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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).
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.
Greenpeace became the largest environmental organization in America, accounting for more than one-third of all members in national environmental groups at its peak in 1990, through an extremely aggressive direct-mail program. At that point Greenpeace leaders, concerned about the spectacle of an environmental group printing tons of junk mail, temporarily cut back on direct-mail solicitation. Almost immediately their membership began to hemorrhage, and by 1998 Greenpeace membership had plummeted by 85 percent.
America is one of the most religiously observant countries in the contemporary world. With the exception of “a few agrarian states such as Ireland and Poland,” observes one scholar, “the United States has been the most God-believing and religion-adhering, fundamentalist, and religiously traditional country in Christendom,” as well as “the most religiously fecund country” where “more new religions have been born… than in any other society.”1
Although most often we think of the colonists as a deeply religious people, one systematic study of the history of religious observance in America estimates that the rate of formal religious adherence grew steadily from 17 percent in 1776 to 62 percent in 1980.
In either case, one reason for this resilience is that religion in America (unlike in most other advanced Western nations) has been pluralistic and constantly evolving, expressed in a kaleidoscopic series of revivals and awakenings rather than a single-state religion that could become ossified.
As a rough rule of thumb, our evidence shows, nearly half of all associational memberships in America are church related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context.
Religious involvement is an especially strong predictor of volunteering and philanthropy. About 75–80 percent of church members give to charity, as compared with 55–60 percent of nonmembers, and 50–60 percent of church members volunteer, while only 30–35 percent of nonmembers do.
[T]he Black church functioned as the institutional center of the modern civil rights movement…. Churches provided the movement with an organized mass base; a leadership of clergymen largely economically independent of the larger white society and skilled in the art of managing people and resources; an institutionalized financial base through which protest was financed; and meeting places where the masses planned tactics and strategies and collectively committed themselves to the struggle.
Over the last forty years mainline denominations (Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran, Congregational, American Baptist, and so on) have heavily lost “market share,” while evangelical and fundamentalist groups (Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, Holiness, Assemblies of God, and Church of God in Christ, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and independent congregations) have continued to grow,
during the civil rights era, black civic engagement was positively correlated with involvement in mainline black churches, but negatively associated with involvement in black fundamentalist denominations.
“As more Americans spend more of their time ‘at work,’ ” hypothesizes one thoughtful observer, “work gradually becomes less of a one-dimensional activity and assumes more of the concerns and activities of both private (family) and public (social and political) life.”
In Yiddish, men and women who invest lots of time in formal organizations are often termed machers—that is, people who make things happen in the community. By contrast, those who spend many hours in informal conversation and communion are termed schmoozers.
In the mid- to late 1970s, according to the DDB Needham Life Style archive, the average American entertained friends at home about fourteen to fifteen times a year. By the late 1990s that figure had fallen to eight times per year, a decline of 45 percent in barely two decades.
one central theme of this book is that people born between 1910 and 1940 constitute a “long civic generation”—that is, a cohort of men and women who have been more engaged in civic affairs throughout their lives—voting more, joining more, trusting more, and so on—than either their predecessors or their successors
Each individual act in a system of reciprocity is usually characterized by a combination of what one might call short-term altruism and long-term self-interest:
When each of us can relax her guard a little, what economists term “transaction costs”—the costs of the everyday business of life, as well as the costs of commercial transactions—are reduced. This is no doubt why, as economists have recently discovered, trusting communities, other things being equal, have a measurable economic advantage.
In 1970 there were 3 percent fewer lawyers than doctors in the United States, but by 1995 there were 34 percent more lawyers than doctors.
Neither of these approaches—what political consultants sometimes label the “ground war” strategy and the “air war” strategy—is politically or morally superior. Rather, they are adapted to different resource endowments. The pro-life ground war (like the civil rights ground war before it) is adapted for a “social capital rich” environment with dense preexisting social networks of reciprocity, while the pro-choice air war is adapted to a “social capital poor” environment.
Virtually all the major American environmental groups (as well as dozens of smaller organizations dedicated to “charismatic” animals, like the Mountain Lion Foundation, Save the Manatee, and Pheasants Forever) are addicted to direct mail as a tool of mobilization and membership retention.31 Indeed, the few national environmental organizations, such as the Izaak Walton League, that have forsworn direct mail have experienced no growth whatsoever over the last thirty years.
Wherever we look, the telephone seems to have effects in diametrically opposite directions. It saves physicians from making house-calls, but physicians initially believed it increased them, for patients could summon the doctor to them rather than travel to him…. It allows dispersal of centers of authority, but it also allows tight continuous supervision of field offices from the center…. No matter what hypothesis one begins with, reverse tendencies also appear.
The sixties (most of which actually happened in the seventies),
Second, all sides in the debates about work hours agree that less educated Americans have gained free time, whereas their college-educated counterparts, for the most part, have lost it. The hours-per-week edge of college-educated Americans over high school dropouts lengthened from six hours in 1969 to thirteen hours in 1998. As Robinson and Godbey note, the “working class” has less work and the “leisure class” less leisure.
In biblical fashion, two fat and happy decades were followed by two lean and nervous decades.
In fact, the only leisure activity positively correlated with financial anxiety is watching TV.
tv is the only true escapism
In one specific and expanding category—single moms—the evidence is quite strong that work outside the home has a positive effect on virtually all forms of civic engagement, from club membership to political interest.
Could rising mobility thus be the central villain of our mystery? The answer is unequivocal: No. Residential mobility can be entirely exonerated from any responsibility for our fading civic engagement, because mobility has not increased at all over the last fifty years.
In a careful survey of community involvement in suburbs across America, political scientist Eric Oliver found that the greater the social homogeneity of a community, the lower the level of political involvement: “By creating communities of homogeneous political interests, suburbanization reduces the local conflicts that engage and draw the citizenry into the public realm.”
American adults average seventy-two minutes every day behind the wheel, according to the Department of Transportation’s Personal Transportation Survey. This is, according to time diary studies, more than we spend cooking or eating and more than twice as much as the average parent spends with the kids.
In the language of economists, commuting has negative externalities.
the evidence makes quite clear that newspaper reading and good citizenship go together.
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.
In a correlational sense, the answer is simple: More television watching means less of virtually every form of civic participation and social involvement.
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.
Heavy television watching by young people is associated with civic ignorance, cynicism, and lessened political involvement in later years, along with reduced academic achievement and lower earnings later in life.
Television is the cheapest and least demanding way of averting boredom. Studies of television find that of all household activities, television requires the lowest level of concentration, alertness, challenge, and skill…. Activation rates while viewing are very low, and viewing is experienced as a relaxing release of tension. Metabolic rates appear to plunge while children are watching TV, helping them to gain weight.47
Life cycle effects mean that individuals change, but society as a whole does not. Generational effects mean that society changes, even though individuals do not.
Unfortunately, this same generational trend also appeared as a veritable epidemic of suicide among American youth in the last half of the twentieth century. 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.
Still more striking is the spatial correlation between low social capital at the end of the twentieth century and slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century. The more virulent the system of slavery then, the less civic the state today.
As a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.
In the famous words of the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider: “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.”
American democracy evolved historically in an environment unusually rich in social capital, and many of our institutions and practices—such as the unusual degree of decentralization in our governmental processes, compared with that of other industrialized countries—represent adaptations to such a setting.
Citizenship is not a spectator sport.
in the 1950s political scientist Daniel Elazar did a path-breaking study of American “political cultures.”46 He concluded that there were three cultures: a “traditionalistic” culture in the South; an “individualistic” culture in the mid-Atlantic and western states; and a “moralistic” culture concentrated in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and Pacific Northwest.
The discerning nineteenth-century Englishman Walter Bagehot described how oppressive the soft shackles of community could be. You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbour. What law is so cruel as the law of doing what he does?
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 challenge for us, however, as it was for our predecessors moving from the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era, is not to grieve over social change, but to guide it.
Other evidence also suggests that the use of social media tends to displace alternative forms of socializing.
Such evidence reinforces the notion that, under anonymous conditions, group identity becomes more significant and users’ attitudes become more polarized.
Mask-wearing was, according to early research, more common in communities that had had high levels of social capital prior to the epidemic.
