Robert Putnam
speaker
197 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Robert Putnam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The Bulwark Daily · Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations · 12 Feb 2025
podcast
Once upon a time, we did have public libraries, but in general, public libraries are no longer serving the purpose of connecting people as they once did. And that makes it harder even for people who would like to connect. So it requires social coordination. Does this make sense? I'm generalizing from the single example of physical space to all of the other things.
If the undeniable attractions of not having to worry about other people outweigh The kick of endorphins we demonstrably get when we're around other people, well, it's not that our biology has changed, but it's that the social or technological setting has changed.
environmental factors, all the social institutions around us make it less easy. And there's another factor today, if we want to get into this, I don't know how far you want to get into politics, but- I want to go into politics next, so let's do it.
Well, even at Thanksgiving, there are people that are in my Thanksgiving that I basically, I love them, but they have really crazy political ideals. And so we tend to shy away from those talks, and therefore political polarization, which is to some extent, and we can get into this, the consequence of social disconnection is also then it reinforces social isolation.
By the way, I basically agree with Derek Thompson's account, but there are a few things in his account that I disagree with, and maybe it would be useful to get to that at some point.
Well, I think it's a great piece. Of course it's a great piece, and I basically agree with almost everything. One part that doesn't seem to me to fit the evidence, he claims that our close ties are as strong as ever. And then there's this intermediate village, he calls it, where this slacking of ties is going on. Yeah. And then out in the more distant arena, it's low under any circumstances.
I think he's wrong about the intimate ties. And the best evidence that I know of, including some recent evidence that has just come out in the last couple of weeks, say that family ties, close intimate ties, have been slackening. First of all, over this period, many fewer people are getting married, which is one kind of intimate tie. Secondly, few people are having fewer children. And why is that?
Because people are having sex less. That's the most intimate kind of contact, I mean, of social contact you can imagine. And especially among younger people, that also is declining. So I just think it's wrong. It's a little bit romantic in multiple senses of the word romantic to think that Well, we don't know our neighbors as well, but we really do love and cherish our most intimate ties.
And actually, many different kinds of evidence suggest that's not true. Now, of course, we're not going to be able to weigh my evidence against Derek's evidence here, but I wanted to single that out. And if I'm right, I think that's even more true. Devastating, actually.
Can I interrupt for just one second? That's factually false. Bowling is the most interclass, interracial sport in America. Blacks bowl more than whites. Not much, but they do. Is that true? Come on. I'm a fat guy here.
Upper class people bowl less than working class people.
Forgive me for self-citation here, but when you talk to an academic, that's what you're going to hear. I wrote a whole book about that fact, that there's a growing gap between rich kids and poor kids, rich adults and poor adults, that and all the ways you talked about. Marriage rates are steady or actually rising among college-educated Americans, plummeting among non-college-educated Americans.
Class is a big dividing line here on all these trends. And moreover, it's becoming a bigger dividing line than race. So the gap between college-educated blacks, let's say, and non-college-educated blacks is growing. And that showed up in the last election. This is fundamentally why...
I don't know if it's fair to say Trump—well, I guess it is fair to say Trump made gains among some blacks, but which blacks? Non-college-educated blacks. The same place he's been making gains among whites and Latinos. And so I think this has big implications for the strategy, the proper strategy for the Democratic Party. That's a separate question. What should we do about it?
And as I say, this has been clear for at least this growing class gap has been clear for at least 20 years because that's when I, I mean, 10 years ago is when I wrote about it. So it's, so let's see what we've summarized, what we've said. It is an asocial 21st century. That's right. But that's even true for family ties.
And it's especially true for the have-nots and even more true for men, young men. So this is, I'm not saying that there isn't a bigger problem. There is, but when you drill down and say, where is this problem worst? It's among have-nots, young have-nots, young male have-nots.
Okay, I want to begin with a little bit of history. I promise this will turn out to be relevant. I trust you. At the turn of the last, from the 19th to the 20th centuries, around 1900, there was what people then called the boy problem. What was the boy problem? It was that young men were unusually isolated and
Now, the backstory is because they basically, or their parents had been living in little villages, whether the villages were in Iowa or in southern Italy, but they were now living in the big city in Chicago or the lower east side of Manhattan, and it wasn't as easy to make friends there. Girls are just generally better at making friends than boys. That's a fact, a sociological fact that they are.
And so these young men... were causing mayhem on the streets of Chicago or New York or really any of the big cities in America around 1900. And it was so bad that it was called, quote, the boy problem, unquote. And then they fixed it. So now the question is, how did they fix it? And this relates to a second principle that I have for building social capital.
Building social capital can't be like saying, eat your spinach, people. It's got to be fun. I mean, okay, we may want to have character formation or something, but it's got to be fun or else people are not going to do it. That's why, by the way, I used... Bowling leagues is one of my stark metaphors because actually, I don't know if you've bowled, bowling is actually fun.
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