BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  It is difficult to overstate the symbiosis between the automobile and the suburb. We went from a society of one car per household in 1969 to nearly two cars per household in 1995, even though the size of the average household was shrinking over this period. Between 1973 and 1996 the fraction of Americans describing a second automobile as “a necessity,” not “a luxury,” nearly doubled from 20 percent to 37 percent. By 1990 America had more cars than drivers. Much of this change has occurred quite recently. As late as 1985 only 55 percent of all new single-family homes included space for two or more cars, but by 1998 that index of automotive dominance was 79 percent and rising.20

  Suburbanization of the last thirty years has increased not only our financial investment in the automobile, but also our investment of time. Between 1969 and 1995, according to government surveys of vehicle usage, the length of the average trip to work increased by 26 percent, while the average shopping trip increased by 29 percent. While the number of commuting trips per household rose 24 percent over this quarter century, the number of shopping trips per household almost doubled, and the number of other trips for personal or family business more than doubled. And each trip was much more likely to be made alone, for the average vehicle occupancy fell from 1.9 in 1977 to 1.6 in 1995; for trips to and from work, the average occupancy fell from 1.3 to 1.15. (Since vehicle occupancy cannot fall below 1.0, these figures represent a decline of a third in passenger occupancy for all trips and a decline of 50 percent in passenger commuting.)

  One inevitable consequence of how we have come to organize our lives spatially is that we spend measurably more of every day shuttling alone in metal boxes among the vertices of our private triangles. American adults average seventy-two minutes every day behind the wheel, according to the Department of Transportation’s Personal Transportation Survey. This is, according to time diary studies, more than we spend cooking or eating and more than twice as much as the average parent spends with the kids. Private cars account for 86 percent of all trips in America, and two-thirds of all car trips are made alone, a fraction that has been rising steadily.

  Commuting accounts for little more than one-quarter of all personal trips, but for the structure of the lives of working Americans it is the single most important trip of the day. (The number of people who work at home has risen, but the proportion remains tiny—less than 4 percent of the workforce in 1997 worked even one day a week at home. In any event, home-based workers drive as much as conventional workers, more trips to the mall offsetting fewer trips to work.) Over the last two or three decades driving alone has become overwhelmingly the dominant mode of travel to work for most Americans. The fraction of us who travel to work in a private vehicle rose from 61 percent in 1960 to 91 percent in 1995, while all other forms of commuting—public transit, walking, and so on—declined. Mass transit plays a small and declining role in the transportation of most metropolitan areas nationwide; in 1995, 3.5 percent of all commuting trips were on mass transit. Carpooling too has fallen steadily for more than two decades. The fraction of all commuters who carpool has been cut in half since the mid-1970s and is projected to reach only 7–8 percent by 2000. The bottom line: By the end of the 1990s, 80–90 percent of all Americans drove to work alone, up from 64 percent as recently as 1980.

  We are also commuting farther. From 1960 to 1990 the number of workers who commute across county lines more than tripled. Between 1983 and 1995 the average commuting trip grew 37 percent longer in miles. Ironically, travel time increased by only 14 percent, because the speed of the average commute, by all modes of transportation combined, increased by nearly one-quarter. Three factors have made for faster travel, at least in the recent past— the switch from carpools and mass transit to single-occupancy vehicles, which are quicker for the individual worker though socially inefficient; the increase in suburb-to-suburb commuting; and greater flexibility in work hours. On the other hand, traffic congestion has metastasized everywhere. In a study of sixty-eight urban areas from Los Angeles to Corpus Christi to Cleveland to Providence, annual congestion-related delay per driver rose steadily from sixteen hours in 1982 to forty-five hours per driver in 1997.21

  In short, we are spending more and more time alone in the car. And on the whole, many of us see this as a time for quiet relaxation, especially those of us who came of age in the midst of this driving boom. According to one survey in 1997, 45 percent of all drivers—61 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty-four, though only 36 percent of those aged fifty-five and over—agreed that “driving is my time to think and enjoy being alone.”22

  The car and the commute, however, are demonstrably bad for community life. In round numbers the evidence suggests that each additional ten minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 percent— fewer public meetings attended, fewer committees chaired, fewer petitions signed, fewer church services attended, less volunteering, and so on. In fact, although commuting time is not quite as powerful an influence on civic involvement as education, it is more important than almost any other demographic factor. And time diary studies suggest that there is a similarly strong negative effect of commuting time on informal social interaction.23

  Strikingly, increased commuting time among the residents of a community lowers average levels of civic involvement even among noncommuters. In fact, the “civic penalty” associated with high-commute communities is almost as great for retired residents and others who are outside the workforce as for full-time workers, and virtually as great for weekend church attendance as for involvement in secular organizations. In other words, this appears to be a classic “synergistic effect,” in which the consequences of individual actions spill beyond the individuals in question. In the language of economists, commuting has negative externalities.

  This otherwise puzzling fact is actually an important clue that it is not simply time spent in the car itself, but also spatial fragmentation between home and workplace, that is bad for community life. Lexington, Massachusetts, for example, has been transformed over the last fifty years from a Middlesex country town to a bedroom suburb for MIT, Harvard, and the high-tech suburbs along route 128. Though still a pleasant place in which to live, it is less self-sufficient civically than it was when most residents worked in town. Now that most residents commute out each day, many civic organizations have fallen on harder times, a fact that affects even those residents who still do work in town. Moreover, work-based ties now compete with place-based ties rather than reinforcing them. If your co-workers come from all over the metropolitan area, you must choose—spend an evening with neighbors or spend an evening with colleagues. (Of course, tired from a harried commute, you may well decide to just stay at home by yourself.) In short, sprawl is a collective bad, both for commuters and for stay-at-homes.

  To be sure, suburbs, automobiles, and the associated sprawl are not without benefits. Americans chose to move to the suburbs and to spend more time driving, presumably because we found the greater space, larger homes, lower-cost shopping and housing—and perhaps, too, the greater class and racial segregation—worth the collective price we have paid in terms of community. On the other hand, DDB Needham Life Style survey data on locational preferences suggest that during the last quarter of the twentieth century—the years of rapid suburbanization—suburban living gradually became less attractive compared to residence in either the central city or smaller towns.24 Whatever our private preferences, however, metropolitan sprawl appears to have been a significant contributor to civic disengagement over the last three or four decades for at least three distinct reasons.

  First, sprawl takes time. More time spent alone in the car means less time for friends and neighbors, for meetings, for community projects, and so on. Though this is the most obvious link between sprawl and disengagement, it is probably not the most important.

  Second, sprawl is associated with increasing social segregation, and social homogeneity appears to reduce incentives for civic involvement, as well as opportunities for
social networks that cut across class and racial lines. Sprawl has been especially toxic for bridging social capital.

  Third, most subtly but probably most powerfully, sprawl disrupts community “boundedness.” Commuting time is important in large part as a proxy for the growing separation between work and home and shops. More than three decades ago, when (we now know in retrospect) civic engagement was at full flood, political scientists Sidney Verba and Norman Nie showed that residents of “well-defined and bounded” communities were much more likely to be involved in local affairs. In fact, Verba and Nie found commuting itself to be a powerful negative influence on participation. Presciently, they wrote that “communities that appear to foster participation—the small and relatively independent communities—are becoming rarer and rarer.”25 Three decades later this physical fragmentation of our daily lives has had a visible dampening effect on community involvement.

  The residents of large metropolitan areas incur a “sprawl civic penalty” of roughly 20 percent on most measures of community involvement. More and more of us have come to incur this penalty over the last thirty years. Coupled with the suburbanization of the American population represented in figure 52, the direct civic penalty associated with sprawl probably accounts for something less than one-tenth of the total disengagement outlined in section II of this book.26 It, like the pressures of time and money, helps explain our national civic disengagement. Yet it cannot account for more than a small fraction of the decline, for civic disengagement is perfectly visible in smaller towns and rural areas as yet untouched by sprawl. Our roundup of suspects is not yet complete.

  CHAPTER 13

  Technology and Mass Media

  WHEN THE HISTORY of the twentieth century is written with greater perspective than we now enjoy, the impact of technology on communications and leisure will almost surely be a major theme. At the beginning of the century the communications and entertainment industries hardly existed outside small publishing houses and music halls. The first quarter of the century had nearly passed before the term mass media was invented. At the end of the century, by contrast, the gradual merger of the massive telecommunications and entertainment industries had become the very foundation for a new economic era.

  Among the effects of this century-long transformation, two are especially relevant here. First, news and entertainment have become increasingly individualized. No longer must we coordinate our tastes and timing with others in order to enjoy the rarest culture or the most esoteric information. In 1900 music lovers needed to sit with scores of other people at fixed times listening to fixed programs, and if they lived in small towns as most Americans did, the music was likely to be supplied by enthusiastic local amateurs.* In 2000, with my hi-fi Walkman CD, wherever I live I can listen to precisely what I want when I want and where I want. As late as 1975 Americans nationwide chose among a handful of television programs. Barely a quarter century later, cable, satellite, video, and the Internet provide an exploding array of individual choice.

  Second, electronic technology allows us to consume this hand-tailored entertainment in private, even utterly alone. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, low-cost entertainment was available primarily in public settings, like the baseball park, the dance hall, the movie theater, and the amusement park, although by the 1930s radio was rapidly becoming an important alternative, the first of a series of electronic inventions that would transform American leisure. In the last half of the century television and its offspring moved leisure into the privacy of our homes. As the poet T. S. Eliot observed early in the television age, “It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”1 The artifice of canned laughter reflected both the enduring fact that mirth is enhanced by companionship and the novel fact that companionship could now be simulated electronically. At an accelerating pace throughout the century, the electronic transmission of news and entertainment changed virtually all features of American life.

  The pace of this transformation was astonishing, even by the standards of modern technology. Table 2 shows the speed at which a range of modern appliances diffused into American households during the twentieth century.2 Those that provided electronic entertainment—radio, the video recorder, and, above all, television—spread into homes at all levels in American society five to ten times more quickly than other devices that are now nearly as ubiquitous. Even more than the automobile, these innovations are transforming how we spend our days. In this chapter we investigate whether they are implicated in the erosion of America’s social capital, as well.

  ALTHOUGH MODERN MEDIA offer both information and entertainment, they increasingly blur the line between the two—it is important from the point of view of civic engagement to treat the two somewhat separately.

  Table 2: Pace of Introduction of Selected Consumer Goods

  Technological Invention

  Household Penetration Begins (1 Percent)

  Years to Reach 75 Percent of American Households

  Telephone

  1890

  67

  Automobile

  1908

  52

  Vacuum cleaner

  1913

  48

  Air conditioner

  1952

  ~48

  Refrigerator

  1925

  23

  Radio

  1923

  14

  VCR

  1980

  12

  Television

  1948

  7

  The first means of mass communication and entertainment, of course, was not electronic, but the printed word and, above all, the newspaper. Alexis de Tocqueville saw clearly the importance of mass communication for civic engagement:

  When no firm and lasting ties any longer unite men, it is impossible to obtain the cooperation of any great number of them unless you can persuade every man whose help is required that he serves his private interests by voluntarily uniting his efforts to those of all the others. That cannot be done habitually and conveniently without the help of a newspaper. Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers…. So hardly any democratic association can carry on without a newspaper.3

  Nearly two centuries later newspaper readership remains a mark of substantial civic engagement. Newspaper readers are older, more educated, and more rooted in their communities than is the average American. Even holding age, education, and rootedness constant, however, those who read the news are more engaged and knowledgeable about the world than those who only watch the news. Compared to demographically identical nonreaders, regular newspaper readers belong to more organizations, participate more actively in clubs and civic associations, attend local meetings more frequently, vote more regularly, volunteer and work on community projects more often, and even visit with friends more frequently and trust their neighbors more.4 Newspaper readers are machers and schmoozers.

  Without controlled experiments, we can’t be certain which causes which. Virtually all nonexperimental studies of the media find it hard to distinguish between “selection effects” (people with a certain trait seek out a particular medium) and “media effects” (people develop that trait by being exposed to that medium). We shall have to grapple with that analytic problem repeatedly in this chapter. Nevertheless, the evidence makes quite clear that newspaper reading and good citizenship go together.

  We should probably not be altogether surprised, therefore, that newspaper readership has been plunging in recent decades, along with most other measures of social capital and civic engagement. In 1948, when the median American adult had nine years of formal schooling, daily newspaper circulation was 1.3 papers per household. That is, a half century ago the average American family read more than one newspaper a day. Fifty years later schooling had risen by 50 percent, but newspaper readership had fallen by 57 percent, despite the fact that newspaper reading is highly co
rrelated with education.5

  Newspaper reading is a lasting habit established early in adult life. If we start young, we generally continue. Virtually none of the precipitous decline in newspaper circulation over the last half century can be traced to declining readership by individuals. Virtually all of the decline is due to the by now familiar pattern of generational succession. As figure 53 shows, three out of every four Americans born in the first third of the twentieth century continue to read a daily newspaper as the century closes, just as that generation did decades ago. Fewer than half of their boomer children are carrying on the tradition, however, a fraction that has dwindled to one in four among their X’er grandchildren. Since more recent cohorts show no sign of becoming newspaper readers as they age, circulation continues to plunge as the generation of readers is replaced by the generation of nonreaders.6 Reversing that slump will not be easy, since each year the ground is slipping away beneath our feet.

  One might imagine that the explanation for this trend is simple: TV. We’re now watching news, not reading it. The facts, however, are more complicated. Americans have not simply shifted their news consumption from the printed page to the glowing screen. In fact, Americans who watch the news on television are more likely to read the daily newspaper than are other Americans, not less likely.7 In the lingo of economics, TV news and the daily newspaper are complements, not substitutes. Some of us are newshounds, and some are not.

  It is not just newspaper readership, but interest in the news per se that is declining generationally. As figure 54 shows, when people are asked whether they “need to get the news (world, national, sports, and so on) every day,” the answer turns out to depend on when they were born. A more or less steady two-thirds