Droll confirmation of declining civility on the highway comes from a long-term study of drivers’ behavior at stop signs at several intersections in suburban New York, as summarized in figure 40. In 1979, 37 percent of all motorists made a full stop, 34 percent a rolling stop, and 29 percent no stop at all. By 1996, 97 percent made no stop at all at the very same intersections.33 Another automotive indicator of the decline in thin trust and reciprocity—the virtual disappearance of hitchhiking—seems to have left no statistical trace but is undeniable to motorists who lived through the 1940s and 1950s.
To be sure, for each of these measures one might find a plausible specific explanation—the growth of telephone solicitation, more media attention to angry drivers, rising insurance rates, cheaper gas and more cars, the changing demography of New York suburbs, and so on. In the aggregate, however, these trends suggest that the undeniable decrease in thin trust that appears in the survey record has affected our actual behavior vis-à-vis strangers.
ONE POTENTIAL YARDSTICK for honesty and trustworthiness is the crime rate. As figure 41 shows, crime rates in America began to rise sharply in the middle 1960s, just about the time that other measures of social capital, trust, and trustworthiness began to turn down.34 In some measure, crime itself may be a symptom of this syndrome of weakened social control. On the other hand, crime rates are highly responsive to other factors, including the youthfulness of the national population, the evolution of illegal drug use (especially crack cocaine), and the rate of incarceration of career criminals.35 It seems unlikely that more than a fraction of the post-1960 increase in crime is attributable to a generic drop in national honesty. Conversely, it is premature to herald the welcome drop in crime during the 1990s as a harbinger of a nationwide sea change in law-abidingness.
As we noted earlier, one alternative to generalized reciprocity and socially embedded honesty is the rule of law—formal contracts, courts, litigation, adjudication, and enforcement by the state. Thus, if the lubricant of thin trust is evaporating from American society, we might expect to find greater reliance on law as the basis for cooperation. If the handshake is no longer binding and reassuring, perhaps the notarized contract, the deposition, and the subpoena will work almost as well. One way to explore this hypothesis is to examine our changing national investment in the legal system.36
The twentieth century was, for America, the century of industrialization and urbanism, of big government and big business. Given folk fears of the licentiousness of the swelling cities, the litigiousness of modern commerce, and the pettifoggery of welfare-state bureaucrats, one might conjecture that the share of legal “transaction costs” in the U.S. economy must have grown steadily throughout the century. In fact, however, as figure 42 plainly shows, as a fraction of the total U.S. workforce, employment of guards, police, and lawyers grew relatively little for most of the twentieth century.
Astonishingly, America had fewer lawyers per capita in 1970 than in 1900.37 Two world wars; the extraordinary booms of the 1920s and the 1950s; one Great Depression; one New Deal; our metamorphosis from a rustic nation (with 60 percent of its inhabitants living in hamlets of fewer than 2,500 souls) to a metropolitan nation (with nearly half its population in cities an order of magnitude larger); the transformation of our economy from gaslights, horse drawn buggies, and the general store to GE, GM, and Kmart—none of these economic, social, and cultural revolutions raised the lawyering ratio in the American economy by a single iota. After 1970, however, the ratio of lawyers to the rest of us suddenly exploded, more than doubling in the next quarter century and bloating this entry in our national “transaction cost” accounts.
Figure 42: Employment in Policing and the Law Soared after 1970
The post-1970 acceleration in employment for providing security was not quite so marked. Nevertheless, during the 1980s both public and private spending on security rose rapidly as a share of GNP — yet another “transaction cost” excrescence. By 1995 America had 40 percent more police and guards and 150 percent more lawyers and judges than would have been projected in 1970, even given the growth of population and the economy.
Moreover, the massive expansion of the legal profession was not simply part of the growth of all professions, for no other major profession experienced this same post-1970 explosion. After 1970 the legal profession grew three times faster than the professions as a whole.38 For the first seven decades of the twentieth century the legal and medical professions grew roughly in tandem, but after 1970 the legal profession grew twice as fast as the medical profession. In 1970 there were 3 percent fewer lawyers than doctors in the United States, but by 1995 there were 34 percent more lawyers than doctors. For the first seven decades of the twentieth century the ratio of lawyers to engineers fell steadily, as our economy became more “technology intensive.” By 1970 America had 1 lawyer for every 4.5 engineers. At that point, however, the century's trend was completely reversed. By 1995, despite all the talk of a high-tech economy, we had 1 lawyer for every 2.1 engineers.39
The explanation for this explosive increase in our society's investment in formal mechanisms of social control and dispute resolution is not entirely clear. On the supply side, the clamor for Vietnam draft deferments, the glitter of L.A. Law, and the requirements of affirmative action policies are sometimes said to have played a role in expanding law school enrollments. The more puzzling question is not why so many young men and women decided to enter law school, but why the rest of us in effect doubled what we invested in lawyering, after having contented ourselves with a constant (and much lower) supply of legal advice through the previous seventy turbulent years.
On the demand side, the rise of the crime rate after 1970 is obviously an important part of the explanation for the growth in security personnel. On the other hand, criminal law was not a major growth area of the bar, so crime itself played little role in the doubling of demand for lawyers. Some argue that simply the growth of affluence and socioeconomic complexity accounts for the growth of lawyering, although it is hard to see why that had no effect whatso ever before 1970.40 The growth of government regulation is probably part of the explanation, though it is striking that New Deal corporatism and the birth of the welfare state had no similar effect in the 1930s and 1940s. The rapid increase in divorce in the 1970s is part of the story, a development itself closely tied to changes in American social capital. Despite talk of a “litigation explosion,” careful research thus far has cast some doubt on the idea that court dockets in general are more crowded today.41
In fact, the largest increase on the demand side for legal work seems to have been in what is gently termed “preventive lawyering.” Throughout the American society and economy, beginning around 1970, informal understandings no longer seemed adequate or prudent. The suddenness of the change and its timing seem uncannily similar to trends in other measures of social capital that we have examined. Spouses, neighbors, business partners and would be partners, parents and children, pastors and parishioners, donors and recipients — all of us abruptly began to demand to “get it in writing.” As law professor Marc Galanter summarizes the expanded role of the lawyer,
Like the provider of artificial hormones that supplement the diminished supply coursing through the body, the lawyer contrives enforceability to supplement the failing supply of reciprocity, moral obligation, and fellow-feeling. … Lawyers contrive to provide “artificial trust.” … Because lawyers are producers and vendors of impersonal “cool” trust, they are the beneficiaries of the decline of its low-cost rival.42
Ironically, even trust among lawyers themselves seems to have been impaired by the decline of social capital. Law professors R. J. Gilson and Robert Mnookin report that as the stability of social networks has declined and the number of one-time-only encounters among lawyers has increased, lawyers worry less about their own reputation for honesty, and knowing this, they too trust one another less and cooperate less.43
Almost imperceptibly, the treasure that we spend on getting i
t in writing has steadily expanded since 1970, as has the amount that we spend on getting lawyers to anticipate and manage our disputes. In some respects, this development may be one of the most revealing indicators of the fraying of our social fabric. For better or worse, we rely increasingly—we are forced to rely increasingly—on formal institutions, and above all on the law, to accomplish what we used to accomplish through informal networks reinforced by generalized reciprocity—that is, through social capital.
CHAPTER 9
Against the Tide? Small Groups, Social Movements, and the Net
NOT ALL ORGANIZATIONS in America have lost membership over the last quarter century, and not all personal relationships have atrophied. In this chapter we examine three important countertrends that must be weighed in any comprehensive balance of social capital. At one end of the spectrum of size, privacy, and informality is the plethora of encounter groups, reading groups, support groups, self-help groups, and the like that have become important anchors in the emotional and social lives of millions of Americans. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the succession of great social movements that swept across the land in the last third of the twentieth century, beginning with the black civil rights movement, followed by the student movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the abortion and right-to-life movements, the religious conservative movement, the environmental movement, the animal rights movement, and innumerable others. Finally, how is our story affected by the explosive growth in telecommunications in recent years, especially the Internet (or as it is fondly known among the cognoscenti, “computer-mediated communication,” or CMC)? Could new “virtual communities” simply be replacing the old-fashioned physical communities in which our parents lived? In short, how do small groups, social movements, and telecommunications qualify our judgment about declining social connectedness and civic engagement?
Sociologist Robert Wuthnow, the leading student of the small-group movement, reports that fully 40 percent of all Americans claim to be “currently involved in [a] small group that meets regularly and provides support or caring for those who participate in it.” Roughly half of these groups are Sunday school classes, prayer fellowships, Bible study groups, and other church-related groups of the sort whose decline we discussed in chapter 4. On the other hand, nearly 5 percent of all the people with whom Wuthnow spoke claimed to participate regularly in a self-help group, such as Alcoholics Anonymous or a local chapter of the Association for Retarded Citizens, and nearly as many said they belonged to book discussion groups and hobby clubs. Although Wuthnow’s evidence represents only a single snapshot, he eloquently describes the small-group movement as a “quiet revolution” in American society, redefining community in a more fluid way, an antidote to social disconnectedness. Nearly two out of five members of such groups reported that other members had helped them out when someone was sick, three in five said that their group had extended help to someone outside the group, and four out of five agreed that the group made them “feel like you weren’t alone.”1 Small groups like this surely represent an important stock of social capital. We earlier reflected on the strengths and limitations of religious forms of social connectedness in contemporary America. What about secular support and discussion groups?
Reading circles emerged as an important feature of middle-class American life in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the spread of education combined with the growth of leisure time. Then, as now, reading groups attracted predominantly women. In the first several decades after the Civil War participants concentrated on intellectual “self-improvement,” but the groups also encouraged self-expression, intense friendship, and what a later generation would call “consciousness-raising.” Their focus gradually widened from literary pursuits to encompass community service and civic betterment, as part of a quickening movement for social and political reform. By the turn of the century one newly elected president exclaimed to her group, “I have an important piece of news for you. Dante is dead. He has been dead for several centuries, and I think it is time that we dropped the study of his Inferno and turned our attention to our own.” Another echoed, “We prefer Doing to Dante, Being to Browning. …We’ve soaked in literary effort long enough.” From such groups in such moments were born the suffrage movement and numerous other civic-minded initiatives of the Progressive Era.2
Informal literary groups can be extremely long lived. One self-rejuvenating group of thirty-five in Fayetteville, Arkansas, for example, has met twice a month since 1926.3 Intense personal, intellectual, and occasionally even political bonds are forged in these lively discussions. Regular participants become more involved in wider community affairs as well, moving from Dante to Doing.4 In short, by converting a solitary intellectual activity (reading) into one that is social and even civic, discussion groups provide a fertile forcing bed for both schmoozers and machers.
Many observers believe that America is now in the midst of another boom in reading groups, much like the end of the previous century, and several grass-roots organizations are striving to make it so.5 Sadly, evidence to support this hopeful view turns out to be hard to find. Although the numbers are a bit uncertain, it appears that as many Americans were involved in literary, artistic, and discussion groups in the 1960s and 1970s as in the late 1990s. In fact, since participation in such groups is heaviest among single women and college graduates, and since those categories encompass a higher portion of Americans today than three or four decades ago, it is somewhat surprising that the popularity of such groups has not blossomed more than it has. The proportion of single female college graduates who belong to a literary, artistic, study, or discussion group actually fell from one in three in 1974 to one in four in 1994. Our verdict on this form of small group must be mixed: such groups surely contribute to civic engagement and social capital, but there is little evidence that they have grown in numbers that would significantly offset the civic decay of the past several decades.6
By contrast, participation in self-help and support groups has unquestionably grown in recent years. The most common of these organizations are “twelve-step” groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (founded in 1935) and the more than 130 national analogues that have proliferated for other addictions, such as Gamblers Anonymous and Co-Dependents Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) itself claims roughly one million members in the United States, and its Al-Anon cousin for the family and friends of alcoholics counts another four hundred thousand members.7 Also relevant are the many support groups for victims of specific diseases or other problems, such as muscular dystrophy, AIDS, and single parenting. Finally there are commercially organized self-help groups, like Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, and some therapy groups. Firm numbers on all these groups are hard to come by, but one recent national survey found that 2 percent of all adults were currently active in some support or self-help group, and another comprehensive survey found a lifetime rate of usage of about 3 percent.8 (For some perspective, it is worth noting that all participants in self-help groups, newcomers and old-timers combined, are outnumbered two to one by the dropouts from league bowling over the last two decades, to say nothing of other, more “civic” forms of engagement.)
Self-help groups certainly provide emotional support and interpersonal ties that are invaluable to the participants. Wuthnow avers that “the small group movement is thus adding an important element to the way in which modern life is organized. It is extending the principles of formal organization into an arena of interpersonal life that was largely spontaneous and unorganized until very recently.”9 Although some medical professionals still debate the advantages of this lay support versus professional therapy, in practice the two approaches are converging; one comprehensive study of self-help groups in California found that more than 60 percent have professional leaders, blurring the line between self-help and group therapy. An increasing body of evidence suggests that support groups—and especially the interpersonal ties that they offer—provide mea
surable health and emotional benefits to many participants.10
In some respects support groups substitute for other intimate ties that have been weakened in our fragmented society, serving people who are disconnected from more conventional social networks. For example, the rate of participation in such groups is two to four times higher among divorced and single people than among married people. In their sympathetic overview of self-help groups, Alfred H. Katz and Eugene I. Bender ask us to recognize that “to be physically handicapped, poor, a former mental patient, or an object of exploitation or social disapproval is an identity that society forces on many unwilling ‘deviants.’ …We see self-help groups as vehicles through which these outcast persons can claim and grow toward new identities, redefining themselves and society; can overcome solitariness through identification with a reference group; and sometimes can work toward social ends or social change that they see as important.”11
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