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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We've been going to fewer club meetings, but we've been going on fewer picnics, and we trust other people less, and we're less connected to our friends and to community organizations, but also to our family. All those ways in which we connect, all of them turned out to be going down. when I wrote that book. And now, 25 years later, it turns out they've gone down even further.
Well, I want to step back just a little bit. If you were a botanist and wanted to study plant growth, how a plant was influenced by its environment, you'd take genetically identical seeds, you'd plant them in different pots of soil, you'd water them differently, and then you'd measure and see which plants flourished and which faltered.
And then you knew it'd be something that you did in the soil or how much you watered them. That's what Italians did in Italy in 1970. They created a new set of regional governments all across Italy from up in the Alps to down in Sicily. They all had the same powers and money. They looked the same on paper, but the environments into which they were implanted were very, very different.
Some were very advanced economically. Some were very backward economically. Some were Catholic. Some were communist, et cetera. And so we, over for 20, 25 years, followed those regional governments. We could see that some of them were very successful, not only in terms of were they able to build daycare centers when they planned to, but also in terms of what did the people think.
And so we could see there were some successful governments and some failures. And then the question is, well, what was in the soil? And we had a lot of different ideas. We thought maybe it was just economic wealth made the difference, or we thought maybe it was education that made a difference.
But we didn't guess what it turned out to be, which was choral societies, singing groups, and football clubs and so on, by which I mean, in some places of Italy, people in the region connected with one another across various lines, singing together. So that's what we came to call social capital. We were talking about these bonds
that brought people in a given region or community together across lines. And in Northern Italy, especially North Central Italy around Bologna, for example, there was a lot of that kind of what I came to call social capital, that is these connections among people. And they had very effective, still do, very, very effective regional governments.
But some places, especially in the South, they didn't. They didn't have those kinds of groups and they had terrible, corrupt, inefficient, never answered the phone even, regional governments. Now I'm coming back to what Christiana asked about. Did they just have no groups down there? No, they had very tiny little groups. Families.
They looked after their own immediate family, but weren't involved in groups with people, you know, even on the other side of the street, much less on the other side of town. Now, what I'm trying to say is their we was strong, but very narrow.
And what was characteristic up north was that they had much broader groups in which people from different families and different walks of life would come together to sing. Now, Christiana, I may not have persuaded you in what I've said now, but I've tried to convey the way I hear your objections.
Let me see if I can explain it this way. If you see people regularly and you're good friends, I don't mean intimate friends, but you have a good friendship, much less a deeper friendship, what tends to evolve is a norm of reciprocity. That is, I'll do this for you now.
without expecting something back immediately from you, because down the road, we'll see each other at choir practice, and you'll do something for me. I'll do this for you now without expecting something back.
And indeed, if everybody in the community is connected, I'll do something for somebody who I don't actually know, because if other people see that I'm cheating him, they won't play games with me. So in other words, everybody learns that the people in this town are nice to each other. Wouldn't you love to live in a place where people were nice to each other?
And moreover, and this is the main point of Bowling Alone, we learned when we carried those ideas back to the United States, that that has changed over time. There have been periods in American history when we did have connections with other people. I grew up in a small town in Ohio. in the late 1950s, and nobody locked their door.
And when I tell my children and grandchildren that, they think Grandpa's lying. But no, in that period, and it wasn't about race. There were black kids. I played football. There's a picture on the cover of Bowling Alone of me and my bowling league. When I was in junior high school, and there are three white guys, I'm the tall, skinny one in the middle, and there are two black guys.
And so this was not about race. I mean, it wasn't bounded. This trust and reciprocity was not bounded then there by race. I'm not saying race was not a problem. Of course it was. But I mean, in terms of this, in a small town in the 1950s, people left their door unlocked. And that's because of what I and my jargon call social capital.
So all I'm saying is not that every single person in America has lost trust or has become untrustworthy, but on average, and we've now shown this to be true all over America, people are less connected and therefore less trustworthy than they used to be. There are differences across America. And the places that are still relatively high in social connection are somewhat more trustworthy.
I'm sorry, I'm going to tell you more social science than you want to know. People do an interesting study. They drop letters on the street with money in them. Sealed, but with money in them and addressed. And then they ask, in any given town or a neighborhood, how many of those letters are actually put in the mailbox so the owner can get their money back?
There are cities in America where your odds of getting your money back, if you drop it in an envelope, drop it on the street, are zero. And there are places, this is hard to believe, there are places in America where if you drop an envelope with money in it, you're 80% likely to get the money back.
There's been virtually no decline in bowling itself. But it used to be that people bowled in teams, in leagues. And there has been a complete collapse of team bowling, of league bowling. And when I told a friend of mine that, he said, oh, you mean we're bowling alone? And I thought, that's a good title for a book. If ever I write a book about this, it turns out to be a good title.
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