BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  The density of informal social connections varies somewhat, as we noticed earlier, among different social categories—higher among women than

  Figure 24: Informal Socializing as Measured in Time Diary Studies, 1965–1995

  among men, higher among young people and retired people than among the middle-aged, and so on. Even though the level of schmoozing differs across these categories, however, the trends in schmoozing (namely, downward) are very similar in all segments of society—down among both women and men, down in all age categories, down in all social classes, down in all parts of the country, down in big cities and suburbs and small towns, down among both married couples and single people.41 In short, informal social connectedness has declined in all parts of American society.

  We noted earlier the paradox that the strongest predictor of formal community involvement—education—had expanded sharply over the last twenty years and that nevertheless formal community involvement is down sharply. One implication is that without the boost provided by higher educational levels, formal involvement might have declined even more rapidly. We see a similar paradox in the case of informal social involvement: schmoozing is higher among single and childless people, and the number of single and childless people has risen significantly over the last two decades.42 Other things being equal, these trends should have led to increased informal social interaction, exactly the opposite of what we have found. As conventional family life has become rarer, we might have expected the real-life equivalent of Cheers and Friends to take the place of civic organizations and dinner parties, but in fact we have witnessed the decline of the latter without a compensating increase in the former. The implication: Something else must be even more powerfully depressing the rate of schmoozing in contemporary America.

  SO WE ARE SPENDING significantly less time nowadays with friends and neighbors than we used to do. What might we be doing instead that has implications for social capital? One common form of leisure activity is participation in sports. What can we learn about trends in social capital from an examination of Americans at play? Have we perhaps shifted the locus of our social encounters from the card table or the neighborhood bar to the softball diamond or the exercise class?

  Some evidence suggests that sports clubs have become slightly more common over the last two decades; according to the General Social Survey, membership in such clubs grew from 19 percent in 1974–75 to 21 percent in 1993–94. On the other hand, many studies have found, somewhat surprisingly, that participation rates in most sports have actually fallen in recent decades.43 Since the population is growing, the gross number of participants is also growing in some cases, but as a fraction of the population, participation in all of the following sports has fallen by 10–20 percent over the last decade or two: softball, tennis (and other racket games, like table tennis), volleyball, football, bicycling, skiing (downhill, cross-country, and water), hunting, fishing, camping, canoeing, jogging, and swimming. For example, long-term surveys from the National Sporting Goods Association, the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the DDB Needham Life Style studies, and the National Center for Health Statistics all agree that nationwide participation in softball dropped by roughly one-third between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s.44

  A few new sports have become popular—in-line skating and snowboarding among younger, more agile Americans, fitness walking and gym activities among the more health-conscious, golf among senior citizens. However, most of the new sports are not as “social” as many traditional athletic activities. Indeed, the most dramatic increases in sports-related purchases over the last decade have involved “in-home” activities, like treadmills and workout equipment.45 Moreover, except for walking, none of them attracts nearly as many participants as the declining traditional sports. Among team sports, soccer and basketball are up, but not enough to offset simultaneous falloffs in all other major team sports—softball, baseball, volleyball, and football. All in all, sports participation is modestly but unambiguously down over the last decade or so, and this decline has particularly affected team and group sports.46

  This decline in sports participation is not due to the aging of the U.S. population. On the contrary, the declines are sharpest among the young, whereas athleticism is actually growing among older Americans. Among twenty-somethings, average attendance at exercise classes was more than halved from eight times a year in the mid-1980s to three in 1998, whereas over this same period attendance doubled from two to four among Americans sixty and over. Swimming and attendance at health clubs display this same generational discrepancy—down among the younger, steady or up among the older. For physiological reasons, sports participation (except for exercise walking) declines with age, but overlaid on that life cycle pattern is the same generational profile (down among boomers and X’ers, up among their parents and grandparents) that we noted earlier for other forms of social and political participation. There is, in fact, some reason to believe that these twin trends—rising recreational activity among the older generation, falling among the younger generation— have been under way since the early 1960s.47

  Although it is not our primary concern here, rates of participation in most youth sports seem to have been stagnant or declining over the last several decades.48 Surprisingly, after an exponential increase in youth soccer in the 1980s, even participation in that fashionable sport slowed in the 1990s.49 At the same time, most other major sports suffered significant declines in adolescent participation in recent years. One important exception to this general picture is growth in organized school-based sports for women, in part as a consequence of Title IX requiring equal opportunity for women in federally funded athletic programs; but even this major initiative has not offset the more general decline in formal and informal sports participation among American youth.50 Because of the “baby echo” the absolute number of participants in many youth sports has risen, but what is relevant to our story is that rates of participation have been declining.

  Fitness was discussed more in the 1990s than it was in the 1970s, and health clubs are all the rage.51 Could this trend perhaps offset the slumps in other forms of social connection? The empirical evidence suggests not. First, all fitness activities combined (apart from walking) are much less common than the more prosaic activities of card playing or dinner parties. Even with the 1990s’ bust in card playing and boom in health clubs, for example, three times as many Americans play cards regularly as visit a health club regularly. Only among single, twenty-something, college graduates are visits to a health club more common than card games, and despite what one might infer from the mass media, only one American adult in every fifteen falls into that demographic category. Even if health clubs offered limitless opportunities for schmoozing (rather than merely staring at a monitor while working out in silence), the growth in health clubs is dwarfed by the collapse of less trendy forms of informal connectedness.

  Second, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed no net gain in the number of times that the average American jogs, attends exercise and aerobic classes, or visits a health club. The rise in health clubs in these years was offset by a decline in jogging and exercise classes. (See figure 25.) The less fashionable activity of “walking more than a mile for exercise” is more common than all other forms of workout combined, and in fact, walking for exercise has increased by about one-third over the last decade. However, the increasing popularity of walking (and golf, too) is due entirely to the fitness boom among older Americans, precisely the group that has most resisted the nationwide decline in connectedness. The trends in athletic activity that we have reviewed—down nationwide, down even faster among young adults, down least (or not at all) among senior citizens—have their visible counterpart in the “obesity epidemic” that has swept over America in recent decades—up nationwide, up even faster among young adults, up least of all among older Americans. Fitness is not a domain that has offset the erosion of social capital elsewhere in American society.52

  Virtually alone among major spo
rts, only bowling has come close to holding its own in recent years.53 Bowling is the most popular competitive sport in America. Bowlers outnumber joggers, golfers, or softball players more than two to one, soccer players (including kids) by more than three to one, and tennis players or skiers by four to one.54 Despite bowling’s “retro” image, in 1996 even twenty-somethings went bowling about 40 percent more often than they went in-line skating. More recently, even greater numbers of young people have reportedly been attracted by a high-tech combination called “cosmic bowling” or “Rock ’N’ Bowl.” Moreover, participation in all other major sports is more highly concentrated among either young men, or the upper middle class, or

  Figure 25: Stagnation in Fitness (Except Walking)

  both. Unlike health clubs, bicycling, jogging, exercise, swimming, tennis, golf, softball, and all other major sports, bowling is solidly middle-American— common among both men and women, couples and singles, working-class and middle-class, young and old.55

  Given population growth, more Americans are bowling than ever before, but league bowling has plummeted in the last ten to fifteen years. Between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by more than 40 percent.56 Figure 26 shows the long-run trend in league bowling in America, a profile that precisely matches the trends in other forms of social capital that we have already exam-ined—steady growth from the beginning of the century (except during the Depression and World War II), explosive growth between 1945 and 1965, stagnation until the late 1970s, and then a precipitous plunge over the last two decades of the century. At the peak in the mid-1960s, 8 percent of all American men and nearly 5 percent of all American women were members of bowling teams. Yet as the projections in figure 26 indicate, if the steady decline in league bowling were to continue at the pace of the last fifteen years, league bowling would vanish entirely within the first decade of the new century.

  Lest bowling be thought a wholly trivial example, I should note that, according to the American Bowling Congress, ninety-one million Americans

  Figure 26: The Rise and Decline of League Bowling

  bowled at some point during 1996, more than 25 percent more than voted in the 1998 congressional elections.57 Even after the 1980s’ plunge in league bowling, between 2 and 3 percent of American adults regularly bowled in leagues, although as we have seen, that figure was dropping fast. The decline in league bowling threatens the livelihood of bowling lane proprietors, because according to the owner of one of the nation’s largest bowling lane chains, league bowlers consume three times as much beer and pizza as do solo bowlers, and the money in bowling is in the beer and pizza, not the balls and shoes. The broader social significance, however, lies in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo. Whether or not bowling beats balloting in the eyes of most Americans, bowling teams illustrate yet another vanishing form of social capital.

  Strictly speaking, only poetic license authorizes my description of non-league bowling as “bowling alone.” Any observant visitor to her local bowling alley can confirm that informal groups outnumber solo bowlers. Insofar as such informal groups represent what I have called schmoozing, the fact that participation in bowling has held more or less steady in recent years actually represents an exception to the general diminishment of informal ties. On the other hand, league bowling, by requiring regular participation with a diverse set of acquaintances, did represent a form of sustained social capital that is not matched by an occasional pickup game.

  While Americans are spending less time doing sports, we are spending more time and money watching sports now than we were only a few decades ago. Sports spectatorship has been rising rapidly, which helps explain the rapid rise in the salaries of professional athletes. In part, the growth in spectatorship reflects our television viewing habits, but it is also reflected in live attendance figures. Adjusted for population growth, attendance at major sporting events has nearly doubled since the 1960s.58 The year-to-year fortunes of individual sports have varied with the excitement of the season and the vicissitudes of labor-management relations, but virtually all major sports have seen growth in per capita attendance over the last four decades—professional baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and stock-car racing, as well as college football and basketball. Figure 27 summarizes this trend—at last, a trend line that is rising, if only for the passive spectator.

  This increase in sports spectatorship is not a dead loss from the point of view of social capital.59 Sitting with friends in the bleachers for a Friday night high school football game might be just as productive of community as sitting across a poker table. Moreover, at least for the fans of winning teams, the sense of shared enthusiasm for a common passion can generate a certain sense of community. As long-suffering Red Sox fans know, even shared adversity can build community. On the other hand, it is striking that the same changing balance between active participation and passive spectatorship that

  Figure 27: The Growth of Spectator Sports, 1960–1997

  we earlier noted in the political sphere can be found in the sphere of sports itself. In football, as in politics, watching a team play is not the same thing as playing on a team.

  This same phenomenon—observing up, doing down—appears in other spheres of American life. In both popular and high culture, audience growth has generally matched or exceeded population growth. Surveys suggest steady or even increasing per capita attendance at art museums, pop and rock concerts, and movies. Between 1986 and 1998, while churchgoing was falling by 10 percent, museumgoing was up by 10 percent; while home entertaining was down by a quarter, moviegoing was up by a quarter; and while club meeting attendance was down by a third, pop/rock concert attendance was up by a third.60

  On the other hand, by many measures, “doing” culture (as opposed to merely consuming it) has been declining. Take town bands or jazz jamming or simply gathering around the piano, once classic examples of community and social involvement. According to surveys conducted every year over the last quarter century, the average frequency of playing a musical instrument has been cut from nearly six times per year in 1976 to barely three times per year in 1999. The percentage of Americans who play an instrument at all has fallen by fully one-third (from 30 percent to 20) percent over this period, and exposure to music lessons has been dropping in recent generations.61 According to surveys commissioned by the National Association of Music Merchants, the fraction of households in which even one person plays an instrument has fallen steadily from 51 percent in 1978 to 38 percent in 1997.62 We certainly have not lost our taste for listening to music, any more than for watching sports, but fewer and fewer of us play together.

  When Aristotle observed that man is by nature a political animal, he was almost surely not thinking of schmoozing. Nevertheless, our evidence suggests that most Americans connect with their fellows in myriad informal ways. Human nature being what it is, we are unlikely to become hermits. On the other hand, our evidence also suggests that across a very wide range of activities, the last several decades have witnessed a striking diminution of regular contacts with our friends and neighbors. We spend less time in conversation over meals, we exchange visits less often, we engage less often in leisure activities that encourage casual social interaction, we spend more time watching (admittedly, some of it in the presence of others) and less time doing. We know our neighbors less well, and we see old friends less often. In short, it is not merely “do good” civic activities that engage us less, but also informal connecting. Whether this silent withdrawal from social intercourse has affected our propensity to pitch in on common tasks and to show consideration for bystanders is the question to which we turn in the next two chapters.

  CHAPTER 7

  Altruism, Volunteering, and Philanthropy

  ALTRUISM, VOLUNTEERING, AND PHILANTHROPY—our readiness to help others—is by some interpretations a central measure of social capital. Social phi
losopher John Dewey, however, rightly emphasized the distinction between “doing with” and “doing for.” The significance of this distinction is highlighted in a recent development in a close-knit Jewish neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island.1

  To celebrate the festival of Purim, Jews of this neighborhood historically exchanged visits, bringing one another gifts of fruit and pastries (Mishloach Manot) in accordance with a religious mitzvah (commandment). In recent years, however, this custom has been interrupted by pressures of time, family vacations, and the like. Nowadays, as Purim approaches, a resident is likely to receive an engraved note from neighbors, like this one:

  We will be in New York for Purim. It will not be possible for us to fulfill the mitzvah of Mishloach Manot this year. Please do not leave any Mishloach Manot outside our door this year. The squirrels, dogs, cats, and rabbits will eat them. Instead of Mishloach Manot, we have donated to the Jewish Theological Seminary in your name.

  The philanthropic purpose is admirable. The traditional visits, however, also reinforced bonds within this community. A check in an envelope, no matter how generous, cannot have that same effect. Social capital refers to networks of social connection—doing with. Doing good for other people, however laudable, is not part of the definition of social capital.