Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

by Robert D. Putnam

In April 1966, with the Vietnam War raging and race riots in Cleveland, Chicago, and Atlanta, 66 percent of Americans rejected the view that “the people running the country don’t really care what happens to you.” In December 1997, in the midst of the longest period of peace and prosperity in more than two generations, 57 percent of Americans endorsed that same view.34

Organizational records suggest that for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century Americans’ involvement in civic associations of all sorts rose steadily, except for the parenthesis of the Great Depression. In the last third of the century, by contrast, only mailing list membership has continued to expand, with the creation of an entirely new species of “tertiary” association whose members never actually meet. At the same time, active involvement in face-to-face organizations has plummeted, whether we consider organizational records, survey reports, time diaries, or consumer expenditures.

Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. ’Tis profitable for us both, that I shou’d labour with you to- day, and that you shou’d aid me to-morrow. I have no kindness for you, and know you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains upon your account; and should I labour with you upon my own account, in expectation of a return, I know I shou’d be disappointed, and that I shou’d in vain

THE TOUCHSTONE of social capital is the principle of generalized reciprocity—

In some respects support groups substitute for other intimate ties that have been weakened in our fragmented society, serving people who are disconnected from more conventional social networks.

The Internet may be part of the solution to our civic problem, or it may exacerbate it, but the cyberrevolution was not the cause.

Employed people are more active civically and socially than those outside the paid labor force, and among workers, longer hours are often linked to more civic engagement, not less. People who report the heaviest time pressure are more likely, not less likely, to participate in community projects, to attend church and club meetings, to follow politics, to spend time visiting friends, to entertain at home, and the like.

for the central fact is that by virtually all measures of civic disengagement and all measures of socioeconomic status, the trends are very similar at all levels.

In short, full-time work inhibits a woman’s social involvement, both formal and informal.34 However, the degree to which a woman works by choice is also closely associated with community engagement.

the emergence of two-career families over the last quarter of the twentieth century played a visible but quite modest role in the erosion of social capital and civic engagement.

Could rising mobility thus be the central villain of our mystery? The answer is unequivocal: No.

Metropolitans are less engaged because of where they are, not who they are.

Living in a major metropolitan agglomeration somehow weakens

the greater the social homogeneity of a community, the lower the level of political involvement:

The car and the commute, however, are demonstrably bad for community life. In round numbers the evidence suggests that each additional ten minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 percent— fewer public meetings attended, fewer committees chaired, fewer petitions signed, fewer church services attended, less volunteering, and so on.

Considered in combination with a score of other factors that predict social participation (including education, generation, gender, region, size of hometown, work obligations, marriage, children, income, financial worries, religiosity, race, geographic mobility, commuting time, homeownership, and more), dependence on television for entertainment is not merely a significant predictor of civic disengagement. It is the single most consistent predictor that I have discovered.

physical health, financial insecurity, low education (a proxy for social class), and TV dependence.

the boomers and their successors have not trod the same ascending civic path traced by previous generations.

inexorable replacement of a highly civic generation by others that are much less so.5

In short, the decades that have seen a national deterioration in social capital are the very decades during which the numerical dominance of an exceptionally civic generation was replaced by the dominion of “postcivic” cohorts.

to understand the origins of American volunteering, one must consider the history of American involvement in wars. “Volunteers are frequently active in the movements that lead to war, in the support of efforts to win war, in the protest against war, and in rebuilding society after war.”38

In speculating about explanations for this sharp generational discontinuity, I am led to the conclusion that the dynamics of civic engagement in the last several decades have been shaped in part by social habits and values influenced in turn by the great mid-century global cataclysm.

First, social capital allows citizens to resolve collective problems more easily.

Second, social capital greases the wheels that allow communities to advance smoothly.

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.

A considerable body of research dating back at least fifty years has demonstrated that trust, networks, and norms of reciprocity within a child’s family, school, peer group, and larger community have wide-ranging effects on the child’s opportunities and choices and, hence, on his behavior and development.

The implication is clear: Social capital keeps bad things from happening to good kids.

One reason for the drop in crime in America’s big cities in the 1990s may well be that their residents and their leaders have learned to capitalize more effectively on local stocks of social capital, dwindling or not.41

the breakdown of community continues in more privileged settings, affluence and education are insufficient to prevent collective tragedy.

the town and surrounding Lee County would never develop economically until they had developed as a community.

people who are socially disconnected are between two and five times more likely to die from all causes, compared with matched individuals who have close ties with family, friends, and the community.

the conventional claim that the health of American democracy requires citizens to perform ourpublic duties and the more expansive and controversial claim that the health of ourpublic institutions depends, at least in part, on widespread participation inprivate voluntary groups—those networks of civic

Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.”

community bonds keep individuals from falling prey to extremist groups that target isolated and untethered individuals. Studies

Citizenship is not a spectator sport.

When most people skip the meeting, those who are left tend to be more extreme, because they care most about the outcome.

Ironically, more and more Americans describe their political views as middle of the road or moderate, but the more polarized extremes on the ideological spectrum account for a bigger and bigger share of those who attend meetings, write letters, serve on committees, and so on. The more extreme views have gradually become more dominant in grassroots American civic life as more moderate voices have fallen silent. In this sense civic disengagement is exacerbating the classic problem of “faction”

nothing in the experience of the average American at the end of the twentieth century matches the wrenching transformation experienced at the beginning of the century by an immigrant raised as a peasant in a Polish village little changed from the sixteenth century who within a few years was helping to construct the avant-garde skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan in the city of “big shoulders” beside Lake Michigan. Even for native-born Americans, the pace of change in the last decades of the nineteenth century was extraordinary. As Bostonian Henry Adams later wrote of his own boyhood. “The American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.”19

The issue was not “modernity, yes or no?” but rather how to reform our institutions and adapt our habits in this new world to secure the enduring values of our tradition.

the central fact is that investment in social capital was not an alternative to, but a prerequisite for, political mobilization and reform. That too is a crucial lesson for our own times.

Another false debate is whether government is the problem or the solution. The accurate answer, judging from the historical record (as I argued in chapter 15), is that it can be both.