North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota high levels of social capital?

books:

	• Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Robert D. Putnam Simon & Schuster, 2001 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 87 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

I love this book, it is organized well and every chapter is very interesting. It is very dense with many graphs, facts, and social science terms, so for someone who isn't trained in social science, it might be hard to read. I love it though.

Great book!

Essential reading

This book is a compendium of research concerning the decline of social activities in the United States over the last part of the Twentieth Century. Putnam, a social science researcher, noted that memberships in various civic organizations was on the decline, prompting him to study the topic in greater detail. In this book, Putnam presents volumes of documentation that social capital, our social contacts and involvement with our community and government, has been on a steady decline for the past fifty years. In seeking to understand the decline, Putnam found that it is generationally linked--the intense community involvement of previous generations actually obscures the more precipitous decline in the social capital of Boomers and their offspring. Putnam goes on to investigate a number of possible reasons for the decline, finding that television viewership appears to contribute the largest identifiable influence on declining community involvement, more than sprawl or the need for both parents to work. Putnam also examines some of the consequences of the decline in social capital, from personal health to implications for neighborhood safety.

This book is extremely dense, with thousands of citations to published social science research. Putnam has done a masterful job of pulling together facts gleaned from innumerable facets of community life to present a coherent picture of how life really was better for previous generations. In his investigation of the causes of the decline of social capital, Putnam does not come across as having an agenda, as trying to vilify certain movements. Instead, he lays out the logical possibilities, then studies each one statistically to determine how much influence it has on the final picture. Putnam's results are quite disturbing because they document how our supply of social capital is dramatically decreasing, but his research also suggest steps that individuals and community leaders can take to encourage community involvement.

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Welcome to club misanthrope

So, we've got this here book here filled with all kinds of pie charts and graphs and figures and studies that are very impressive looking. It says in here that once upon a time people were politically aware, civically engaged, had extensive networks built upon strong social capital and were active components of a genuine community. It also says that today, folks are indifferent, apathetic, isolated and alienated, and he thinks that's bad and something ought to be done about it. Well, isn't that special.

While the author does a good job identifying a societal trend, and describing why this change hasn't been a particularly positive one, his suggested remedies leave much to be desired and display an only partial understanding of the underlying problem. There is no disagreement that spending more time participating in the community and less time watching television are admirable goals, however all of his proposals treat the symptoms and not the disease.

A unique set of circumstances coalesced to produce the civically over-achieving pre-boomer generation. These circumstances created the conditions necessary for the organic growth of a participation culture, and its development would naturally be expected to occur. Plant a sunflower seed in a flowerpot filled with rich soil, place it in the sun and water it every day, and it should be no surprise when a sunflower is soon growing there. When one considers the conditions experienced by the post-boomer generation, the organic growth of a non-participation culture would only naturally be expected.

Every institution that stabilized society and communities has been systematically eroded or destroyed. Job security is non-existent. Marriage is a joke. The church is a fraud. The government operates with impunity in arrogant defiance of its citizens wishes. Important sectors of the domestic economy have been hollowed out and exported wholesale. Income disparity is the worst its been in a century, etc. etc. the list goes on and on, but the bottom line is, this is the first generation whose prospects are dimmer then the previous one; the first generation forced to swallow the reality of lower expectations.

Competition for scarce resources is not known to bring out the finer qualities in humanity. As resources become scarcer, and competition fiercer, life becomes harsher, and people become coarser.

If, as a society, the younger generations had the bright prospects and a future of opportunity combined with the supportive institutional structures that existed for the pre-boomers AND civic engagement was on the wane, that might be remarkable. As things stand today, its only predictable. It sounds like a very nice and pleasant time to be alive, but it was but a moment. Energy spent reminiscing a time passed by is energy that could have been better spent adapting to a diminished future.

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Bowling alone means anarchy?

Judging by Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, his version of anarchy lies somewhere between Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes and one in which everyone retreats behind computer and TV screens and refuses to interact in meatspace. I think that is an unfair view of mutualist anarchy.

The book divides its subject, American withddrawal since roughly 1960, into four sections. The first is a cataloguing of all of the data which shows we are less involved with one another through everything from Free Masonry to cardplaying; the second is an analysis of why this has happened; the third is a discussion of the benefits of our lost communalism, and the fourth is a set of recommendations to restore the participation experienced in the 1950s. I found them decreasingly interesting as I went.

There is a problem in that Putnam looks only at what was and finds less of it, rather than what is and looking for the growth in new things. Putnam notes these problems and seems hopeful (in 1999) that the social aspects of the internet will lend themselves to increasing contact, but there is still room for skepticism.

The next section seems more problematic. While he spends many pages to exonerate the entry of women into the workplace, and more to partially convict television, he spends just over one page exonerating the state. He does this by noting that state spending barely changed in the period as a percentage of GDP. This seems disingenuous at best. I think the reason becomes more clear as he proceeds.

While Putnam acknowledges David Beito's work in From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967, he doesn't seem to have absorbed the one relevant thing that he should have been most interested in from Beito's account. That is, that Mutual Aid organizations became so happy with the outcome of their efforts that they began to lobby their respective States for policies to mandate worker's insurance, and this was successful to their own detriment. After the States adopted laws to pay out unemployment insurance, there was no exclusionary reason to belong to a mutual aid society (see Manur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Second printing with new preface and appendix (Harvard Economic Studies) for explanation and expansion of this theme), so they closed their doors, and with them, presumably, a host of other activities suffered. Thereafter, the federal government began to get involved in this sort of activity and the center of decision-making and power has moved far away from the community. Considering how this pattern has been repeated for education, care for the elderly, health care, and other aspects of life, is there any wonder that people are less involved with their neighbors?

Finally, laws don't only cost the state time and money, they frequently cost the citizens in the way of unfunded mandates and unintended consequences. If I have to spend more time trying to understand and comply with laws, that is time I cannot spend with my neighbors.

When describing what should be done to restore American community, Putnam tips his hand and reveals his real interest in social capital: he idolizes the Progressive period and the resulting increase in scope of state action. Curiously, it seems that his analytical skills abandon him at this point. He begins by noting the Gilded Age period preceding the Progressive Era and finds it wanting, and then locates all of the success in the Progressive period. He doesn't use "hyperindividualist" to describe the Gilded Age, but comes damn close. But if you look at the data he provides, you can see that community activity is clearly growing during the Gilded Age and peaks and perhaps even falters during the Progressive period. Why is the peak period considered to be the most successful? Why no interest in the growth that preceded it, or in the reasons that activity fell off immediately afterward? I would think the interesting research would be in looking at change and the reasons for it, not steady state operation.

In the end, while I am sympathetic to the general program of looking at community participation and social capital, I was not happy with what I perceived to be Putnam's goal. He does not seem to think that social capital is valuable in and of itself. Rather, he seems to believe that social capital is valuable as a means to petition government for more programs. Ironically, he seems to be surprised or curiously uncurious whenever the people succeed in getting those programs, as happened after the first Progressive hey-day (after 1920) and after the expansion in the welfare state in the 1960s.