the trends
politics: There is now more money in politics, and less individual involvement. There are more total associations, but they look more like the AARP and Greenpeace, instead of unions, churches, bridge clubs, rotary.
religion: Attendance has definitely gone down in the last 40 years, even if the number of people who profess stays nearly the same. (This has changed since the book was published on January 1, 2000.) The 60s and 70s saw people make their religion more private, more personal, making people less concerned with the communal support of a shared faith. Fundamentalist religion (including evangelical) results in more service and giving, but primarily within the church community. So as the mainline middle falls out, religion is becoming a less helpful societal lubricant overall, despite the fact that religiosity has generally meant more volunteerism and giving.
workplace: Unionization has declined, and people primarily see the union as a means for collective bargaining rather than a social movement. People are likely to have friends at work, but those friendships are not usually intimate and they don’t form the center of one’s social life. And now all jobs are more contingent; people are less likely to spend many years at a single job. Job precarity leads to anxiety, and less rootedness in one’s financial and community situation. People are less satisfied with their work time. At the end of the day, employers have control over work time and communications, especially with modern monitoring.
personal social connections: Informal social connection is just as important. Informality peaks in young and old adulthood, and formality in middle age. People thought urbanization would destroy social life, but instead of a city fostering a single social community, it fosters many smaller dispersed networks. You don’t know your neighbors though.But is this due to the lack of third spaces at a scale that makes it easy to meet your neighbors? My high-rise complex in Montreal provides an area with tables and chairs, grills, basic outdoor exercise equipment, and water fountains that kids can splash in. But the complex is large enough that this feels like a public place, like a park. If there were common spaces on the scale of a single building or even a single floor, I would probably know my neighbors. I think a lot of this comes down to some missing priorities in 20th century urban design. But hanging out with friends has really dropped off for average Americans, as has going out to sit-down restaurants. People spend 2/3 as much time in informal social activities as we used to, even while people are having fewer kids and are more educated (which in the past have been associated with greater social capital). Watching sports, going to museums, observing is up, and playing sports, creating music, and doing is down.
altruism/philanthropy: Donating and volunteering are predicted by one’s social connectedness, rather than defining connectedness itself. Joiners of any organization give ten times more philanthropy. We’re making more now than our parents did, but giving has not kept up. Volunteering is reported more frequently, but community service is reported less, meaning the volunteer work we do is more one-on-one, probably partly because people are not doing it through church as often. Volunteering has been propped up by the Silent generation doing more in old age.
trustworthiness: When we trust each other we can get more done because transaction costs are lower. Thick trust is when you’re on a first name basis, thin trust is the kind of trust you have in the anonymous other. Cities are less trusting, but more free. Thin trust peaked in the early 60s and has declined since. People are becoming angrier drivers, and hitchhiking is gone. Spending on lawyers, police, security, etc. have gone up. The increase in lawyers has mostly come from preventative efforts, where we “get it in writing” to establish a cool trust dependent on contracts.
grassroots movements: Political activism has turned from the “ground-based” Civil Rights Movement to “air-based” Greenpeace et al., due to the destruction of social capital. Meanwhile, evangelical, right-leaning political movements have managed to remain based in social capital and become a big political force. Evangelicals are 3-4 times more politically active than average.
telecommunications: People call a lot and keep up with distant friends by voice instead of by writing now. The social impact of the telephone was hard to judge, but was probably mostly positive for families and personal relationships, but reduced the creation of new friendships and the existence of personal relationships in public space. I’d be interested to see what he would report in 2023 about the internet. His ideas about it at time of writing were actually pretty reasonable. “Most online groups have the structure of either an anarchy, if unmoderated, or a dictatorship, if moderated.” (I wonder if we could design an algorithm to allow participants to represent the natural discomfort/dislike people feel with someone and then act accordingly.) Internet communication removes a lot of information necessary for social capital formation. In-person dialog allows speakers to constantly mediate their statements as they get facial feedback from listeners. This section was quite prescient:
Experiments that compare face-to-face and computer-mediated communication confirm that the richer the medium of communication the more sociable, personal, trusting, and friendly the encounter.
Computer-mediated communication is, to be sure, more egalitarian, frank, and task-oriented than face-to-face communication. Participants in computer-based groups often come up with a wider range of alternatives. However, because of the paucity of social cues and social communication, participants in computer-based groups find it harder to reach consensus and feel less solidarity with one another. They develop a sense of “depersonalization”, and are less satisfied with the groups accomplishments. Computer-based groups are quicker to reach an intellectual understanding of their shared problems—probably because they are less distracted by extraneous social communication—but they are much worse at generating the trust and reciprocity necessary to implement that understanding.
Cheating and reneging are more common in computer-mediated communication, where misrepresentation and misunderstanding are easier. Participants in computer-based settings are less inhibited by social niceties and quicker to resort to extreme language and invective. “Flaming” is the commonly-used term among cybernauts; the compelling image of communication is hand-to-hand combat with flamethrowers. Computer-mediated communication is good for sharing information, gathering opinions, and debating alternatives, but building trust and goodwill is not easy in cyberspace. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid point out that “interactions over the Net, financial or social, will be as secure not as its digital encryption, which is a relatively cheap fix, but as the infrastructure—social as well as technical—encompassing that interaction.”
For these reasons, Nohria and Eccles suggest, widespread use of computer-mediated communication will actually require more frequent face-to-face encounters: “an extensive, deep, robust social infrastructure of relationships must exist so that those using the electronic media will truly understand what others are communicating to them.” (pp. 176-177)
He wondered whether the internet would become the next telephone, or the next TV. Very interesting, because it’s kind of been both, although I would say it definitely has fallen more on the side of TV even though it connects people somewhat intimately across long distances, and allowed important modern communities to flourish in a way they couldn’t have before.
why this is happening
- mobility: Business (as in busy), economic distress, and two-career families cannot explain the decline. Residential mobility cannot explain the decrease either, because mobility has not increased since the 50s. But the moving has always been at the expense of the country and the growth of the burbs.
- cars:
One inevitable consequence of how we have come to organize our lives spatially is that we spend measurably more of every day shuttling alone in metal boxes among the vertices of our private triangles. (p. 212)
- news: We consume culture at a national level now, not a local level. The newspaper is fundamental to democracy, and reading (not watching) the news is correlated with good citizenship.
- television: Television watching is the single most important factor in decreasing community engagement in the 90s when the book was written. It “privatizes leisure time”. The question that mattered the most in surveys was whether you would consider TV watching to be your primary means of entertainment.
- depression/malaise: younger people used to be happier than older people. Younger people have become much more likely to commit suicide or experience malaise (headaches, indigestion, etc.) than older people. This didn’t used to be the case.
- family is probably not significant. Kids, marriage, and divorce come out a wash for social involvement.
- race is not a significant factor either, although states that experienced more slavery have significantly lower social capital now.
- big government is not a significant factor, nor is the tradeoff of state/federal power significant.
- capitalism is not a significant factor because it’s been around for all the recorded data we have. The globalization of business may be a factor, because execs are now more likely to be far away.
the effects
- education: Social capital is probably more important than actual finances for improving school outcomes. Social capital in the broader society leads to better outcomes, but also social capital within the school results in teachers, kids, and parents who are all invested in learning.
- neighborhood success: social capital is the biggest predictor of neighborhood safety, cleanliness, organization, etc. As people who “make it” leave struggling neighborhoods, they take their social capital with them, thus making it harder for those who stay, and keeping the neighborhood disconnected from the wider adult social network. As joblessness continued and crime became lucrative, the wisdom of older men and women became less respected, leading to deterioration of their social capital. Without access to wider social institutions, gangs become a (much more dangerous) replacement for the needed social capital. There are now fewer women who stay at home and provide the eyes and ears for the neighborhood. The North-South divide on homicide can be largely explained by social capital difference, not a “culture of personal honor” or whatever. See The Death and Life of American Cities and All Our Kin. Because poorer communities depend more on social capital, they are disproportionately affected by the decrease in social capital.
- economic success: Weak ties are more important for getting a job than family and friends, because they’re more likely to surface opportunities that weren’t already known to you. Hiring, especially in white-collar jobs, is often for the social capital you have, in addition to the human capital you have. Tupelo, Mississippi, and Silicon Valley are both examples of how horizontal relations of social capital preceded and fostered economic development, surpassing other regions that were otherwise similarly poised for progress. Community development based on shared goals is far more effective than personal enterprising, when it comes to the economic prosperity of a community.
- public/individual health: Social connectedness accounts for a greater improvement in health outcomes than quitting smoking. People are happier and healthier when they are more socially connected, and the relationship is causal. Faraway connections don’t count as much as in-person connections.
- healthy democracy: Voluntary associations and church groups give people practice with meetings, debate, organizing, etc., and also serve as forums and establish social networks for broader political organizing. Democracy can’t just be about choosing between presented options for leaders, if it’s going to work well. Isolated people are more likely to subscribe to extremist views. A society with less social capital has fewer places for people to have political conversations with skin in the game. “Anonymity is fundamentally anathema to deliberation.” When you don’t have social skin in the game, you aren’t invested in actually changing your mind, interrogating the other viewpoint, learning new info, etc. (This leads to internet debates that are mostly not good faith, although debates on Facebook are notoriously bad and those aren’t anonymous or pseudonymous.) Success of Italian regional governments depended mostly on “civicness” regardless of density, religion, political bent. Social capital predicts tax compliance.
Civic traditions seem to matter in the United States as well. As I explained briefly in chapter 16, in the 1950s political scientist Daniel Elazar did a pathbreaking study of American “political cultures.” 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 traditionalistic states, where politics tends to be dominated by elites resistant to innovation, are also the states that tend to be lowest in social capital. The individualistic states, where politics is run by strong parties and professional politicians and focused on economic growth, tend to have moderate levels of social capital. The moralistic states— in which “good government,” issue-based campaigning, and social innovation are prized— tend to have comparatively high levels of social capital. (p. 346)
- tolerance at the cost of social capital?: Social capital reduces liberty. One might ask, does tolerance correlate inversely with social capital? But for individuals, those more connected are more tolerant, except those very involved in conservative religious community. Places where people are most civically engaged are also places where people are more tolerant, even controlling for urbanism. Some kinds of associations (especially private) have led to increased class boundaries. The 1950s were a peak in social capital and tolerance. Fraternity and equality are complementary. But is social capital at war with itself? Does social capital always need an “other”? Is it always to create bonding social capital? Are we willing to sacrifice bridging social capital for this?
What do we do now?
- The Gilded Age and the Progressive Era: New technological innovations led to big changes in the national economy: huge mergers, big names associated with entire industries (Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.), massive waves of immigration, massive political capture and corruption, and huge increases in wealth with a growing wealth gap. But even the Progressive Era was very segregated, anti-immigration, etc. Sociological discussion of innovations in transportation and communication mirrored how we talk about what happens now with the internet, with optimists and pessimists. There was also this prizing of rugged individualism, and a longing for a more communitarian past. The issue is not " modernity, yes or no?" But how do we reform our institutions? (Find that quote) Reformers in churches, social groups, and settlement housing started in the depression of the 1890s. Then there was a boom in clubs and organizations and newspapers (moved faster than even the population), followed by a stagnation. And these weren’t issue-specific organizations. They were fraternity and mutual aid groups. There was segregation but there were similar organizations for minority groups, women, etc. Rather than whining about “kids these days,” progressives established associations. More successful ideas were eventually coopted into the state, e.g. playgrounds, kindergarten, high schools. Many of these progressive movements were accomplished first in rural America. Experimentation happened both locally and federally. But progressivism had a blind spot for technocratic, professional solutions, and sometimes tended toward illiberal “Big-Brotherism”. We need to avoid reactionary nostalgia, but instead invent social innovations with openness to experimentation.
- What to do by 2010: Here he lays out a bunch of prescriptions on how to start building community life again. I’d have to go back and read chapter 24 again in text form to really summarize it well here.