Robert D. Putnam — Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…

189 published claims from this book.

• A communication medium both increases and decreases the same connection simultaneously.
• A landmark social-science thesis began as an unverified personal hunch.
• Adult education levels barely affect child outcomes once social capital is held constant.
• Altruism as doing-for is distinct from social capital as doing-with
• America’s postwar civic engagement peaked despite widespread discrimination and inequality.
• American civic engagement has cycled between collapse and renewal, not declined steadily.
• American civic engagement rose for two-thirds of the century then sharply reversed.
• American civic engagement spans widely varied forms and scales simultaneously.
• American civil society vibrancy has notably declined over recent decades
• American community group membership rose steadily for decades before the 1960s
• American residential mobility is lower now than it has ever been
• American social trust dropped sharply even after accounting for rising education
• American trust in neighbors peaked at 77 percent in 1964
• Americans increasingly consume culture while abandoning participatory social forms
• Americans replaced social evenings with home-centered solitary leisure
• Americans widely perceived community bonds weakening by the 1990s.
• An era’s commerce came to be led by celebrity industrialists.
• At 1990s decline rates, American clubs faced extinction within twenty years
• Autonomy-oriented culture amplifies despair when individual effort fails
• Big government does not undermine social capital and may foster it
• Big-metro residence suppresses civic engagement independent of who lives there
• Bonding and bridging are continuous dimensions, not either-or categories
• Bonding ties secure support while bridging ties enable advancement.
• Bonding-only social capital can deepen instead of heal racial division
• Boston’s liberation energized American confidence and anti-British rhetoric justifying independence.
• Bridging social capital declines when online affinity groups narrow communication
• Broadcast television shifts track thirty years of British cultural decline
• Building inward-facing social ties is a prerequisite for later outward political action
• Card playing may collapse faster than a linear trend predicts
• Casual acquaintances beat close friends for job leads because they know different people.
• Championing community inadvertently strengthens exclusionary bonding over inclusive bridging ties
• Chapter-based groups retain members through personal ties rather than mission
• Check-writing membership without member contact creates no social capital
• Church attendance boosts youth employment through networking, not religious belief.
• Church giving shifted from external charity toward internal operations
• Civic engagement traditions precede and enable socioeconomic modernization, not the reverse.
• Civic engagement vulnerable to free riding declines fastest
• Civic organizations across America faded dramatically in the late twentieth century.
• Class size reduction alone cannot close state achievement gaps.
• Collective civic networks, not individual heroes, enabled the American Revolution’s opening
• College freshmen’s materialism tripled across three decades while civic priorities halved
• Community bonds have thinned from dense local ties into weak single-purpose ones
• Community cohesion alone protected Rosetans from heart attacks until they abandoned it
• Community decline came from failing recruitment of new members, not member dropout.
• Community decline operates invisibly through the absence of familiar practices
• Contradictory local crosscurrents still reveal shared national trends in civic life.
• Cooperative civic activities decline faster than individual ones
• Correlated social capital and child outcomes may share hidden confounding causes.
• Declining civic volunteering was not offset by volunteers shifting to other organizations.
• Declining community bonds measurably impair schools, democracy, economy, and health.
• Declining social trust reflects generational succession, not individual change
• Declining trust follows from civic withdrawal, not just causes it
• Demographic shifts predicted rising sociability, so other forces depress it
• Dense civic networks enable trust, reciprocity and collective action.
• Different civic activities declined through different generational and society-wide mechanisms
• Digital tools reinforce existing ties rather than create new communities
• Directory undercounting and un-purged lists mask grassroots environmental decline
• Disbanding an elite chamber spurred a poor county’s economic takeoff.
• Distrust of government may follow rather than cause civic disengagement
• Diverse independent data sources triangulate toward truth despite shared flaws.
• Divorce alone does not cause civic disengagement outside religious activity
• Education raises participation in absolute rather than relative terms.
• Evangelical church attendance does not translate into broader community involvement
• Even a brief hallway greeting measurably increases later helpfulness toward a stranger.
• Even booming professions saw their associations’ market share collapse in sequence
• Even generous population estimate errors leave PTA membership declines intact
• Existing social capital is a prerequisite for effective online interaction
• Expert predictions about a new medium’s social uses are routinely wrong.
• Face-to-face talk enables instantaneous message repair that text cannot match.
• Falling life satisfaction splits evenly between financial worry and lost social ties
• Foreign membership growth can distort apparent US civic association trends
• Freed blacks built mutual aid associations on the same pattern as white societies
• Generalized reciprocity emerges from frequent diverse interaction and boosts efficiency
• Generalized reciprocity is more valuable than specific reciprocity
• Generalized reciprocity outranks tit-for-tat as a social glue
• Generational effects alter society even when individuals stay the same
• Generational succession explains roughly half of America’s civic decline since the 1970s
• Gilded Age growth enriched workers absolutely while enriching the top disproportionately.
• Good families improve neighborhoods by expanding the pool of well-behaved peers
• Government policy can deliberately foster social-capital formation.
• High school completion among American adults doubled from 41 to 82 percent by 1998
• Home purchase of exercise equipment does not translate into regular use
• Ideas spread when they articulate a public’s preexisting unease, not by their novelty.
• Informal social ties predict school achievement better than formal civic memberships do.
• Institutional and individual reform are mutually dependent, not alternatives
• Late-nineteenth-century change outpaced even our accelerated modern rate.
• Less than 15 percent of national environmental group members do more than donate
• Marriage is a substitute for, not a complement to, other happiness sources.
• Mass democratic association historically depended on newspapers to coordinate collective action
• Mass production created mass leisure time that changed American life
• Membership stagnates even though more Americans are positioned to join groups.
• Mere shared bowling league membership can create bonds deep enough for organ donation
• Mingling across classes in shared pursuits dissolves prejudice between groups
• Most community groups lack formal records, biasing roster-based measures.
• Movements grounded in preexisting churches mobilize better than those without social infrastructure
• Nearly all of the turnout decline is generational replacement, not individual change
• Neighborly sociability has measurably declined while non-neighbor friendships rose
• Networks sustain conduct rules because they embed mutual obligation
• New civic institutions must be invented fresh, not copied from past models
• Nineteenth-century slavery still predicts low civic engagement today.
• No reliable nationwide measures distinguish bridging from bonding social capital
• Nonprofit sector growth does not indicate rising social connectedness.
• Nostalgic tales of community decline have recurred for two centuries
• Old moral panics about community loss breed reactionary nostalgia rather than constructive reform
• Older citizens’ civic activism now amplifies their policy influence
• One cohort stayed well-adjusted lifelong while its children grew more distressed
• One commuter’s long drive depresses civic life even for noncommuting neighbors
• Organizational self-reports of membership counts can be administratively frozen
• Parental involvement in PTAs functions as an especially productive form of civic engagement.
• Physical volunteering declined as older volunteers cannot replace it
• Pluralist democracy amplifies the already privileged
• Political scandals alone cannot explain Americans’ civic withdrawal
• Poor neighborhoods harm development independent of family circumstances
• Postwar Americans’ collective confidence came from remembered shared accomplishments.
• Postwar observers saw leisure drawing Americans into civic and neighborhood engagement
• Presidential turnout rose steadily from 1920 to 1960
• Progressives rejected passive faith that time remedies social evils
• Protestant giving per member stagnated while membership kept falling
• Question wording shifts measured social trust by about twenty points
• Race and poverty affect test scores only through their effect on social capital.
• Raw group membership must be measured against eligible-population share.
• Received kindness makes recipients more likely to help others
• Regional government quality tracks civic traditions rooted in the eleventh century
• Regular meaningful service builds civic skills while episodic service does not
• Religion’s civic effect depends on cross-group connections beyond private virtue
• Religious disengagement doubled from boomers to their children.
• Religious polarization doubled as moderates left while extremists persisted.
• Religious revivals create bonding capital at the expense of bridging capital
• Richer communication media produce more trust and social solidarity
• Rising volunteering was an Indian summer, not a renewal
• Scandinavian ancestry predicts a state’s current social capital.
• Scholarly impact depends on timing and resonance more than on scholarly merit.
• Settlement houses mainly transformed their wealthy service givers into national leaders
• Shared sacrifice in military service built solidarity while unequal service bred cynicism
• Social capital as an idea was independently reinvented six times across the twentieth century.
• Social capital divides into bonding and bridging forms that aid cooperation.
• Social capital serves harmful as well as beneficial ends
• Social capital varies along intensity, formality, and multiplexity dimensions.
• Social capital was invented to explain racial advantage beyond wealth.
• Social capital’s external effects are frequently antisocial and negative
• Social connectedness affects health as strongly as smoking, obesity, and hypertension do
• Social interaction yields diminishing and then negative happiness returns past fortnightly
• Social networks carry productive economic value like physical tools and education do
• Social networks themselves constitute capital with measurable productive value
• Social trust and civic engagement co-vary across societies as one underlying factor.
• Social-capital interventions fail precisely where they are needed most
• Southern violence is explained by social-capital deficit, not culture of honor
• Sprawl accounts for only a small slice of America’s civic decline.
• State-level mistrust correlates strongly with poor self-reported health.
• Support groups only weakly bind members and do not replace genuine community attachments.
• Survey overreporting hides a bigger real decline in church attendance.
• Survey self-reports of social trust predict actual returned-wallet honesty
• Survey self-reports wildly overstate environmental organization membership
• Television creates a false intimacy that substitutes for real community engagement
• Television has fragmented from a shared national culture into segmented audiences
• Television privaatizes leisure even in group settings meant for sociability
• Television privatizes leisure and thereby erodes community social capital
• The 1940-45 cohort uniquely combined engagement with tolerance and bred civil rights
• The association boom of 1960s-1990s was organizational growth without mass membership
• The average protester has aged from 35 to 46 across two decades
• The Christian Coalition’s membership claims were vastly inflated
• The civic decline’s roots predate sixties upheavals and divorce revolution
• The Internet cannot have caused America’s civic decline.
• The midcentury lifetime-employment contract was dismantled across white-collar America
• The post-1960 civic slump is unprecedented since Reconstruction
• The re-potting hypothesis fails because there was no mobility decline to explain away.
• The rise of mass media and consumer leisure transformed American life at century’s turn.
• The social capital idea vanished after 1916 until independent rediscoveries began in the 1950s.
• The telephone reinforced local ties instead of enabling distant communities.
• The volunteering boom came almost entirely from seniors
• The youth political knowledge gap is a recent, cohort-driven development
• Time and financial pressures explain very little of civic disengagement.
• Time and money pressures alone cannot explain civic disengagement.
• Traditional community bonds bring corruption and intolerance as well as civic benefit.
• Trust in government collapsed from 1966 to 1992
• Trusting communities enjoy economic and health advantages through lower transaction costs
• Unemployment makes people passive and withdrawn rather than radicalized.
• Union decline cannot be blamed mainly on industrial-to-service economic shifts
• Union decline reflects weakened attachment to membership itself, not unions specifically
• Unions once functioned as networks of reciprocity, not merely bargaining agents
• US lawyers per capita stagnated for seventy years then suddenly doubled
• Virtue only produces social benefit when embedded in reciprocal networks
• Volunteering correlates with political engagement, not alienation
• Weak bridging ties outperform strong bonding ties for advancement
• Well-funded national advocacy organizations signal grassroots engagement’s absence
• Women’s labor-force entry may have had multiplier effects on civic disengagement
• World War II dramatically equalized American wealth and income
• Younger generations retain strong ties but lost bridging ties to wider community
• Youth distrust reflects experience of an untrustworthy world, not personal flaw