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Robert D. Putnam

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Paperback – August 7, 2001

by Robert D. Putnam (Author)

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Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work—but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, which The Economist hailed as “a prodigious achievement.”

Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures—whether they be PTA, church, or political parties—have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.

Like defining works from the past, such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society, and like the works of C. Wright Mills and Betty Friedan, Putnam’s Bowling Alone has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do.

Print length

544 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Touchstone Books by Simon & Schuster
Publication date

August 7, 2001
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.3 x 8.44 inches
ISBN-10

0743203046
ISBN-13

978-0743203043
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Alan Ryan The New York Review of Books Rich, dense, thoughtful, fascinating...packed with provocative information about the social and political habits of twentieth-century Americans.

Richard Flacks Los Angeles Times Putnam styles himself as a kind of sociological detective....The reader experiences the suspense that can happen in both detective fiction and science.

Wendy Rahn The Washington Post This is a very important book; it's the de Tocqueville of our generation. And you don't often hear an academic like me say those sorts of things.

Alan Ehrenhalt The Wall Street Journal A powerful argument...presented in a lucid and readable way.

Julia Keller Chicago Tribune A learned and clearly focused snapshot of a crucial moment in American history.

About the Author

Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and a former Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Nationally honored as a leading humanist and a renowned scientist, he has written fourteen books, including the bestselling Our Kids and Bowling Alone, and has consulted for the last four US Presidents. In 2012, President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities. His research program, the Saguaro Seminar, is dedicated to fostering civic engagement in America. Visit RobertDPutnam.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: Thinking about Social Change in America

No one is left from the Glenn Valley, Pennsylvania, Bridge Club who can tell us precisely when or why the group broke up, even though its forty-odd members were still playing regularly as recently as 1990, just as they had done for more than half a century. The shock in the Little Rock, Arkansas, Sertoma club, however, is still painful: in the mid-1980s, nearly fifty people had attended the weekly luncheon to plan activities to help the hearing- and speech-impaired, but a decade later only seven regulars continued to show up.

The Roanoke, Virginia, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been an active force for civil rights since 1918, but during the 1990s membership withered from about 2,500 to a few hundred. By November 1998 even a heated contest for president drew only fifty-seven voting members. Black city councillor Carroll Swain observed ruefully, "Some people today are a wee bit complacent until something jumps up and bites them." VFW Post 2378 in Berwyn, Illinois, a blue-collar suburb of Chicago, was long a bustling "home away from home" for local veterans and a kind of working-class country club for the neighborhood, hosting wedding receptions and class reunions. By 1999, however, membership had so dwindled that it was a struggle just to pay taxes on the yellow brick post hall. Although numerous veterans of Vietnam and the post-Vietnam military lived in the area, Tom Kissell, national membership director for the VFW, observed, "Kids today just aren't joiners."

The Charity League of Dallas had met every Friday morning for fifty-seven years to sew, knit, and visit, but on April 30, 1999, they held their last meeting; the average age of the group had risen to eighty, the last new member had joined two years earlier, and president Pat Dilbeck said ruefully, "I feel like this is a sinking ship." Precisely three days later and 1,200 miles to the northeast, the Vassar alumnae of Washington, D.C., closed down their fifty-first -- and last -- annual book sale. Even though they aimed to sell more than one hundred thousand books to benefit college scholarships in the 1999 event, co-chair Alix Myerson explained, the volunteers who ran the program "are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. They're dying, and they're not replaceable." Meanwhile, as Tewksbury Memorial High School (TMHS), just north of Boston, opened in the fall of 1999, forty brand-new royal blue uniforms newly purchased for the marching band remained in storage, since only four students signed up to play. Roger Whittlesey, TMHS band director, recalled that twenty years earlier the band numbered more than eighty, but participation had waned ever since. Somehow in the last several decades of the twentieth century all these community groups and tens of thousands like them across America began to fade.

It wasn't so much that old members dropped out -- at least not any more rapidly than age and the accidents of life had always meant. But community organizations were no longer continuously revitalized, as they had been in the past, by freshets of new members. Organizational leaders were flummoxed. For years they assumed that their problem must have local roots or at least that it was peculiar to their organization, so they commissioned dozens of studies to recommend reforms. The slowdown was puzzling because for as long as anyone could remember, membership rolls and activity lists had lengthened steadily.

In the 1960s, in fact, community groups across America had seemed to stand on the threshold of a new era of expanded involvement. Except for the civic drought induced by the Great Depression, their activity had shot up year after year, cultivated by assiduous civic gardeners and watered by increasing affluence and education. Each annual report registered rising membership. Churches and synagogues were packed, as more Americans worshiped together than only a few decades earlier, perhaps more than ever in American history.

Moreover, Americans seemed to have time on their hands. A 1958 study under the auspices of the newly inaugurated Center for the Study of Leisure at the University of Chicago fretted that "the most dangerous threat hanging over American society is the threat of leisure," a startling claim in the decade in which the Soviets got the bomb. Life magazine echoed the warning about the new challenge of free time: "Americans now face a glut of leisure," ran a headline in February 1964. "The task ahead: how to take life easy."

As a matter of fact, mankind now possesses for the first time the tools and knowledge to create whatever kind of world he wants....Despite our Protestant ethic, there are many signs that the message is beginning to get through to some people....Not only are Americans flocking into bowling leagues and garden clubs, they are satisfying their gregarious urges in countless neighborhood committees to improve the local roads and garbage collections and to hound their public servants into doing what the name implies.

The civic-minded World War II generation was, as its own John F. Kennedy proclaimed at his inauguration, picking up the torch of leadership, not only in the nation's highest office, but in cities and towns across the land. Summarizing dozens of studies, political scientist Robert E. Lane wrote in 1959 that "the ratio of political activists to the general population, and even the ratio of male activists to the male population, has generally increased over the past fifty years." As the 1960s ended, sociologists Daniel Bell and Virginia Held reported that "there is more participation than ever before in America...and more opportunity for the active interested person to express his personal and political concerns." Even the simplest political act, voting, was becoming ever more common. From 1920, when women got the vote, through 1960, turnout in presidential elections had risen at the rate of 1.6 percent every four years, so on a simple straight-line projection it seemed reasonable, as a leading political scientist later observed, to expect turnout to be nearly 70 percent and rising on the nation's two hundredth birthday in 1976.

By 1965 disrespect for public life, so endemic in our history, seemed to be waning. Gallup pollsters discovered that the number of Americans who would like to see their children "go into politics as a life's work" had nearly doubled over little more than a decade. Although this gauge of esteem for politics stood at only 36 percent, it had never before been recorded so high, nor has it since. More strikingly, Americans felt increased confidence in their neighbors. The proportion that agreed that "most people can be trusted," for example, rose from an already high 66 percent during and after World War II to a peak of 77 percent in 1964.

The fifties and sixties were hardly a "golden age," especially for those Americans who were marginalized because of their race or gender or social class or sexual orientation. Segregation, by race legally and by gender socially, was the norm, and intolerance, though declining, was still disturbingly high. Environmental degradation had only just been exposed by Rachel Carson, and Betty Friedan had not yet deconstructed the feminine mystique. Grinding rural poverty had still to be discovered by the national media. Infant mortality, a standard measure of public health, stood at twenty-six per one thousand births -- forty-four per one thousand for black infants -- in 1960, nearly four times worse than those indexes would be at the end of the century. America in Life was white, straight, Christian, comfortable, and (in the public square, at least) male. Social reformers had their work cut out for them. However, engagement in community affairs and the sense of shared identity and reciprocity had never been greater in modern America, so the prospects for broad-based civic mobilization to address our national failings seemed bright.

The signs of burgeoning civic vitality were also favorable among the younger generation, as the first of the baby boomers approached college. Dozens of studies confirmed that education was by far the best predictor of engagement in civic life, and universities were in the midst of the most far-reaching expansion in American history. Education seemed the key to both greater tolerance and greater social involvement. Simultaneously shamed and inspired by the quickening struggle for civil rights launched by young African Americans in the South, white colleges in the North began to awaken from the silence of the fifties. Describing the induction of this new generation into the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, sociologist Doug McAdam emphasizes their self-assurance:

We were a "can do" people, who accomplished whatever we set out to do. We had licked the Depression, turned the tide in World War II, and rebuilt Europe after the war....Freedom Summer was an audacious undertaking consistent with the exaggerated sense of importance and potency shared by the privileged members of America's postwar generation.

The baby boom meant that America's population was unusually young, whereas civic involvement generally doesn't bloom until middle age. In the short run, therefore, our youthful demography actually tended to dampen the ebullience of civil society. But that very bulge at the bottom of the nation's demographic pyramid boded well for the future of community organizations, for they could look forward to swelling membership rolls in the 1980s, when the boomers would reach the peak "joining" years of the life cycle. And in the meantime, the bull session buzz about "participatory democracy" and "all power to the people" seemed to augur ever more widespread engagement in community affairs. One of America's most acute social observers prophesied in 1968, "Participatory democracy has all along been the political style (if not the slogan) of the American middle and upper class. It will become a more widespread style as more persons enter into those classes." Never in our history had the future of civic life looked brighter.

What happened next to civic and social life in American communities is the subject of this book. In recent years social scientists have framed concerns about the changing character of American society in terms of the concept of "social capital." By analogy with notions of physical capital and human capital -- tools and training that enhance individual productivity -- the core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups.

Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals, social capital refers to connections among individuals -- social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called "civic virtue." The difference is that "social capital" calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.

The term social capital itself turns out to have been independently invented at least six times over the twentieth century, each time to call attention to the ways in which our lives are made more productive by social ties. The first known use of the concept was not by some cloistered theoretician, but by a practical reformer of the Progressive Era -- L. J. Hanifan, state supervisor of rural schools in West Virginia. Writing in 1916 to urge the importance of community involvement for successful schools, Hanifan invoked the idea of "social capital" to explain why. For Hanifan, social capital referred to

those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit....The individual is helpless socially, if left to himself....If he comes into contact with his neighbor, and they with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community. The community as a whole will benefit by the cooperation of all its parts, while the individual will find in his associations the advantages of the help, the sympathy, and the fellowship of his neighbors.

Hanifan's account of social capital anticipated virtually all the crucial elements in later interpretations, but his conceptual invention apparently attracted no notice from other social commentators and disappeared without a trace. But like sunken treasure recurrently revealed by shifting sands and tides, the same idea was independently rediscovered in the 1950s by Canadian sociologists to characterize the club memberships of arriviste suburbanites, in the 1960s by urbanist Jane Jacobs to laud neighborliness in the modern metropolis, in the 1970s by economist Glenn Loury to analyze the social legacy of slavery, and in the 1980s by French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu and by German economist Ekkehart Schlicht to underline the social and economic resources embodied in social networks. Sociologist James S. Coleman put the term firmly and finally on the intellectual agenda in the late 1980s, using it (as Hanifan had originally done) to highlight the social context of education.

As this array of independent coinages indicates, social capital has both an individual and a collective aspect -- a private face and a public face. First, individuals form connections that benefit our own interests. One pervasive strategem of ambitious job seekers is "networking," for most of us get our jobs because of whom we know, not what we know -- that is, our social capital, not our human capital. Economic sociologist Ronald Burt has shown that executives with bounteous Rolodex files enjoy faster career advancement. Nor is the private return to social capital limited to economic rewards. As Claude S. Fischer, a sociologist of friendship, has noted, "Social networks are important in all our lives, often for finding jobs, more often for finding a helping hand, companionship, or a shoulder to cry on."

If individual clout and companionship were all there were to social capital, we'd expect foresighted, self-interested individuals to invest the right amount of time and energy in creating or acquiring it. However, social capital also can have "externalities" that affect the wider community, so that not all the costs and benefits of social connections accrue to the person making the contact. As we shall see later in this book, a well-connected individual in a poorly connected society is not as productive as a well-connected individual in a well-connected society. And even a poorly connected individual may derive some of the spillover benefits from living in a well-connected community. If the crime rate in my neighborhood is lowered by neighbors keeping an eye on one another's homes, I benefit even if I personally spend most of my time on the road and never even nod to another resident on the street.

Social capital can thus be simultaneously a "private good" and a "public good." Some of the benefit from an investment in social capital goes to bystanders, while some of the benefit redounds to the immediate interest of the person making the investment. For example, service clubs, like Rotary or Lions, mobilize local energies to raise scholarships or fight disease at the same time that they provide members with friendships and business connections that pay off personally.

Social connections are also important for the rules of conduct that they sustain. Networks involve (almost by definition) mutual obligations; they are not interesting as mere "contacts." Networks of community engagement foster sturdy norms of reciprocity: I'll do this for you now, in the expectation that you (or perhaps someone else) will return the favor. "Social capital is akin to what Tom Wolfe called 'the favor bank' in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities," notes economist Robert Frank. It was, however, neither a novelist nor an economist, but Yogi Berra who offered the most succinct definition of reciprocity: "If you don't go to somebody's funeral, they won't come to yours."

Sometimes, as in these cases, reciprocity is specific: I'll do this for you if you do that for me. Even more valuable, however, is a norm of generalized reciprocity: I'll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road. The Golden Rule is one formulation of generalized reciprocity. Equally instructive is the T-shirt slogan used by the Gold Beach, Oregon, Volunteer Fire Department to publicize their annual fund-raising effort: "Come to our breakfast, we'll come to your fire." "We act on a norm of specific reciprocity," the firefighters seem to be saying, but onlookers smile because they recognize the underlying norm of generalized reciprocity -- the firefighters will come even if you don't. When Blanche DuBois depended on the kindness of strangers, she too was relying on generalized reciprocity.

A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. If we don't have to balance every exchange instantly, we can get a lot more accomplished. Trustworthiness lubricates social life. Frequent interaction among a diverse set of people tends to produce a norm of generalized reciprocity. Civic engagement and social capital entail mutual obligation and responsibility for action. As L. J. Hanifan and his successors recognized, social networks and norms of reciprocity can facilitate cooperation for mutual benefit. When economic and political dealing is embedded in dense networks of social interaction, incentives for opportunism and malfeasance are reduced. This is why the diamond trade, with its extreme possibilities for fraud, is concentrated within close-knit ethnic enclaves. Dense social ties facilitate gossip and other valuable ways of cultivating reputation -- an essential foundation for trust in a complex society.

Physical capital is not a single "thing," and different forms of physical capital are not interchangeable. An eggbeater and an aircraft carrier both appear as physical capital in our national accounts, but the eggbeater is not much use for national defense, and the carrier would not be much help with your morning omelet. Similarly, social capital -- that is, social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity -- comes in many different shapes and sizes with many different uses. Your extended family represents a form of social capital, as do your Sunday school class, the regulars who play poker on your commuter train, your college roommates, the civic organizations to which you belong, the Internet chat group in which you participate, and the network of professional acquaintances recorded in your address book.

Sometimes "social capital," like its conceptual cousin "community," sounds warm and cuddly. Urban sociologist Xavier de Souza Briggs, however, properly warns us to beware of a treacly sweet, "kumbaya" interpretation of social capital. Networks and the associated norms of reciprocity are generally good for those inside the network, but the external effects of social capital are by no means always positive. It was social capital, for example, that enabled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh's network of friends, bound together by a norm of reciprocity, enabled him to do what he could not have done alone. Similarly, urban gangs, NIMBY ("not in my backyard") movements, and power elites often exploit social capital to achieve ends that are antisocial from a wider perspective. Indeed, it is rhetorically useful for such groups to obscure the difference between the pro-social and antisocial consequences of community organizations. When Floridians objected to plans by the Ku Klux Klan to "adopt a highway," Jeff Coleman, grand wizard of the Royal Knights of the KKK, protested, "Really, we're just like the Lions or the Elks. We want to be involved in the community."

Social capital, in short, can be directed toward malevolent, antisocial purposes, just like any other form of capital. (McVeigh also relied on physical capital, like the explosive-laden truck, and human capital, like bomb-making expertise, to achieve his purposes.) Therefore it is important to ask how the positive consequences of social capital -- mutual support, cooperation, trust, institutional effectiveness -- can be maximized and the negative manifestations -- sectarianism, ethnocentrism, corruption -- minimized. Toward this end, scholars have begun to distinguish many different forms of social capital.

Some forms involve repeated, intensive, multistranded networks -- like a group of steelworkers who meet for drinks every Friday after work and see each other at mass on Sunday -- and some are episodic, single stranded, and anonymous, like the faintly familiar face you see several times a month in the supermarket checkout line. Some types of social capital, like a Parent-Teacher Association, are formally organized, with incorporation papers, regular meetings, a written constitution, and connection to a national federation, whereas others, like a pickup basketball game, are more informal. Some forms of social capital, like a volunteer ambulance squad, have explicit public-regarding purposes; some, like a bridge club, exist for the private enjoyment of the members; and some, like the Rotary club mentioned earlier, serve both public and private ends.

Of all the dimensions along which forms of social capital vary, perhaps the most important is the distinction between bridging (or inclusive) and bonding (or exclusive). Some forms of social capital are, by choice or necessity, inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogeneous groups. Examples of bonding social capital include ethnic fraternal organizations, church-based women's reading groups, and fashionable country clubs. Other networks are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages. Examples of bridging social capital include the civil rights movement, many youth service groups, and ecumenical religious organizations.

Bonding social capital is good for undergirding specific reciprocity and mobilizing solidarity. Dense networks in ethnic enclaves, for example, provide crucial social and psychological support for less fortunate members of the community, while furnishing start-up financing, markets, and reliable labor for local entrepreneurs. Bridging networks, by contrast, are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion. Economic sociologist Mark Granovetter has pointed out that when seeking jobs -- or political allies -- the "weak" ties that link me to distant acquaintances who move in different circles from mine are actually more valuable than the "strong" ties that link me to relatives and intimate friends whose sociological niche is very like my own. Bonding social capital is, as Xavier de Souza Briggs puts it, good for "getting by," but bridging social capital is crucial for "getting ahead."

Moreover, bridging social capital can generate broader identities and reciprocity, whereas bonding social capital bolsters our narrower selves. In 1829 at the founding of a community lyceum in the bustling whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Thomas Greene eloquently expressed this crucial insight:

We come from all the divisions, ranks and classes of society...to teach and to be taught in our turn. While we mingle together in these pursuits, we shall learn to know each other more intimately; we shall remove many of the prejudices which ignorance or partial acquaintance with each other had fostered....In the parties and sects into which we are divided, we sometimes learn to love our brother at the expense of him whom we do not in so many respects regard as a brother....We may return to our homes and firesides [from the lyceum] with kindlier feelings toward one another, because we have learned to know one another better.

Bonding social capital constitutes a kind of sociological superglue, whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD-40. Bonding social capital, by creating strong in-group loyalty, may also create strong out-group antagonism, as Thomas Greene and his neighbors in New Bedford knew, and for that reason we might expect negative external effects to be more common with this form of social capital. Nevertheless, under many circumstances both bridging and bonding social capital can have powerfully positive social effects.

Many groups simultaneously bond along some social dimensions and bridge across others. The black church, for example, brings together people of the same race and religion across class lines. The Knights of Columbus was created to bridge cleavages among different ethnic communities while bonding along religious and gender lines. Internet chat groups may bridge across geography, gender, age, and religion, while being tightly homogeneous in education and ideology. In short, bonding and bridging are not "either-or" categories into which social networks can be neatly divided, but "more or less" dimensions along which we can compare different forms of social capital.

It would obviously be valuable to have distinct measures of the evolution of these various forms of social capital over time. However, like researchers on global warming, we must make do with the imperfect evidence that we can find, not merely lament its deficiencies. Exhaustive descriptions of social networks in America -- even at a single point in time -- do not exist. I have found no reliable, comprehensive, nationwide measures of social capital that neatly distinguish "bridgingness" and "bondingness." In our empirical account of recent social trends in this book, therefore, this distinction will be less prominent than I would prefer. On the other hand, we must keep this conceptual differentiation at the back of our minds as we proceed, recognizing that bridging and bonding social capital are not interchangeable.

"Social capital" is to some extent merely new language for a very old debate in American intellectual circles. Community has warred incessantly with individualism for preeminence in our political hagiology. Liberation from ossified community bonds is a recurrent and honored theme in our culture, from the Pilgrims' storied escape from religious convention in the seventeenth century to the lyric nineteenth-century paeans to individualism by Emerson ("Self-Reliance"), Thoreau ("Civil Disobedience"), and Whitman ("Song of Myself") to Sherwood Anderson's twentieth-century celebration of the struggle against conformism by ordinary citizens in Winesburg, Ohio to the latest Clint Eastwood film. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, patron saint of American communitarians, acknowledged the uniquely democratic claim of individualism, "a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself."

Our national myths often exaggerate the role of individual heroes and understate the importance of collective effort. Historian David Hackett Fischer's gripping account of opening night in the American Revolution, for example, reminds us that Paul Revere's alarum was successful only because of networks of civic engagement in the Middlesex villages. Towns without well-organized local militia, no matter how patriotic their inhabitants, were AWOL from Lexington and Concord.24 Nevertheless, the myth of rugged individualism continues to strike a powerful inner chord in the American psyche.

Debates about the waxing and waning of "community" have been endemic for at least two centuries. "Declensionist narratives" -- postmodernist jargon for tales of decline and fall -- have a long pedigree in our letters. We seem perennially tempted to contrast our tawdry todays with past golden ages. We apparently share this nostalgic predilection with the rest of humanity. As sociologist Barry Wellman observes,

It is likely that pundits have worried about the impact of social change on communities ever since human beings ventured beyond their caves....In the [past] two centuries many leading social commentators have been gainfully employed suggesting various ways in which large-scale social changes associated with the Industrial Revolution may have affected the structure and operation of communities....This ambivalence about the consequences of large-scale changes continued well into the twentieth century. Analysts have kept asking if things have, in fact, fallen apart.

At the conclusion of the twentieth century, ordinary Americans shared this sense of civic malaise. We were reasonably content about our economic prospects, hardly a surprise after an expansion of unprecedented length, but we were not equally convinced that we were on the right track morally or culturally. Of baby boomers interviewed in 1987, 53 percent thought their parents' generation was better in terms of "being a concerned citizen, involved in helping others in the community," as compared with only 21 percent who thought their own generation was better. Fully 77 percent said the nation was worse off because of "less involvement in community activities." In 1992 three-quarters of the U.S. workforce said that "the breakdown of community" and "selfishness" were "serious" or "extremely serious" problems in America. In 1996 only 8 percent of all Americans said that "the honesty and integrity of the average American" were improving, as compared with 50 percent of us who thought we were becoming less trustworthy. Those of us who said that people had become less civil over the preceding ten years outnumbered those who thought people had become more civil, 80 percent to 12 percent. In several surveys in 1999 two-thirds of Americans said that America's civic life had weakened in recent years, that social and moral values were higher when they were growing up, and that our society was focused more on the individual than the community. More than 80 percent said there should be more emphasis on community, even if that put more demands on individuals. Americans' concern about weakening community bonds may be misplaced or exaggerated, but a decent respect for the opinion of our fellow citizens suggests that we should explore the issue more thoroughly.

It is emphatically not my view that community bonds in America have weakened steadily throughout our history -- or even throughout the last hundred years. On the contrary, American history carefully examined is a story of ups and downs in civic engagement, not just downs -- a story of collapse and of renewal. As I have already hinted in the opening pages of this book, within living memory the bonds of community in America were becoming stronger, not weaker, and as I shall argue in the concluding pages, it is within our power to reverse the decline of the last several decades.

Nevertheless, my argument is, at least in appearance, in the declensionist tradition, so it is important to avoid simple nostalgia. Precisely because the theme of this book might lend itself to gauzy self-deception, our methods must be transparent. Is life in communities as we enter the twenty-first century really so different after all from the reality of American communities in the 1950s and 1960s? One way of curbing nostalgia is to count things. Are club meetings really less crowded today than yesterday, or does it just seem so? Do we really know our neighbors less well than our parents did, or is our childhood recollection of neighborhood barbecues suffused with a golden glow of wishful reminiscence? Are friendly poker games less common now, or is it merely that we ourselves have outgrown poker? League bowling may be passé, but how about softball and soccer? Are strangers less trustworthy now? Are boomers and X'ers really less engaged in community life? After all, it was the preceding generation that was once scorned as "silent." Perhaps the younger generation today is no less engaged than their predecessors, but engaged in new ways. In the chapters that follow we explore these questions with the best available evidence.

The challenge of studying the evolving social climate is analogous in some respects to the challenge facing meteorologists who measure global warming: we know what kind of evidence we would ideally want from the past, but time's arrow means that we can't go back to conduct those well-designed studies. Thus if we are to explore how our society is like or unlike our parents', we must make imperfect inferences from all the evidence that we can find.

The most powerful strategy for paleometeorologists seeking to assess global climate change is to triangulate among diverse sources of evidence. If pollen counts in polar ice, and the width of southwestern tree rings, and temperature records of the British Admiralty all point in a similar direction, the inference of global warming is stronger than if the cord of evidence has only a single strand. For much the same reason, prudent journalists follow a "two source" rule: Never report anything unless at least two independent sources confirm it.

In this book I follow that same maxim. Nearly every major generalization here rests on more than one body of independent evidence, and where I have discovered divergent results from credible sources, I note that disparity as well. I have a case to make, but like any officer of the court, I have a professional obligation to present all relevant evidence I have found, exculpatory as well as incriminating. To avoid cluttering the text with masses of redundant evidence, I have typically put confirmatory evidence from multiple studies in the notes, so skeptical "show me" readers should examine those notes as well as the text.

I have sought as diverse a range of evidence as possible on continuities and change in American social life. If the transformation that I discern is as broad and deep as I believe it to be, it ought to show up in many different places, so I have cast a broad net. Of course, social change, like climatic change, is inevitably uneven. Life is not lived in a single dimension. We should not expect to find everything changing in the same direction and at the same speed, but those very anomalies may contain important clues to what is happening.

American society, like the continent on which we live, is massive and polymorphous, and our civic engagement historically has come in many sizes and shapes. A few of us still share plowing chores with neighbors, while many more pitch in to wire classrooms to the Internet. Some of us run for Congress, and others join self-help groups. Some of us hang out at the local bar association and others at the local bar. Some of us attend mass once a day, while others struggle to remember to send holiday greetings once a year. The forms of our social capital -- the ways in which we connect with friends and neighbors and strangers -- are varied.

So our review of trends in social capital and civic engagement ranges widely across various sectors of this complex society. In the chapters that follow we begin by charting Americans' participation in the most public forum -- politics and public affairs. We next turn to the institutions of our communities -- clubs and community associations, religious bodies, and work-related organizations, such as unions and professional societies. Then we explore the almost infinite variety of informal ties that link Americans -- card parties and bowling leagues, bar cliques and ball games, picnics and parties. Next we examine the changing patterns of trust and altruism in America -- philanthropy,
volunteering, honesty, reciprocity. Finally we turn to three apparent counterexamples to the decline of connectedness -- small groups, social movements, and the Internet.

In each domain we shall encounter currents and crosscurrents and eddies, but in each we shall also discover common, powerful tidal movements that have swept across American society in the twentieth century. The dominant theme is simple: For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago -- silently, without warning -- that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.

The impact of these tides on all aspects of American society, their causes and consequences and what we might do to reverse them, is the subject of the rest of this book. Section III explores a wide range of possible explanations -- from overwork to suburban sprawl, from the welfare state to the women's revolution, from racism to television, from the growth of mobility to the growth of divorce. Some of these factors turn out to have played no significant role at all in the erosion of social capital, but we shall be able to identify three or four critical sources of our problem.

Whereas section III asks "Why?" section IV asks "So What?" Social capital turns out to have forceful, even quantifiable effects on many different aspects of our lives. What is at stake is not merely warm, cuddly feelings or frissons of community pride. We shall review hard evidence that our schools and neighborhoods don't work so well when community bonds slacken, that our economy, our democracy, and even our health and happiness depend on adequate stocks of social capital.

Finally, in section V we turn from the necessary but cheerless task of diagnosis to the more optimistic challenge of contemplating possible therapies. A century ago, it turns out, Americans faced social and political issues that were strikingly similar to those that we must now address. From our predecessors' responses, we have much to learn -- not least that civic decay like that around us can be reversed. This volume offers no simple cures for our contemporary ills. In the final section my aim is to provoke (and perhaps contribute to) a period of national deliberation and experimentation about how we can renew American civic engagement and social connectedness in the twenty-first century.

Before October 29, 1997, John Lambert and Andy Boschma knew each other only through their local bowling league at the Ypsi-Arbor Lanes in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Lambert, a sixty-four-year-old retired employee of the University of Michigan hospital, had been on a kidney transplant waiting list for three years when Boschma, a thirty-three-year-old accountant, learned casually of Lambert's need and unexpectedly approached him to offer to donate one of his own kidneys.

"Andy saw something in me that others didn't," said Lambert. "When we were in the hospital Andy said to me, 'John, I really like you and have a lot of respect for you. I wouldn't hesitate to do this all over again.' I got choked up." Boschma returned the feeling: "I obviously feel a kinship [with Lambert]. I cared about him before, but now I'm really rooting for him." This moving story speaks for itself, but the photograph that accompanied this report in the Ann Arbor News reveals that in addition to their differences in profession and generation, Boschma is white and Lambert is African American. That they bowled together made all the difference. In small ways like this -- and in larger ways, too -- we Americans need to reconnect with one another. That is the simple argument of this book.

Copyright © 2000 by Robert D. Putnam

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Touchstone Books by Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (August 7, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743203046
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743203043
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.44 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #103,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #132 in Sociology of Class
- #320 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
- #3,880 in Social Sciences (Books)

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Robert D. Putnam

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Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and founder of the Saguaro Seminar, a program dedicated to fostering civic engagement in America. He is the author or coauthor of ten previous books and is former dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Lots of common sense

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 25, 2020

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I have been reading books for over half a century. I'm what they call a book lover. Generally interest is in PoliSci, psychology, censorship, history and conflict. This book was purchased because it was alleged that the author asserted trust is most advanced by those having similarities. So, what was the big deal? People wrote as if his hypothesis on common sense was something ground shattering. Having resided in the Worker’s Paradise, his “common sense” baffled my curiosity.

The book is 540 pages and the author, Prof. Robert Putnam, is a professor. The cover notes the book was a best seller. That astounded me. I absolutely can't understand it.

It’s now realized that the social scientists praising this book, in all probability, did such because they enjoyed one of the conclusions. Whether riding from coast to coast on a motorcycle, sitting by a beach, or under an old oak tree I have generally consumed books within 3 to 8 days. Unfortunately, this work was very difficult to plow through. I struggled for over three weeks. There was a desire to mail the book to a buddy (he’s a sociologist).

I don't know why the author engages in writing. Is it a publish or perish issue? God bless him if that's what he likes to do. However, it seemed as though he just went into cyberspace, threw things down and added ingredients to the cognitive nutriments. Often I had the feeling much of the writing did not relate to the subject at hand.

A principal tone of this work is that past folks had greater reciprocity than those in our age. One of the keys for opening up this book’s door is the concept of social capital. It appears several times. Generally really good authors throw in some humor. The only humor I found was about Yogi Berra. Yogi said, “If you don't go to somebody's funeral they won't come to yours.”

Putnam stopped to gas up his social capital tank at a weird stop. He has a strange reference to a guy by the name of Timothy McVay. He had bombed a federal building and the author indicates this was possible because of his network of friends. He goes through a few pages about that guy and includes the catch phase “Ku Klux Klan.” I thought this was very odd. I've been in the US for years and never ever heard anybody other than MSM refer to them. He flips the coin and tells us what everyone already knows; mainly, social capital can mostly have positive effects. He says the black church, for example, brings together people across class lines. Nearly everything he writes simply seems to be common sense. So again I wondered what's the big fuss?

In one place he tells us it’s not his view that community bonds have weakened. He thinks it's a matter of ups and downs, of collapse and renewal. As noted, I kept placing the book aside. This was one of those places.

For some reason he informs about a black fellow who donated a kidney. The recipient was white. This indicated apparently that, “We Americans need to reconnect.” (p. 28) This evidently meant that we have disconnected. After this, he goes into political participation. He tells us who voted in 1960 and 1996. He wants us to know that Afro-Americans and some poor whites were disenfranchised because of literacy tests and other factors. I thought kids knew this?

It seems that one of the foundations for his social capital theme is the South. He writes a lot about politics and the region of the old Confederacy. He refers to Jim Crow. Seems the South is in decline within America’s electorate. He expands and says that the average college graduate today knows little more about government than the average high schooler in the 1940s. I now reside in the South, know blacks from a recreational area. No one has ever mentioned Jim Crow. He’s like ancient history; he’s the bird that flew away, half a century ago.

He wants readers to know there’s less political participation, but funds have skyrocketed (compared to the past). It’s because of mass marketing. Money had replaced time and participation. Also in the 1990s roughly three out of every four Americans didn't trust their government. (p. 47) Is that not the same today? Is that not why, when a politician speaks about the Deep State, he has a huge cheering of crowds? Well?

Going from politics, he wants us to know that membership in other groups has declined. He has an entire session pertaining to civic participation. As for trust, at the same time there was a collapse in the American family structure. I noticed that, after having spent several years outside the US. Despite the breakdown, he wants us to realize not everything was negative. For example, they were new housing programs like the Habitat for Humanity and (2) black churches in America were still social institutions.

As for religion, although masses were not attending church they affirmed a belief in God. While the Catholic population increased, the Protestant and Jewish populations decreased. (p. 73) This brings us to his informal social connections. We learned that in Yiddish there's a word for informal communication, schmoozers. (p. 93) He tells us that in that language there's a word for people who invest time in organizations and it’s machers. He uses these two words extensively and emphasizes machers were generally male. BTW Yiddish is not a dead language. There are still enclaves and small communities all over Mother Earth, including NY.

In case you don't know, he informs that single people spend more energy schmoozing and (2) marriage increases time at home. (p. 94) The book is full of this type of common sense and it doesn't need to be repeatedly recorded into studies. We read that there's been a decline in the number of families that eat or vacation together. (pp. 100 -101) On the other side of the coin, there’s been more neighborhood watch groups than ever before. I remember attending a mass media conference in Warsaw, Poland and being shown graphs in which journalists discussed a way of getting people to believe what was desired. This was by presenting poll results. This study is loaded with poll info. Polls can be more than dubious. They have always been for open-ended discussion.

By the time we hit chapter 8 (Reciprocity, Honesty and Trust) the readership is told those three items lubricate the fractions in life. (p. 135) People who believe others are honest are less likely to lie, steal and cheat. It’s written that “have nots” are less trusting than the “haves.” When people tell posters that most people can't be trusted, they are not hallucinating, they are merely reporting their life experiences. We are told that most people today believe they are living in a less trustworthy society than did their parents. In 1970 they were 3% less lawyers than doctors. By 1995 they were 34% more lawyers than doctors. The increase in divorce is part of the trust story.

Prof. Putnam ventures into the arena of black, gay, and student protest movements. We read about a person stating that he had pertinent news, “Dante is dead and it’s time that we stop the study of his inferno and turn our attention to our own.” (p. 149) I thought that was the most fascinating part of the book. It was original and not a redundancy of common sense.

For continued verification of less interaction and trust, the author refers to phones, and again organizations and voting. In the past about half of all phone calls were within a 2 mile radius. We read that the telephone facilitated schmoozing. Regarding interaction, now, in the age of the Internet, there are 500 places where a person can pray virtually on a site that forwards email prayers that can be placed within the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem. (p. 170) As for organizations, he uses Green Peace is an example. It increased its membership X3 in barely 5 years. It went from 800,000 in 1985 to 2,350,000 in 1995. It then lost 85% of its membership in the next eight years. Many memberships in organizations are as phony as a three dollar bill, consisting of mailing lists. Often national organizations do not even have local offices.

Putnam then pulls in interest by mentioning Bill Gates. Voting, trusting, volunteering, meeting and visiting were all in decline when Gates was in school. I believe much of that had to do with the new electro- gadget age. In 1996 only 10% of American adults were on the Internet. Since then the figures have skyrocketed.

Dr. Putnam informs us that cyberspace is not responsible for the decline in social trust. He then mentions cyber apartheid, eye contact and gestures. Face-to-face encounters provide plenty that can not be comparable in cyberspace. (p. 175) These are good common sense points.

In short, cyberspace is not the same as personal interaction. For some reason he wants us to know that as early as 1995 it was reported that 27,000 were on a homosexual news group. (p. 173) That site averaged 75,000 emails a day. Four pages later we read that the most disconnected groups are racial minorities, female headed households, and the rural poor. Makes one wonder about the disparity gab.

We read that today more and more Americans Kibitz. We are also less likely to give strangers the benefit of a doubt. They, in turn, return the favor.

This second half of this book
About midway through the book it becomes much more readable and entertaining. Here, we read that levels of social engagement differ. The author deems that by the 1960s -70s American community life begin to unravel.

Gaps are formed by education, income, race and family structure. The gaps are widening. The author then emphasizes that education has little effect on informal social connecting, schmoozing. (p. 186)

Putnam then breaks all this down into time and money. People have less time for others than in the past. This seems to be another redundant example of exploiting common sense. We read that two career parents are spending more time at work than past couples. The movement of mothers from their children and home to the factory/office has had a devastating effect.

The author wants us to know that women who work full-time are less likely to visit others for entertainment or to volunteer. (p. 201) The chapter is summed up by noting that pressures associated with two career parents are part of the explanation for declining connectiveness. Nearly cemented to all this is the idea of mobility and the sprawl of communities.

As we all know, those in small towns are more connected with neighbors. Putnam wants his readers to know that suburbs contributed to segregations. The author even mentions gated communities. No need to comment on what that function implies. Suburbs also contributed to more time being spent in cars. Social disengagement was becoming an undeniable fact.

Technology also separated people. For example, TV steals time. In 1970 only 6% of sixth graders had a TV in their room. By 1999 that number had escalated to 77%. Husbands and wives spent more time watching TV than interaction with each other.

The author goes over prior themes in discussing the destruction of civil engagement. The loosening of family bonds along with divorce played a major part in the eradication of positive civil interaction. In 1974 about 75% of children had married parents. In 1998 the figure had fallen to 56%. Putnam notes that these factors were not all inclusive. For example, he refers to it having just about no affect on NAACP membership. He insists that this is because race is such a fundamental feature in American social history. He wonders if it’s perhaps possible it might have somehow played a role in the erosion of social capital (p. 279) We read that after all, the erosion of social capital began just after the greatest accomplishments in civil rights.

Dr. Putnam states if racial prejudice were responsible for civil disengagement, it would be especially pronounced among the most bigoted generations. But it’s not. He noticed government policies might be responsible in someway. But, it’s hard to see which policies might be responsible for the decline. (p. 281) A rehash centered on time, money, urbanization, electronic entertainment and generational changes.

Putnam refers to an ancient era in US history, slavery. He notes it was a system designed to destroy social capital. He also writes that states such as Vermont, Nebraska and North Dakota have healthy civic adults and well adjusted kids. On the other hand, those in the South face challenges in both adult and young populations. Social capital is associated with these factors. Common sense verifies that a state’s rate of single parent households can certainly be part of an equation in solving problems of social capital.

We read of a study pertaining to inner-city children. They were less depressed when they had high levels of social capital. (p. 299) He talks about SAT scores, but I see no reason to rehash that. We read about some American cities and how high murder rates have become basically accepted. He informs that it's an old age puzzle as to why states in the old Confederacy have more violence than many other states. (p. 309)

Conclusio- Putnam seems to contradict himself about his noted northern factors by mentioning Chicago and Philadelphia. He wants us to know that many problems are due to poverty. When speaking about inner cities he noticed there's a lack of social capital but most residents work and are not on welfare. Also, most teenagers attend school. On the other hand, there’s a rising number of single woman with children who are on public assistance. We learn one of the reasons for all the alleged turmoil is because of low levels of trust.

In many instances policing a community doesn't seem to reduce disorder and crime. For some reason, after referring to the above, he wants readers to know that much of his evidence is from other studies. That's baffling.

Discussing regions, he moves on to places such as Silicon Valley. Skeptics have argued that there’s employer racism there. Also perhaps certain ethnic groups dominate. He skips around and refers to Singapore and Detroit. We even read about a community in Mississippi. It was one of the poorest in the country and today it prospers.

One wonders if the author had some sort of a degree in political science. The reason for this is an entire chapter pertaining to how wonderful our democracy is. He even refers to President Madison. He wants us to know that everything is not perfect and there has been long-standing inattention and even alienated factors concerning the disadvantaged.

For some strange reason the author mentions there's also a dark side of social capital. He refers to a movie that is concerned with such things as being provincial and racist. Sometimes social capital can be at war with liberty and tolerance. Sometimes it objects to community ties. (p. 351) We read that in 1956 half of white Americans thought that they should be allowed to send their kids to separate schools. Putnam tells us that in 1995 only 4% thought this.

According to Prof. Putnam, in 1963 45% of white Americans said that they would move out of their neighborhood if blacks moved in. In 1997 only 1% said that. (p. 352) We read that community mongers, in the past, fostered intolerance.

While readers absorb all this, they see that at the end of the 20th century there remains a big gap between the rich and the poor. The author doesn't refer to such facts as a mere eight Americans being richer than the citizenry of the country’s lower 40%. He does note that fraternity and equality amongst regular citizens are complementary. (p. 359) He ponders about policies to build bridges for social capital to ensure that kids get future stimulation. (p. 363)

Near the end of the book the author wonders what can be done to improve social capital. He goes way back in US history; he mentions the lynching of Southern blacks, legal segregation, white vigilantes and Jim Crowe. He touches upon the inequality of cooperate power. He then refers to great organization. He touches upon German associations as well as those of Italians, Jews and Poles. Putnam mentions that by 1910 two thirds of all Poles belonged to a PolishAm association. Overall participation in civil organizations cut widely across class lines.

As noted, Prof. Putnam wants readers to know that much of his evidence is from other studies. The work contains lots of charts, poll info, correlations and a hundred pages of notes. As shown in this brief, his themes about social capital provide plenty of evidence verifying the erosion of reciprocity and trust.

Sometimes one wonders about those of us with PhDs, who speak other languages and have traveled the world. Why do intellectuals -mostly academics- write books that contain half a thousand pages, on issues of common sense, when 25 pages would suffice? In some of the Slavic languages we’d say it’s a zagatka (“Puzzle”).

Near the very end of the book he refers to a famous Hebrew saying, “To everything there is a season.” He mentions a need to create new structures to renew civil engagements. Putnam believes that we need, as individuals, to reconnect. (p. 403)

When we read the Three Bears or Cinderella to little souls it’s not just to entertain. Each of those myths are about justice. It seems the author was seeking what he thought possible.

He wanted to find ways that more Americans would participate in public life. He refers to the Museum of the National Center for Afro-Am Artists, in Boston. It has convened diverse groups such as Haitians, Jamaicans, Afro Brazilians and native African Americans. He wanted public policies to be more attractive so they could be as successful as those in Atlanta and Portland. We can only wait to see if, like in Cinderella, dreams will be achieved.

His agenda in the year 2000 was to find ways that would match civil engagement with those of an earlier time. He desired cooperation to reduce racism. (p. 405) He longed to find means so that by 2010 the work place would be more friendly and congenital. Don't most work places in America, in the realms of humanity and (also) law, fit that category? Of course, work is work.

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A. Diamond

Informative and thoroughly researched

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 27, 2020

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Phew! This one was a long slog. Putnam provides exhaustive data in his examination of the decline of “social capital” in late 20th-century American society. The author defines social capital as the network of informal social bonds within a society.

These bonds tie individuals and communities together, providing social, economic, and emotional support for all. The social networks of church, clubs, interest groups and sports leagues embody an ethos of trust and open-ended reciprocity: you watch my kids this afternoon, and I’ll watch yours some day in the future. In a society rich in social capital, individuals and families have much to lean on.

Bowling Alone traces the rise and decline of America’s organized social institutions over the course of the twentieth century, including everthing from Elks and Kiwanis to the Sierra Club and Boy Scouts to churches and bowling leagues. Putnam shows, with an immense amount of hard data, how membership and participation in all of these organizations swelled in the middle decades of the twentieth century and then went into steep decline in the mid-late 1960s.

One of Putnam’s most interesting findings is that the decline was constant across all socio-economic groups, all races, all education levels, and all regions of the country, including urban, suburban, and rural areas.

Not only did membership in social groups wane during this era, but general participation in civic life atrophied as well. People attended fewer community meetings, fewer political rallies, wrote fewer letters to newspaper editors, attended church less often. People even entertained guests and attended dinner parties less often than they used to. (Putnam has evidence for this in decades of time-use surveys that were administered annually throughout the US.)

The nature of membership in many organizations changed from participatory to financial. No one attends United Way meetings, but millions of “members” write checks in support, and unlike the Rotary Club or any other organization whose members had regular face-to-face contact, United Way “members” pass each other on the street every day without recognizing each other.

These changes substantially weakened community ties among all populations in US. Through rigorous statistical analysis, Putnam attempts to trace the causes of this decline in social capital. He finds three minor factors and one major one.

The first and least significant minor factor is the rise of the two-income family. With both parents working, neither has much time to give to outside social organizations.

The second minor factor is what Putnam calls “mobility and sprawl.” When people move a lot, they don’t have time to put down roots. And in the suburban sprawl that replaced cities and small towns as centers of population, there is little chance for the sort of informal encounters that used to happen on street corners, in shops, and in parks. Those encounters where people caught up on the details of each others’ lives were replaced by long commutes alone in the car, by stip malls that no one walks to, and by suburbs that were designed so people would not have to encounter their neighbors.

The biggest of the three minor factors is technology and the rise of mass media. This book was published in 2000, so the author focuses mainly on television when he writes of mass media. In the days before television, people went out with friends and neighbors because spending night after night in the house was just downright tedious. After television, people stayed in to engage passively with a device rather than actively with other humans.

Television appeared first appeared in 1948, and by 1955, 75% of American homes had a TV. That’s a shockingly fast adoption rate for such a major cultural and technological change, and it occurred just as the first baby boomers were getting old enough to watch.

Putnam presents numbers showing a direct correlation between the amount of television watched in childhood and a person’s likeliness to participate in social, political, and religious organizations. The more you watch, the less likely you are to participate.

The three minor facts together account for about a third of the decline in social capital. The rest, according to Putnam, comes from generational change. The two generations before the Boomers were joiners: they formed and joined groups and participated heavily in community. The boomers and later generations were more individualistic. As the earlier generations died off, very few people from the subsequent generations stepped in to take their places. You could see this if you walked into a Kiwanis or Elks meeting in the late twentieth century: the members, on average, were much older than the population at large.

Putnam doesn’t fully answer the question of why, after several generations of “joiners,” did the Boomers and later generations become so atomized, so much less community focused. He does note several surveys that show a shift in values. Boomers and Gen-X value financial and material success much more highly than prior generations, and they seem to have poured most of their energy into pursuing those ends. But why?

I have my own theories about that. As Putnam notes, 80% of the male population of the World War II generation that was of service age served in the armed forces. Army life is communal, not individual. Whatever your unit happens to be doing, no one is in it for themselves. Everyone is working for the team and the cause, and everything a unit does together–eating, sleeping, working–reinforces the bonds between its members.

This is a very different mindset that what television ads began to promote from the 1950s on, where the message was, “Whatever you have isn’t good enough. You need better.” And the implication, of course, was that you had to go out and get that better car/house/life, or you weren’t really living.

The Great Depression had taught the war generation to practice austerity, and after a long and brutal war, they naturally wanted peace and stability. The boomers were born into a world of relative plenty. They didn’t experience the harsh realities that had conditioned their parents, they just saw that their parents were boring and (according to television) there was a more exciting world out there just waiting to be had. So they rejected their parents dull world and spent their lives chasing that exciting one.

That’s my take, not Putnam’s.

After painting a portrait of a country in steep social decline, Putnam closes with some hope. He notes that the economic and technological changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with mass internal and international migrations, caused a fraying of social bonds similar to those in the latter half of the twentieth century. Those earlier changes also led to income and wealth inequalities as bad as we see today.

How did America handle the crisis then?

The author describes how the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century saw a sharp rise in social and political activism by both conservaties and liberals. Virtually all of the social organizations that would come to strengthen American communities in the mid-twentieth century were founded during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the century.

Communities for decades had been fraying because they could not keep up with the pace of social, economic, political, and technological change. While a minority advocated a return to the past, the majority understood there was no turning back from the progress of railways, electricity, the telephone, and the huge corporate conglomerates that were decimating local businesses.

The prevailing attitude across all sections of the political spectrum was that the future would not fix itself. The people had to step up, advocate and work for change. The fact that the institutions that arose from that turbulent era survived though most of the following century provides some hope for our own chaotic and divisive times.

Putnam will be publishing an update to this work in just a couple of weeks. The new edition will be out on October 13, 2020 and will include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the internet. I’m interested to see what he writes about the most disruptive technological change in our lifetime.

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Top reviews from other countries

Edward B. Crutchley

Generations of loners

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 8, 2016

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Interestingly, this engaging book was published in 2000. This was just before the dawn of social media; the final arrival of Marshall McLuhan’s global village predicted fifty years ago, the great electronic front porch (closely monitored by the State). Aided by plenty of graphs derived from various studies made over the years, the author illustrates the fall of ‘social capital’ since its 1940-1945 birth cohort peak. He observes declining participation in every aspect of bridging or bonding civic life, from religious organisations to politics, charities and charitable contributions (as a percentage of earnings), making long distance phone calls or writing letters, obeying stops signs, being active in trade unions and workplace groups, interest or social groups, and so on. He attributes much of the cause to a combination of the influences of generational differences (25%), TV (25%), metropolitan sprawl that gave rise to the need for extensive commuting and less focus on the home environment (10%), and the increasing pressures of work (10%). He notes that among the younger generations born after WW2 there has been a decline in trust (and a corresponding increase in the legal professions). People have cocooned, disenfranchised themselves, become socially isolated, opted out, turned their backs on conformity and joining in, become anchored at home, more fickle, giving money rather than personally participating. Charitable organisations have only kept afloat through intensive direct mailing. There has occurred a balkanisation of interests. The graphs are fascinating. Some of the most interesting of them convincingly correlate lower social capital of different American States with violent crime, health problems and mortality, educational performance. The southern states (other than Florida) tend to fair worst; the old slavery states tend to be less tolerant and civil. TV appears to be a great evil. Unforgettable, if it is to be believed, is Figure 66 on page 233 from a study that correlates time spent watching television with giving the finger at other drivers on the road. But why the generational difference? The author ends the book on a positive note. He believes in a new Great Awakening such as the one which sparked off the great move towards social cohesiveness in the first place at the end of the 19th Century that peaked around 1950. Back then it was against a background of widening inequality, patronage, invasive immigration, uprooting and urbanisation. One sees some parallels. The advent of widespread part-time work may help to create the opportunity.

13 people found this helpful

Andy Green

Profound wake up call for community activists

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 18, 2015

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A must read for all with an interest in regeneration and community development - as well as anyone with a genuine interest in creating a better world.
An authoritative and wide ranging review with a central metaphor that we bowl alone at our peril.
I found this a masterful survey of the issue with significant research and references to back up its case.
Something of a dichotmy here in posting this review on Amazon when I should be doing more to promote local bookstores.
Just a tip to the publishers - the cover makes it look more like a retro crime novel rather than a serious text - which has undermined my efforts to get others to take it seriously and read it.

9 people found this helpful

Martin Turner

Near canonical work of applied social theory

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 2, 2009

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Review the literature on Social Capital, and one name comes to the forefront again and again: Robert Putnam. It is this book which not only established him in the field, but more or less defined the future course of international study. But, although social capital is the central theme of this book, Putnam is less concerned with defining it (he gives at least three differing definitions, that I counted) as with demonstrating that it is not what it used to be.

Pages and pages of graphs all show a similar curve - gently rising from the 1900s, dipping for the Great Depression before rising again, dipping again for the second World War, rising sharply to peak in the sixties, before tumbling to a short plateau in the eighties, and then tumbling relentlessly from then on. This 'Putnam curve' (my words, not his) applies to Parent Teacher Associations, Card playing, civic activity, and, of course, to the rise and fall of league bowling, which is what gives this book its title. The graphs are supported by much reasoning, and by careful exclusion of other factors which might paint a false picture. The result is as compelling as it is far reaching.

Putnam's four factors which he believes contribute to the decline in social capital, or generalised reciprocity, as he at one point puts it, are perhaps less clearly demonstrated than the problem itself. They are: pressures of time and money, suburbanisation (with its commute to work), electronic entertainment (especially the television), and generational change, as more civic generations are replaced by less civic ones.

Likewise, his solutions, increasing civic engagement, community friendly workspaces, less time travelling, engaging faith groups, reducing TV time, and participatory cultural activities, are more supported by the extensive anecdotes than by the huge amounts of data.

Putnam's underlying thesis, that social capital is basically a 'good thing', and we should have more of it, had already been challenged by neo-marxist Pierre Bourdieu. A more substantial challenge has been put since, in that the US picture is very difficult to apply to the international community. UK society, for example, with the same four factors at work, does not remotely show a similar pattern of rising and falling social capital.

Nonetheless, the strength of Putnam's argument has been enough to set in motion major projects by the World Bank, the OECD, the EU and our own Office of National Statistics, to firm up the data gathering, and to find how it might apply to public policy.

It is very, very unusual to find a single work of such eminence in any modern field of enquiry. Most commentators have been content to build on Putnam's work, or take issue with the technicalities, rather than to challenge his overall thesis. This puts us at risk of discovering that it is the Emperor's new clothes, when someone comes along with a radically critical perspective.

Nonetheless, whatever flaws may be found in the theory at a later date, this is a seminal work, and well deserves the maximum rating.

18 people found this helpful

Chris X

Can be applied to anywhere in the west today

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 23, 2019

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For an overview of the current state of society read this book.

2 people found this helpful

Elaine Martin

Very good for Psychology & Criminology students

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 26, 2016

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The book had been read before but was in a very good condition as described, it was delivered before the stated date. I have just started to read it & up to now it looks very informative. (possibly should have read it when doing my degree as suggested by a lecturer!)

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Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Paperback – August 7, 2001

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