kids from the wrong side of the tracks are increasingly dropping out,” wrote Putnam, who founded the Seminar in 1995, in an e-mailed statement. “This generous new grant will help us better understand the dimensions of this problem, and to explore its origins...
According to Sander, he and Putnam will be using the grant to analyze data collected by the U.S. government on civic participation, a study he said he expects will take two or three years...
...problem with the Putnam fund, which was sold only to institutional investors (such as pensions funds and insurance companies), wasn't that it was losing value but rather that so much money was being withdrawn. The fund was going to be forced to dump a big block of its holdings, and flooding the market like that has the effect of driving down security prices - thereby driving down the value of the fund you want to keep at $1 per share. "The investors are almost as important as the investments here," says Peter Crane, money fund expert and CEO of Crane...