• Is the proposed explanatory factor changing in the relevant way? Suppose, for instance, that people who often move have shallower community roots. That could be an important part of the answer to our mystery, but only if residential mobility itself had risen during this period. (Failure to clear this hurdle is what led us to dismiss any indictment against education.)
• Is it possible that the proposed explanatory factor is the result of civic disengagement, not the cause? For example, even if newspaper readership were closely correlated with civic engagement across individuals and across time, we would need to weigh the possibility that reduced newspaper circulation is the result (not the cause) of disengagement.
Against that set of benchmarks, the next five chapters examine potential influences on the creation and destruction of social capital.
CHAPTER 11
Pressures of Time and Money
THE MOST OBVIOUS SUSPECT behind our tendency to drop out of community affairs is pervasive busyness. This is everybody’s favorite explanation for social disengagement. “I don’t have enough time” is the reason that Americans cite most often for our failure to participate. “Too busy” is by far the most common explanation we offer for not volunteering. We certainly feel busier now than Americans did a generation ago: the proportion of us who say we “always feel rushed” jumped by more than half between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s more and more of us reported that we “work very hard most of the time” and that we frequently “stayed late at work.” The groups that feel most harried are full-time workers (especially those with advanced education), women, people aged twenty-five to fifty-four, and parents of younger children, especially single parents.1 These patterns are hardly surprising, yet these same groups have historically been especially active in community life. Perhaps the villain of the piece is simply overwork.
Related potential causes of disengagement are endemic economic pressures, job insecurity, and declining real wages, especially among the lower two-thirds of the income distribution. The economic climate in America from the middle 1970s to the middle 1990s was one of increasing anxiety. So perhaps the combined pressures of time and money are (just as we tell pollsters) the main explanation for our civic disengagement. However, finding sufficient evidence to convict (or acquit) these suspects—that we have less time for friends, neighbors, and civic affairs simply because we’re running harder than ever to keep up economically—turns out to be unexpectedly difficult. Because of crosscurrents in the relevant evidence, I ask the reader to withhold final judgment on this interpretation until the end of this chapter.
First, it is not at all clear whether, in the aggregate, Americans are working harder than our parents did at the height of the civic boom in the 1960s. Economists Ellen McGrattan and Richard Rogerson report that in the aggregate, “the number of weekly hours of market work per person in the United States has been roughly constant since World War II,” a half century during which (as we have seen) civic engagement first ballooned and then shriveled.2 Beneath this aggregate stability there have been important shifts in the distribution of paid work, from men to women and from older to younger people. Men as a whole spent fewer hours in paid work in the 1990s than in the 1950s. In particular, men over fifty-five have far more leisure time today, mainly because of early retirement, some of it involuntary. Clearly women work more hours outside the home now than thirty years ago, a development we shall address in more detail later. Whether men and women who are in the labor force are working longer now than a generation ago is a matter of debate among economists, but probably the best guess is that there has not been much change. Time diary studies suggest that nonwork time burdens have been reduced, including housework and (since we have fewer children today) child care. In fact, John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey report a 6.2-hour-per-week gain in free time between 1965 and 1995 for the average American—4.5 hours for women and 7.9 hours for men—due mostly to less housework and earlier retirement.3
The Robinson-Godbey claim that Americans have more leisure time now than several decades ago is contested by other observers, but there is surely no evidence that we have less. Harris polls have found that the median time that Americans say we have “available to relax, watch TV, take part in sports or hobbies, go swimming or skiing, go to the movies, theater, concerts, or other forms of entertainment, get together with friends, and so forth” has remained rock-steady at nineteen to twenty hours per week over the last quarter century. (Time diary studies suggest that we actually have up to twice that much free time.) Despite somewhat conflicting evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that the last three decades have seen no general decline in free time in America that might explain civic disengagement.4 In fact, there may well have been a significant net increase in leisure time over these years. Before releasing the suspect, however, we need to identify specifically how the gains and losses in free time have been distributed.
First, much of the new “free time” has come in forms that are not easily convertible to civic engagement. Some of it has come in a thousand scattered moments amid a harried schedule and some of it in large, involuntary chunks to older men forced to take early retirement. Second, all sides in the debates about work hours agree that less educated Americans have gained free time, whereas their college-educated counterparts, for the most part, have lost it. The hours-per-week edge of college-educated Americans over high school dropouts lengthened from six hours in 1969 to thirteen hours in 1998. As Robinson and Godbey note, the “working class” has less work and the “leisure class” less leisure. Third, dual-career families are more common and are spending more time at work than they used to: married couples average fourteen more hours at work each week in 1998 than 1969. In other words, for that segment of society—well-educated middle-class parents—whose energies historically provided a disproportionate share of the community infrastructure, the time bind is real. Perhaps we’ve witnessed a redistribution of free time from people (mostly younger, more educated women) who would have invested it in community engagement toward people (mostly older, less educated men) more likely to consume it privately.5
Finally, even if all of us have enough free hours to invest in community activities, my free hours are not necessarily the same hours as yours, so coordinating schedules has become more burdensome. That interpretation is consistent with the fact noted earlier that collective forms of civic engagement have declined more rapidly than individual forms.6
Two additional streams of evidence, however, are not entirely consistent with this “hassle” theory of civic disengagement. First, heavy time demands are not associated with lessened involvement in civic life, even among people with identical levels of education and income. Quite the reverse: Employed people are more active civically and socially than those outside the paid labor force, and among workers, longer hours are often linked to more civic engagement, not less. People who report the heaviest time pressure are more likely, not less likely, to participate in community projects, to attend church and club meetings, to follow politics, to spend time visiting friends, to entertain at home, and the like.7 Contrary to standard economic theory, one study has found that people with longer paid work hours are actually more likely to volunteer, and people with two jobs are likelier to volunteer than people with only one. In an exhaustive study of the determinants of participation, political scientist Sidney Verba and his colleagues found that the amount of free time a person has seems to have little or no effect on whether he or she becomes civically active or not. Just about the only social activity that busy, harried people engage in less than other people is dinner with their families.8
The positive correlation between civic activity and work hours certainly does not mean that working longer causes greater civic involvement. We all know that the way to get something done is to give it to a busy person. One reason that some of us are harried is precisely that we are civically engaged. Neither fact implies that if we became even busier (by work
ing much longer hours, for example), we would also become more involved in community life, since at some point the twenty-four-hour constraint would become binding. On the other hand, evidence shows that hard work does not prevent civic engagement. Time diary studies show that, unsurprisingly, people who spend more time at work do feel more rushed, and these harried souls do spend less time eating, sleeping, reading books, engaging in hobbies, and just doing nothing. Compared with the rest of the population, they also spend a lot less time watching television—almost 30 percent less. However, they do not spend less time on organizational activity.9 In short, those who are always on the run forgo ER before the Red Cross and Friends before friends. Busy people tend to forgo the one activity—TV watching—that is (as we shall see in chapter 13) most lethal to community involvement.
A second reason for doubting that the hecticness of contemporary life explains much of the decline in civic involvement is that the civic decline is virtually as steep among those who feel least harried as among those who feel most harried. The falloff in civic and social involvement is perfectly mirrored among full-time workers, among part-time workers, and among those outside the paid labor force. Even among the one-third of the American population who report that they have “a lot of spare time,” church attendance has dropped by 15–20 percent, clubgoing by 30 percent, and entertaining friends by 35 percent over the last two decades.10 If people are dropping out of community life, long hours and hectic schedules cannot be the sole reason. Although these may be contributing factors, especially for the sorts of people who have historically borne a disproportionate share of the organizational burden in America, they are certainly not the sole cause.
IF TIME PRESSURE is not the main culprit we seek, how about financial pressures? Several important clues point in this direction. First, financial anxieties clearly rose over the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the early 1970s inflation triggered by the Vietnam War plus two massive global oil shocks brought down the curtain on the ebullient economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. In biblical fashion, two fat and happy decades were followed by two lean and nervous decades. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s financial anxieties mounted among Americans of all walks of life, and even the recovery of the 1990s did not erase the pervasive uneasiness left by those two decades. In early 1975, at the bottom of the most serious recession in forty years, 74 percent of Americans still said that “our family income is high enough to satisfy nearly all our important desires,” but by 1999, despite eight uninterrupted years of growth, that very same barometer of economic satisfaction had fallen to 61 percent.11 In the midst of the boom of the 1990s, Americans remained more troubled and skittish economically than we had been thirty years earlier, perhaps because our material aspirations had expanded in the meantime.12
It is also true that financial worries and economic troubles have a profoundly depressing effect on social involvement, both formal and informal. As we saw in chapter 3, the Great Depression triggered the only significant interruption in the rising tide of civic participation and social connectedness during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Contrary to expectations that unemployment would radicalize its victims, social psychologists found that the jobless became passive and withdrawn, socially as well as politically.13 As my economic situation becomes more dire, my focus narrows to personal and family survival. People with lower incomes and those who feel financially strapped are much less engaged in all forms of social and community life than those who are better off. For example, even comparing people with identical levels of income and education, men and women in the financially most worried third of the population attend only two-thirds as many club meetings as people in the least worried third of the population.14
Financial anxiety is associated not merely with less frequent moviegoing—perhaps the natural consequence of a thinner wallet—but also with less time spent with friends, less card playing, less home entertaining, less frequent attendance at church, less volunteering, and less interest in politics. Even social activities with little or no financial cost are inhibited by financial distress. In fact, the only leisure activity positively correlated with financial anxiety is watching TV. Furthermore, when we combine financial worries, income, and education to predict various forms of civic engagement and social connectedness, income itself becomes insignificant. In other words, it is not low income per se, but the financial worry that it engenders, that inhibits social engagement. Even among the well-to-do, a sense of financial vulnerability dampens community involvement.
This bill of particulars is powerful.15 Economic hard times lower our incomes, raise our debt levels, and make our jobs more precarious (and perhaps more demanding). Stress rises, and civic engagement falls. The case seems open and shut. However, the defense has some strong counterevidence. First, the decline in civic engagement in its various forms appears to have begun before the economic troubles of the 1970s, and the decline continued unabated during the booms of the mid-1980s and late 1990s. The economy went up and down and up and down, but social capital only went down.
Second, the declines in engagement and connectedness are virtually as great among the affluent segments of the American public as among the poor and middle-income wage earners, with very little sign that disengagement is concentrated among those who have borne the brunt of the economic distress of the last two decades. For example, among the third of the U.S. population least troubled by financial worries, attendance at club meetings fell from thirteen times per year to six times per year, while among the most troubled financially, the decline was from nine times per year to four times per year. Even among the fortunate one in every eighteen Americans who avows that his family “definitely” has “more to spend on extras than most of our neighbors do,” the pace of entertaining at home fell from seventeen times per year in 1975 to ten times per year in 1999, while their annual club attendance was falling from thirteen to five.16 Economic good fortune has not guaranteed continued civic engagement.
Some observers of trends in social capital argue that its decline in the last twenty years has been concentrated among the more “marginalized” sectors of the population.17 Others, by contrast, blame civic disengagement on an AWOL, self-centered, upper-middle-class elite who have abandoned their traditional civic responsibilities.18 The balance of evidence, in my opinion, speaks against both those views, for the central fact is that by virtually all measures of civic disengagement and all measures of socioeconomic status, the trends are very similar at all levels. Examined with a microscope, the dropouts may be faintly greater among the financially distressed, but the differences are slight and inconsistent.19 Certainly the comfortable are not dropping out more rapidly than the afflicted, but neither are they dropping out much less.
Holding both real income and financial satisfaction constant (a trick done more easily in the statistical world than in the real world) does little to attenuate the fall in civic engagement and social connectedness. At most, the spread of financial anxiety might account for 5–10 percent of the total decline in church attendance, club membership, home entertaining, and the like.20 Neither objective nor subjective economic well-being has inoculated Americans against the virus of civic disengagement. Pressures of time and money are supporting actors in our mystery story, but neither is easily cast in the lead.
THE MOVEMENT OF WOMEN out of the home into the paid labor force is the most portentous social change of the last half century. The fraction of women who work outside the home doubled from fewer than one in three in the 1950s to nearly two in three in the 1990s. On average, women are spending roughly one more hour per day in paid labor in the 1990s than in the 1960s, and since there are only twenty-four hours in a day, something had to give. Most, if not all, of that additional time at work was recouped by cutting back on household chores and child care, but it seems plausible that the cutbacks also affected community involvement.21 Most of our mothers were homemakers, and most of them invested heavily in social-capital formatio
n—a jargony way of referring to countless unpaid hours in church suppers, PTA meetings, neighborhood kaffeeklatsches, and visits to friends and relatives. However welcome and overdue the feminist revolution may be, it is hard to believe that it has had no impact on social connectedness. Could this be the primary reason for the decline of social capital over the last generation?
Getting a job outside the home has two opposing effects on community involvement—it increases opportunity for making new connections and getting involved, while at the same time it decreases time available for exploring those opportunities.
Generally speaking, people active in the workforce are more involved in community life. The role of housewife is often socially isolating. Homemakers belong to different types of groups from those working women belong to (more PTAs, for example, and fewer professional associations), but in the aggregate working women belong to slightly more voluntary associations. Earlier in the twentieth century, men belonged to more civic and professional organizations and took a more active role in public life, but that sex difference has faded as women have moved into the paid workforce.22
The “public involvement” gap has narrowed downward over the last several decades, as activities like working for a political party or serving as a local organizational leader have faded more rapidly among men than among women, some of whom had only recently entered work-related circles of influence. While the number of men running for public office fell by about one-quarter between 1974 and 1994, the number of female candidates actually rose over these years, sharply narrowing the gender gap, at least at the local level.23 Similarly, even though membership in the bar association has lagged behind the growth of lawyers, more women lawyers has meant relatively more women active in the bar association. In this sense, the movement of women toward professional equality has tended to increase their civic involvement.
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