Bowling Alone is a book about social isolation. The book was published in 2000, and though it is dated in some respects, the trends Robert Putnam analyzes in it (and their causes) feel more relevant than ever in 2023. Bowling Alone is a dry, academic book, and can at times be a frustrating read. Still, its completionist overview of declining American engagement is a useful, sobering reference for anyone interested in one of America’s largest social ills. The book is divided into four major sections with self-explanatory titles: “Trends in Civic Engagement and Social Capital,” “So What?”, “Why?”, and “What is to be Done?” This review summarizes those four sections, provides some commentary on each, and closes with some thoughts on the broader implications of Putnam’s detailed work.
Section One is an exhaustive compilation of how just about everything that could reasonably be called “social capital” is declining. Social capital is a wide-ranging label, meaning simply “social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.” Thus, this section is the longest and driest of the book, as Putnam summarizes and presents study after survey after statistic. Opening to a random page in the first section, I find this paragraph, which is typical of the style:
Comparable estimates of a broader array of social connections (as summarized in figure 17) show that, on average, during the last quarter of the twentieth century Americans attended church services and visited with relatives nearly every other week; ate dinner out, sent a greeting card to someone, and wrote a letter to a friend or relative about once every three weeks; played cards about once a month and entertained at home just about that often; attended a club meeting about every other month and had a drink in a bar almost that often; gave or attended a dinner party, went to the movies, and attended a sporting event roughly every two or three months; worked on some community project and played some team sport roughly twice a year; and wrote a letter to the editor every other year.
You can see the difficulty. Putnam’s approach is obsessive, exhaustive, detailed, and nuanced. He is the sort of author who will note that he could not confirm the authenticity of an Oscar Wilde quote used in an introductory paragraph. He carefully investigates positions he disagrees with, and generally plays the dispassionate academic. This is refreshing, in a media landscape defined by relentless unsubstantiated takery, and appeals to the same part of me that enjoys ACX. But it also sometimes feels like eating vegetables. I found myself wishing, especially in this first section, that he would cut short the endless parade of statistics summarizing things everyone already knows.
The trends Putnam takes careful account of in section one can seem too obvious to even mention. People go to church less often. Voter turnout is down. People have fewer friends than ever, and spend less time with the friends they do have. Americans aren’t involved in their communities. It is possible that these things were less obvious to the average reader in the early 2000s, but, by this point, they’ve been think-pieced so aggressively to death that the skin and flesh of the dead horse has been worn off by the continued beating. In that context, it's difficult not to skim through endless graphs summarizing declines in club enrollment.
That said, the sheer volume of evidence makes Putnam’s assertions hit with force. It’s one thing to have a hazy sense that Americans are more disengaged, it’s another to learn that while nearly 50% of American families participated in the PTA in 1960, that number fell to 15% in just twenty years. Or that the fraction of families that rarely eat dinner together doubled from 1976 to 1997. Or that we go out to bars or nightclubs half as much as we used to. Or that softball team participation dropped by a third from the 1980s to the 1990s. Or that the fraction of Americans who attended a public political meeting dropped by 40 percent between 1973 and 1999. Or that monthly charitable giving declined from 50% to 30% in fifteen years. Or that 20% fewer Americans agree that “most people can be trusted.” Nearly everywhere Putnam turns, he finds evidence of a more sickly body politic, and the more facts he accumulates, the more the decline in social capital starts to feel like an invisible sickness eating away at every aspect of American life.
Most people would agree that isolation and weaker social bonds are bad. Putnam feels obligated to prove it. The section entitled “So What?” attempts to catalog the impact of the decline in social capital, with mixed results. Putnam is forced to grapple with the fact that the idea of “social capital” is extremely broad, encompassing almost everything we do with other people. This makes it difficult to tease out its effects, especially if different varieties of social capital pull in different directions.
This can lead to chapters where Putnam sets up easy targets like: “it’s good if children are raised in strong communities” and struggles to knock them down. He often finds himself tangled in webs of contradictory data, such as this paragraph from the “Safe and Productive Neighborhoods” chapter:
The integration of families into neighborhoods may not always be beneficial. If the neighborhood norms and networks are at odds with what ethnographer Anderson calls ‘decent’ values, then families who become enmeshed in the community may run afoul of their own better natures. One study of Northern California high school students found that the extent to which parents knew their child’s friends, and knew the parents of those friends, was a strong indicator of the child’s classroom engagement and refusal to use alcohol and drugs. But such positive effects of “parents knowing parents” were found only in areas where school engagement and substance abuse were not a problem. In areas where students were more troubled, the social integration of parents actually exacerbated the problems of living in a community with poorly adjusted peers. In other words, social integration into a community of bad actors may not produce good results.
…which is a long winded way of saying that social capital is good in moral communities, and bad in immoral ones.
That same chapter see him wrestling with the fact that street gangs are a form of community, concluding that “Even as they sell drugs and carry out violent wars on the streets, gangs represent a form of social capital, providing networks of reciprocity, charity, organizing, and social control–albeit on their own, often destructive terms.” Reading the section, you can almost feel him wrenching himself away from an exhaustive, chin-stroking investigation of the pros and cons of gang activity.
Other chapters are smoother, if a bit perfunctory. “Economics” includes a case study of a failing small town that bootstrapped its recovery by pooling resources and working together, and notes that “Silicon Valley” succeeded in part because the business culture encouraged socializing that cross-pollinated useful ideas. His chapter on “Health” has the interesting insight that isolation is as bad as cigarette smoking for one’s health, but that going to a community meeting once a month seems to be all that’s required to reverse the effects.
But frankly, this entire section mostly seems like an excuse to write the chapter on “Democracy.” Bowling Alone was inspired by independent research Putnam conducted on the Italian government, so it makes sense he’s interested in how social capital affects our politics. Unsurprisingly, social capital is good for democracy: it reduces tax evasion and extremism, and is correlated with political awareness and engagement. Citing his study, Putnam describes how Italy in the 1970s created 20 new local governments to manage diverse regions. The structure of each government was identical, but the culture and politics of each region were significantly different, ranging from “the preindustrial to postindustrial, from the devoutly catholic to the ardently communist, from the inertly feudal to the frenetically modern.” Seeing as it formed the inspiration of a book on civic engagement, the results should not be difficult to predict: whether a local government succeeded or failed was a result of the level of social capital in the region. No other factor had an impact.
Sadly, the political ailments caused by low social capital are all the more prevalent in America today. Isolation makes people more likely to “[fall] prey to extremist groups that target isolated and untethered individuals.” Putnam also suggests that while “it is commonly assumed that cynicism toward government has caused our disengagement from politics…the converse is just as likely: that we are disaffected because as we and our neighbors have dropped out, the real performance of government has suffered.” Social capital has certainly continued to fall since Bowling Alone was written, and, as a result, our political problems have worsened, too.
Ever careful, Putnam also devotes a bunch of time to considering if social capital is, in fact, bad. Unsurprisingly, he does not do this terribly effectively. The main charge is that strong communities promote intolerance. This argument is supported primarily by the fact that the decline in social capital is correlated with a rise in overall tolerance. Putnam seems to think this is disprovable by noting that, generationally, tolerance peaked only slightly after civic engagement did, hinting that the two may not be closely related. This is pretty weak evidence, and it’s so poorly explained that I’m suspicious Putnam is concealing something, but it is, at least, an attempt to deal with the charge.
Putnam also claims that states with higher social capital are more tolerant, but the graph that supposedly illustrates this fact shows mainly that a handful southern states are especially intolerant and have low social capital, and other states are basically the same in terms of tolerance, despite widely varying social capital.
Again, Putnam’s diligence is his own worst enemy here: this chapter, in my mind, weakens his argument in favor of social engagement. That said, it’s a credit to him that he included it at all.
So, there you have it: socializing is good, and isolation is bad. While this section contains some interesting insights, especially on the importance of strong communities for democracy, it largely weakens the book, as Putnams desire for careful, rigorously supported reasoning prevents him from making a case more appealing than any layperson’s gut feelings.
So we’ve established that social capital is declining, and we’ve agreed that this is bad. Why is it happening? This is the most interesting part of the book. It’s got a little something for every ideological bent, as Putnam considers plausible reasons from across the ideological spectrum: loss of small businesses, racial integration, the welfare state, and more! He gives most of these considerations a light touch, disclaiming them as outside the scope of his book, but he focuses on four trends he believes to be prime culprits: women entering the workforce, urban sprawl, television, and boomers.
Let's start with women entering the workplace, which has the potential to be the most incendiary of the four claims. Here Putnam’s detailed and prevaricating style is an asset, as he manages to make a potentially touchy conclusion seem dully obvious. The argument: controlling for other factors, working full time “appears to cut home entertaining by roughly ten percent, club and church attendance by roughly 15 percent, informal visiting with friends by 25 percent, and volunteering by more than 50 percent.” This trend holds across multiple general surveys of the population, and should not be particularly surprising; after all, an additional commitment of forty hours a week sucks up a lot of time.
Curiously, women who are unemployed have seen a greater fall in social engagement than employed women. This perhaps points to a sort of general collapse as engaged, driven women leave leadership roles in PTAs or neighborhoods, causing the groups to flounder. Or perhaps the number of homemakers fell below the critical mass necessary for communities to sustain themselves. Regardless, the data seem to support the idea that full-time employment decreases engagement, and women are the demographic that has seen a massive increase in full-time employment.
Note that this data does not necessarily show that the optimal formula for civic engagement is a return to archetypical 1950s gender roles. Though Putnam does not include data on how full-time employment affects men’s social engagement, it seems plausible that discouraging men from working could reverse losses in civic engagement. Happily, the optimal solution does not seem to require gender discrimination of any sort: people who work part time are more socially engaged than those who work full-time or not at all, suggesting that perhaps reducing standard working hours could result in a social capital boom.
On to a less controversial topic: urban sprawl. From 1950 to 1996 the number of Americans living in a suburb jumped from 23% to 49%. Interestingly, the data also shows that the proportion of Americans who live in cities has stayed basically constant from 1950-2000, and the gains in suburbs have corresponded to falls in rural areas.
Since civic engagement exists on a continuum of cities-suburbs-rural areas (from low to high), it’s tempting to claim the decline is attributable to rural dieback rather than urban sprawl. Putnam, however, dismisses this by noting that past urbanization (and loss of rural populations) was not associated with eras of declining engagement, but current suburbanization is. He goes on to conclude that the rise in suburbs must be the problem.
He does a decent job of supporting this hypothesis. Suburbs are more homogenous, which is associated with lower engagement. Suburbs increase commuting time, of which an extra ten minutes cuts engagement by 10%. And suburbanization fractures communities: if you work, relax, and shop in your neighborhood, your neighbors are also your co-workers, customers, merchants, and friends. Suburbanization and car culture cut these bonds by placing our life trajectories in “large suburban triangles,” weakly bonding us to disparate groups spread across large areas and reducing our connectedness.
Though he believes they have measurable impact, Putnam thinks the rise in working women and urban sprawl contributed a small amount to America's social capital decline. The last two causes are more substantial.
Television is the first. Television[38] is one of those things that basically everyone agrees is a vice, but no one is willing to condemn. It’s a non-chemical, apparently harmless form of relaxation and entertainment, and it’s so pervasive that even those who make an effort to avoid it likely engage with it in some limited quantity.
And yet, specific numbers on use are almost always shocking. When Bowling Alone was written, Americans, on average, spent around six hours per day on television[39], more than an additional full time job. This massive absorption of time seems like it should come at some kind of cost.
And indeed it does. The TV section is full of statistics about how bad television is for civic engagement. Habitual users are 23% less active in grassroots organizations and 37% less likely to attend public meetings. Television is the only leisure activity that is negatively correlated with involvement in other leisure activities: watching TV “comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home: especially social gatherings and informal conversations,” and the only activities positively correlated with it are “sleeping, resting, eating, housework, radio listening, and hobbies.” Each additional hour of television results in a 10% decrease in civic engagement, and, in terms of civic engagement, one less hour of television per day is equivalent to five to six years of education. Essentially any way you slice it, TV use is the best predictor of civic disengagement, a fact that leads to amusing graphs like the one where he demonstrates that television watching and giving someone the finger while driving are nearly perfectly correlated.
Putnam drives his point home with a few qualitative points on television’s psychological effects. He describes a nearly perfect natural experiment in which a “typical” Canadian small town, through a quirk of geography, was unable to get TV reception until 1973. When TV was introduced, participation in community activities plummeted, while the patterns of essentially identical neighboring towns who already had television remained steady.
Why? TV is addictive. Putnam includes a few pages of paragraphs like the following, which summarize how psychologically harmful TV is:
[T]elevision is surely habit-forming and may be mildly addictive. In experimental studies viewers generally demand a major bribe to give it up, even though viewers consistently report that television viewing is less satisfying than other leisure activities and even than work. In 1977 the Detroit Free Press was able to find only 5 out of 120 families willing to give up television for a month in return for $500. People who do give up TV reportedly experience boredom, anxiety, irritation, and depression. One woman observed: “It was terrible. We did nothing–my husband and I talked.”
Putnam also notes the distortion of reality TV produces, describing parasocial relationships and the phenomenon whereby heavy media consumption makes viewers “feel more engaged with [their] community without the effort of actually being engaged.” Though Putnam does not assign the greatest share of the blame to television, he seems to have the most disdain for it, perhaps because it seems entirely without benefit.
The final explanation is simple: kids today really do suck. Though civic engagement fluctuates over a person’s lifetime, Boomers and Gen Z[40] are much less civically engaged than their Greatest Generation counterparts were. In his meandering way, Putnam catalogs a variety of ways younger people are worse than the people who came of age in the 20s and 40s. We’re vastly more materialistic[41], more prone to suicide and depression, more isolated, and sicker than our ancestors were.
Putnam doesn’t have a great explanation for why this is. Television is probably related, as boomers were the first generation raised on it, and subsequent cohorts have only seen a more saturated media environment. But it might just be that the greatest generation was genuinely great. Putnam implies that their zest for engagement is a byproduct of WWII: zeal in the early years of US involvement saw not just massive military volunteering, but booming civic engagement at home: volunteering sky-rocketed, war bonds were sold, and people donated household materials to help the war effort.
Critically, these habits stuck. Though initial enthusiasm waned, this experience of coming together seemed to have shaped the nation. Civic engagement fell after the war ended, but it remained much higher than it had been at the beginning of the conflict: many people inspired by the war effort remained engaged.
Similarly, veterans brought the bonds formed of combat home with them. As JFK put it in 1946: “Most of the courage shown in the war came from men’s understanding of their interdependence on each other. Men were saving other men’s lives at the risk of their own simply because they realized that perhaps the next day their lives would be saved in turn” These men, trying to keep that sense of community alive, started and joined social organizations and invested in their communities and their country.[42]
This generational shift is the most intractable of the four factors. Unfortunately, it is also the one that had the biggest impact.
Putnam closes the chapter by giving hard numbers for how much these factors have contributed to social decline. He assigns 10% of the blame to two-career families, 10% to urban sprawl, 25-40% to television, and 40% to generational differences. He derived these numbers by asking “how would civic participation or social capital have declined if the relevant factors…had not changed over the last third of the twentieth century,” and comparing that to the actual rate of decline. He acknowledges that this approach has limitations, and that the numbers are “rough and ready,” but they provide a clear and easy summary in a book reluctant to make hard claims about much of anything.
Bowling Alone is a difficult book to summarize. There’s essentially no filler: every paragraph is a new summary of four different studies, many of which end up being unrelated or contradictory to the overall claim Putnam is making. Indeed, it’s sometimes difficult to parse out exactly what he’s claiming, if anything–he flits from study to study, discarding a theory here, weakly endorsing a theory there, and remarking on things he finds suggestive or curious; but he’s often reluctant to be pinned down to a larger opinion. His most definite claims are about why all of this happened, but even those are fairly disparate and disconnected.
Bowling Alone is not a tight, well-structured book. It’s a charcuterie board of facts around a central theme. It becomes a sociological rorschach test: a reference work that contains some evidence for just about any pet theory the reader can come up with.
This leaves the reader yearning for a clear takeaway. To his credit, Putnam tries to provide this in a slim section entitled “What is to be Done?” In it, he suggests that America faced similar problems at the end of the 1800s, which was solved by an “era of civic inventiveness” that created a “renewed set of institutions and channels for reinvigorated civic life.” He suggests we take inspiration from their example, and lays out prescriptions that range from the obvious (campaign finance reform) to the laughable (modern dance groups composed of unemployed shipyard workers).[43]
This is all well and good, but it feels a bit circular. If Progressivism succeeded by “organizing a voluntary association, investigating a problem, gathering relevant facts, and analyzing them,” isn’t the key problem that we can’t even organize in the first place? There appears to be some deeper issue we need to address before we can organize to solve our organization problem.
To answer that question, one has to depart from Putnam’s style of careful, data-driven analysis, and make wild claims about The State of America. Happily, doing that is really fun.
To me, it seems as though an epidemic of learned helplessness has devastated the American population: an overall psychological malaise that makes the idea of attending a book club or getting together for drinks–let alone affecting social change–simply too daunting. We do not feel capable of the basic human activities of getting together in groups, communicating, and solving problems in the way we have in the past. We lack the basic confidence required to believe we can do anything outside of the very narrow roles that institutions have placed us in. As a result, we do not do much of anything at all.
Return to the factors Putnam names as causes of social decline, and we can see evidence for this theory. Each cause of civic disengagement has also reduced American confidence.
The Greatest Generation saw the world change radically as they grew up. Americans beat the Great Depression, and in the process spread life-changing technology across America. A child born in the 1920s who grew up using an outhouse and reading by lantern-light was, by the end of the 1930s, likely to be taking hot baths and listening to the radio. It was made clear to them during their formative years that things got better.
Perhaps because of this experience, entry into World War 2 sparked a firestorm of civic energy: families grew their own food, women went to work, and most people found whatever way they could to aid the war effort. Ordinary men on the front lines were thrown together to solve dangerous and complex problems for the highest possible stakes.
The result? The Allies won, and in the process completely reshaped the political and economic structure of the entire world. Americans in their 20s and 30s had faced the greatest threat ever posed to the world, and neutralized it. It is not surprising that this generation did not find it difficult to socialize or solve local problems: after defeating the Nazis and the Depression, what could possibly be seen as a comparable challenge?
Their children, the boomers, did not see massive levels of improvement during their childhoods, and they did not overcome a similar challenge. They also faced a new sap of civic energy: television. Television, and now video games and social media, are a new class of activity, one that requires zero engagement. Users sit passively as media enters their brains. Nothing is asked, and nothing is gained. Images simply rush in and fill the mind.[44] In comparison to this, the simple act of real-time conversation is difficult: the participant must read their partner’s cues, interpret their words, and formulate a response unlikely to offend or confuse. Small wonder that a generation raised on electronic media is plagued with social anxiety and depression: their primary form of entertainment allows the most fundamental aspects of humanity to atrophy, to say nothing of larger skills of communal organization or problem solving.
What’s worse, the narratives on television generally lack any depiction of the sorts of civic skills required to work on hard problems or live in community. Comedies and reality TV depict emotionally stunted, conflict prone humans who cannot manage to go an episode without generating conflict and crises, while popular dramas present ultra-competent characters who always know what to do. Deliberation, thought, and consensus building are boring. TV optimizes them away, leaving viewers with the unconscious understanding that the human experience is primarily one of vicious, self-centered cruelty or effortless heroism. This leaves no room for the vast majority of life which is confusing, contradictory, messy, boring, and difficult. When problems arise, heavy users of mass media are likely to feel incapable of solving them because, in the narratives they have internalized, problems are either never solved or solved by people they could never hope to emulate.
Still, some social problems are so easy to solve they don’t require narratives about how to solve them. For example, if a coworker’s car breaks down, I can commute to work with him–assuming he lives nearby. Urban sprawl, in its severing of healthy community bonds, removes the opportunities to solve small problems collaboratively.
Imagine two neighbors talking about the plight of a third who has recently lost his job. If they know him well, they might feel motivated to help. If they know local business owners in the community, they might be able to find him work. If that owner knows the unemployed person, he can confidently judge whether the man is trustworthy, and has more motivation to help him. A breakage in any of those links results simply in an agreement that the situation is very sad, and no chance for concrete action, a moment that leaves all participants feeling helpless and disempowered.
Finally, consider more people entering the workforce. This would seem to create more empowerment, not less–after all, working is simply getting paid to solve problems, right? This is true in some sense, but as economic life in the US is dominated more and more by large corporations, and work moves from factories and job sites to offices and call centers, the character of work is increasingly that of being a cog in a machine. An employee at Google or McDonald’s has no ability to change the direction or strategy of the organization. They are unlikely, even, to be able to change the character of their department or local franchise, as all important matters are prescribed by rigid corporate edict. They may become more and more adept at performing tasks, but they have no room to think novelly or propose solutions to problems outside of their job description.[45]
Socially, their interactions are constrained to water cooler conversation about sports or television, lacking the space or freedom to forge deep bonds or talk about meaningful issues.
Contrast this to a landscaper at a small firm. He may see the company owner every day, even consider him a friend. He has ample opportunities to suggest changes. By working in the real world, he is forced to deal with unexpected and chaotic problems like weather, illness, exhaustion, and personal conflict. His workspace is less monitored, and he works in close proximity to his co-workers, creating opportunity for genuine, free-form conversation. His work environment encourages him to be more adaptable and able to solve novel problems.
Viewed in these terms, our social engagement and feelings of helplessness are unsurprising. We are denied and avoid opportunities to solve life's little problems, making life’s large problems seem insurmountable. It is little wonder that feelings of imposter syndrome have risen in the past few decades. In a very real sense, we are genuine imposters: well-trained, intelligent professionals who are, nevertheless, unable to do more than what we have been explicitly trained to do.
Happily, this deficiency is easy to solve. Find small problems outside your comfort level and work on them. Talk to people. Engage with life beyond the narrow bounds of institutionally permitted activity.
Live!