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September 5 - September 15, 2025
Precisely because social capital is essential for social movements, its erosion could shroud their prospects for the future.
The timing of the Internet explosion means that it cannot possibly be causally linked to the crumbling of social connectedness described in previous chapters. Voting, giving, trusting, meeting, visiting, and so on had all begun to decline while Bill Gates was still in grade school. By the time that the Internet reached 10 percent of American adults in 1996, the nationwide decline in social connectedness and civic engagement had been under way for at least a quarter of a century.
Whatever the future implications of the Internet, social intercourse over the last several decades of the twentieth century was not simply displaced from physical space to cyberspace. The Internet may be part of the solution to our civic problem, or it may exacerbate it, but the cyberrevolution was not the cause.
Information is, of course, important, but as John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid of Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center emphasize, information itself needs a social context to be meaningful: “The tight focus on information, with the implicit assumption that if we look after information everything else will fall into place, is ultimately a sort of social and moral blindness.”
The movement of women toward professional equality has released much creative energy and increased individual autonomy and has been a net plus for American society. The broader social ledger of costs and benefits, however, must include not merely the benefits of women’s new roles, but also the costs of social and community activities collectively foregone.
What about television entertainment? Here we must begin with the most fundamental fact about the impact of television on Americans: Nothing else in the twentieth century so rapidly and profoundly affected our leisure.
In 1950 barely 10 percent of American homes had television sets, but by 1959, 90 percent did, probably the fastest diffusion of a technological innovation ever recorded.
Deciphered with this key, figure 71 depicts a long civic generation, born roughly between 1910 and 1940, a broad group of people substantially more engaged in community affairs and more trusting than those younger than they.11 The core of this civic generation is the cohort born in 1925–1930, who attended grade school during the Great Depression, spent World War II in high school (or on the battlefield), first voted in 1948 or 1952, set up housekeeping in the 1950s, and saw their first television when they were in the late twenties. Since national polling began, this cohort has been
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As the distinguished sociologist Charles Tilly (born in 1928) has said on behalf of his generation, “We are the last suckers.”
Political scientist Paul Light reports that by the time the average baby boomer reached age 16, he or she had watched from 12,000 to 15,000 hours of TV, or the equivalent of 24 hours a day for 15 to 20 solid months…. There can be little doubt that television reduced the baby boom’s contact with its peers and parents, and that the generation made its first contacts with the real world through the medium.
Delli Carpini concludes, It is the rejection of mainstream politics rather than the development of an alternative political direction that most clearly distinguishes the sixties generation from preceding cohorts…. In short, it is a generation which, relative to earlier generations, rejects the norms and institutions that are central to the political system of which they are a part. What distinguishes this generation most is what it does not like or does not do, and not what it likes or does.
To their credit, the boomers have been from the beginning an unusually tolerant generation—more open-minded toward racial, sexual, and political minorities, less inclined to impose their own morality on others.
On any given issue, the tolerant, cynical, “laid-back” boomers may have a point, but as a syndrome their attitudes have had a high social cost.
In both personal and national terms, this generation is shaped by uncertainty (especially given the slow growth, inflation-prone 1970s and 1980s), insecurity (for these are the children of the divorce explosion), and an absence of collective success stories—no victorious D-Day and triumph over Hitler, no exhilarating, liberating marches on Washington and triumph over racism and war, indeed hardly any “great collective events” at all. For understandable reasons, this cohort is very inwardly focused.
Generation X
public health epidemiologists using a variety of different methodologies have confirmed a long-term trend toward increasing depression and suicide that is generationally based. Depression has struck earlier and much more pervasively in each successive generation, beginning with the cohorts born after 1940.
Seligman concludes that “the rate of depression over the last two generations has increased roughly tenfold.”
Between 1950 and 1995 the suicide rate among adolescents aged fifteen to nineteen more than quadrupled, while the rate among young adults aged twenty to twenty-four, beginning at a higher level, nearly tripled. Most, though not all, of this increase was concentrated among young men, although young women attempt suicide more frequently.
As the twentieth century ended, Americans born and raised in the 1920s and 1930s were about half as likely to commit suicide as people that age had been at midcentury, whereas Americans born and raised in the 1970s and 1980s were three or four times more likely to commit suicide as people that age had been at midcentury.
If racial prejudice were responsible for America’s civic disengagement, disengagement ought to be especially pronounced among the most bigoted individuals and generations. But it is not.
Among the advanced Western democracies, social trust and group membership are, if anything, positively correlated with the size of government; social capital appears to be highest of all in the big-spending welfare states of Scandinavia.
Work, sprawl, TV, and generational change are all important parts of the story, but important elements in our mystery remain unresolved.
Does social capital have salutary effects on individuals, communities, or even entire nations? Yes, an impressive and growing body of research suggests that civic connections help make us healthy,
wealthy, and wise.
First, social capital allows citizens to resolve collective problems more easily.
Second, social capital greases the wheels that allow communities to advance smoothly. Where people are trusting and trustworthy, and where they are subject to repeated interactions with fellow citizens, everyday business and social transactions are less costly.
A third way in which social capital improves our lot is by widening our awareness of the many ways in which our fates are linked.
The networks that constitute social capital also serve as conduits for the flow of helpful information that facilitates achieving our goals.
Social capital also operates through psychological and biological pro-cesses to improve individuals’ lives.
Social capital appears to be a complement, if not a substitute, for Prozac, sleeping pills, antacids, vitamin C, and other drugs we buy at the corner pharmacy.
In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference in our lives. This section considers five illustrative fields: child welfare and education; healthy and productive neighborhoods; economic prosperity; health and happiness; and democratic citizenship and
government performance. I present evidence that social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.
Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen. Well-established networks of reciprocity among the oppressed would have raised the risk of rebellion, and egalitarian bonds of sympathy between slave and free would have undermined the very legitimacy of the system. After emancipation the dominant classes in the South continued to have a strong interest in inhibiting horizontal social networks. It is not happenstance that the lowest levels of community-based social capital are found where a century of
plantation slavery was followed by a century of Jim Crow politics. Inequality and social solidarity are deeply incompatible.
In light of the rash of deadly school violence in 1999 it is worth noting that among all these factors the strongest predictors of student violence across the states are two-parent families and community-based social capital, dwarfing the importance of such social conditions as poverty, urbanism, or levels of parental education. In short, parents in states with high levels of social capital are more engaged with their kids’ education, and students in states with high levels of social capital are more likely than students in less civic states to hit the books rather than to hit one another.
Historians have known for more than a century that lethal violence is much more common in the states of the former Confederacy than in the rest of the country. In fact, murder rates have been much higher in the South since well before the Civil War, and this difference continued more or less undiluted throughout the twentieth century. During the 1980s and 1990s, for example, the murder rate in the South was roughly twice that in the North.
The more integrated we are with our community, the less likely we are to experience colds, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, depression, and premature death of all sorts. Such protective effects have been confirmed for close family ties, for friendship networks, for participation in social events, and even for simple affiliation with religious and other civic associations.
Statistically speaking, the evidence for the health consequences of social connectedness is as strong today as was the evidence for the health consequences of smoking at the time of the first surgeon general’s report on smoking.
Where people know one another, interact with one another each week at choir practice or sports matches, and trust one another to behave honorably, they have a model and a moral foundation upon which to base further cooperative enterprises. Light-touch government works more efficiently in the presence of social capital.
A Hull House club gave Benny Goodman his first clarinet.
The burst of unionization at the turn of the century, however, culminated in the election of fifteen unionists to Congress in 1910, and with the threat of “socialism” hanging in the air, the political establishment moved to encompass labor reform among their objectives.
my message is that we desperately need an era of civic inventiveness to create a renewed set of institutions and channels for a reinvigorated civic life that will fit the way we have come to live. Our challenge now is to reinvent the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Boy Scouts or the settlement house or the playground or Hadassah or the United Mine Workers or the NAACP.
The specific reforms of the Progressive Era are no longer appropriate for our time, but the practical, enthusiastic idealism of that era—and its achievements—should inspire us.
