BOWLING ALONE
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Based on years of studying inner-city Philadelphia, the urban ethnographer Elijah Anderson also has documented a steady erosion in the “moral cohesion” of low-income neighborhoods. He, too, links the decline of social capital to the exodus of financial and human capital. The departure of middle-class blacks, he concludes, “has diminished an extremely important source of moral and social leadership within the black community.” Meanwhile the senior statesmen and stateswomen of the neighborhood—the “old heads,” as Anderson calls them—have stuck around, but their numbers are dwindling, and they have lost their moral authority. The male “old head” was “a man of stable means who was strongly committed to family life, to church, and, most important, to passing on his philosophy, developed through his own rewarding experience with work, to young boys he found worthy.” He has “been losing prestige and credibility as a role model” as legitimate jobs have disappeared and illicit economic activity has proved highly lucrative. At the same time, the community “mothers,” who once occupied porch stoops and served as the neighborhood’s eyes and ears, have become “overwhelmed by a virtual proliferation of ‘street kids’—children almost totally without parental supervision, left to their own devices.” These women no longer enjoy the informal permission they once had to intervene on behalf of neighbors. “As family caretakers and role models disappear or decline in influence, and as unemployment and poverty become more persistent,” Anderson concludes, “the community, particularly its children, becomes vulnerable to a variety of social ills, including crime, drugs, family disorganization, generalized demoralization, and unemployment.”17
People who live and work in inner cities recognize the people and processes that Anderson describes. Moreover, it is not only in minority and impoverished neighborhoods that social-capital deficits lead to crime and other social pathologies. Anderson’s ground-level insights about how social capital underpins healthy neighborhoods have been quantified in scores of sophisticated analyses of neighborhood and individual data.
One of the best is a widely noted study of Chicago neighborhoods by Robert J. Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush, and Felton Earls. Based on extensive survey and crime data, the study found that two characteristics—mutual trust and altruism among neighbors, and their willingness to intervene when they see children misbehaving—went a long way to explain why some neighborhoods are less crime prone than are others. Indeed, a neighborhood’s “collective efficacy” was a better predictor than was its poverty or residential instability of whether a person is likely to be victimized in the neighborhood. In this Chicago study other measures of social capital—such as individual participation in local organizations, number of neighborhood-based programs, and extent of kin and friendship ties in the neighborhood—didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Rather, the authors conclude, “Reductions in violence appear to be more directly attributable to informal social control and cohesion among residents.”18
An earlier study by Sampson and W. Byron Groves found that organizational participation and social ties did make a difference in reducing crime levels. Their analysis of British crime data found that in areas where people are connected through tight bonds of friendship and looser yet more diverse acquaintanceship ties, and where people are active in local committees and clubs, there are fewer muggings, assaults, burglaries, auto thefts, and so forth.19 What is most interesting about this research is its finding that traditional neighborhood “risk factors”—such as high poverty and residential mobility—may not be as big a part of the crime problem as most people assume. Sampson and Groves’s analysis suggests that while poorer, less stable areas do have substantially higher rates of street robbery, this is not simply because of poverty and instability per se. Rather, these places have higher crime rates in large part because adults don’t participate in community organizations, don’t supervise teenagers, and aren’t linked through networks of friends. Similarly, a study of a dozen New York neighborhoods found that participation in community organizations helped to lessen the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage on juvenile delinquency.20 Put another way, young people rob and steal not only because they are poor, but also because adult networks and institutions have broken down.
Just as neighborhoods can affect families, so can families affect neighborhoods. In economists’ terms, family social capital has “positive externalities,” spilling out of the home and into the streets. In Northern California scholars have found that the presence of lots of stable families in a neighborhood is associated with lower levels of youthful lawbreaking, not because the adults serve as role models or supervisors, but because the adults rear well-adjusted and well-behaved kids. Thus “good families” have a ripple effect by increasing the pool of “good peers” that other families’ kids can befriend.21 If we think of youthful troublemaking as a communicable disease—a sort of behavioral chicken pox that spreads through high schools and friendship groups—then stable families provide the vaccines that reduce the number of contagious kids capable of infecting others.
Yet the integration of families into neighborhoods may not always be beneficial. If the neighborhood norms and networks are at odds with what ethnographer Anderson calls “decent” values,22 then families who become enmeshed in the community may run afoul of their own better natures. One study of Northern California high school students found that the extent to which parents knew their child’s friends, and knew the parents of those friends, was a strong indicator of the child’s classroom engagement and refusal to use alcohol and drugs. But such positive effects of “parents knowing parents” were found only in areas where school engagement and substance abuse were not a problem. In areas where students were more troubled, the social integration of parents actually exacerbated the problems of living in a community with poorly adjusted peers.23 In other words, social integration into a community of bad actors may not produce good results.
Inner-city gangs might also be seen as a misguided attempt at neighborhood-based social capital building in areas where constructive institutions are sadly lacking. Although experts agree that gangs are hard to identify and even harder to count, most evidence suggests that their numbers are growing.24 Some of these gangs are hierarchical enterprises whose sole business is business, especially marketing drugs and guns. But other gangs are closer to mutual aid societies based on horizontal bonds of interpersonal trust, reciprocity, and friendship that is defended to the death.25 In many cases gang members are tolerated and well integrated into the mainstream community.26
In her excellent study of Latino gangs in Chicago, Ruth Horowitz describes the extensive social capital that existed within them:
The Lions have been together as a group for almost ten years and during that time there has been a continual exchange, both individual and collective, of goods, services, and personal information. Small exchanges have occurred continuously but the larger obligations often take years to fulfill. The constant lending of money or buying of rounds of beer provides a daily continuity of social relationships and the flow of exchanges. Whoever has cash pays for the beer; no questions are asked, no accounts are recorded. The same is true of small loans and meals. The more serious mutual obligations, such as owing someone for help in an ongoing struggle for precedence or for going to jail without revealing the names of the other participants, are often continued over an extended period.27
A former Los Angeles gang member, Sanyika Shakur, explained such long-term obligations in the language of the streets: “If you are in this ’hood, and you leave and …are successful, you’re obligated. You have double indemnity: you have the cultural obligation, and … you have the ’hood obligation…. So, the cultural obligation: If you don’t come back and … contribute, you’ll get your ‘guild pass’ revoked. Then you have the responsibility for the ’hood thing, which can get you murdered if you don’t come back.”28
The reciprocal obligations described in these accounts of gang life represent, I must underline, forms of social capital. In many re
spects these networks and norms of reciprocity serve the interests of the members in much the same way that social capital embodied in bowling teams helps their members. The purposes to which gang solidarity are directed are, however, typically more harmful to bystanders. This example reminds us that not all the external effects of social capital are beneficial.
Other students of gang activity have suggested that gangs represent an important social institution in neighborhoods where young men have little chance of connecting with wider society29 and where other “mainstream” institutions, such as neighborhood associations and fraternal societies, are debilitated or absent.30 Gang members have been used by ward politicians as soldiers in political organizing,31 by organized crime syndicates as entry-level employees in illicit enterprises,32 and by community groups as sources of volunteer labor, money, and protection.33 The latter point is particularly telling. One study of women activists in Washington, D.C., public-housing developments found that drug gangs were important benefactors, providing crucial money for children’s after-school programs that the women were organizing. One activist invited the drug dealers to tour her fledgling children’s center, and they reciprocated by putting out the word that the woman’s organizing was to go forward without any trouble from the street toughs.34 In short, even as they sell drugs and carry out violent wars on the streets, gangs represent a form of social capital, providing networks of reciprocity, charity, organizing, and social control—albeit on their own, often destructive, terms. Where constructive social capital and institutions are allowed to wither, gangs emerge to fill the void.
All this is not to suggest that America’s inner cities lack constructive forms of social capital. American ghettos are far more diverse than is commonly appreciated. Most residents work; most families are not on welfare; most teenagers are in school.35 And ethnographers of minority communities, especially in American cities, have found rich spiritual and emotional networks that sustain people stung by economic dislocations and the indifference of “mainstream” white institutions. More than two decades ago Carol Stack’s classic study, All Our Kin, introduced white America to the elaborate and nurturing support networks developed by the black families of “the Flats,” an inner-city neighborhood in the Midwest. Most of the people Stack met and lived among for three years were second-generation northerners. Most were single women raising children, and most were on public assistance. Stack discovered numerous “alliances of individuals trading and exchanging goods, resources, and the care of children.” She was impressed by “the intensity of their acts of domestic cooperation, and the exchange of goods and services among these persons, both kin and non-kin.”36
Although students of urban life frequently note the high level of distrust that exists among the urban poor, Stack countered that residents of the Flats must have high levels of trust to maintain their exchange networks, since a gift is rarely repaid right away. And far from being disorganized, Stack argued, inner cities are (or at least were then) marked by well-organized, though often invisible, networks of altruism and obligation.37 These networks took the form of extended, socially constructed, and well-recognized “kin groups,” made up of one’s relatives, one’s romantic partners and their family members, one’s friends, and the family members and friends of one’s friends. Stack noted how the urban poor, knowing that they cannot make it on their own, are constantly seeking to expand their network. Network members might provide child care, cash assistance, temporary shelter, and other forms of assistance. Meanwhile members of the network monitored one another for evidence of shirking, imposing strong sanctions against those who take more than they give. In sum, the Flats offered a richly textured depiction of a wealth of social capital among the struggling poor.38
Unfortunately, more recent studies suggest that inner-city social networks are not nearly as dense or effective as those Stack found in the late 1960s,39 for like the sprawling suburbs and small villages in the heartland, inner cities too have less social capital nowadays than they once did. Where these reciprocity systems persist, however, they remain an important asset to poor people, an asset that is too often overlooked in popular accounts of the urban underclass.
In short, social capital is a good thing, far more often than not, for disadvantaged neighbors. In areas where social capital is lacking, the effects of poverty, adult unemployment, and family breakdown are magnified, making life that much worse for children and adults alike. As we have seen, there is preliminary yet intriguing evidence that social trust, organizational participation, and neighborhood cohesion can help to break the link between economic disadvantage and teenage troublemaking. The problem, of course, is that social capital is often lacking in disadvantaged areas, and it is difficult to build. A review of “neighborhood crime watch” programs found that they are most likely to succeed in areas where they are least needed—middle-class, stable neighborhoods that already benefit from social trust and networks of association.40 Instead of a “virtuous circle,” in which existing social capital facilitates the creation of more social capital, inner cities are too often marked by a vicious circle, in which low levels of trust and cohesion lead to higher levels of crime, which lead to even lower levels of trust and cohesion. Social-capital-intensive strategies may help to “unwind” this negative spiral, but they are challenging strategies to pursue.
During the 1980s, under the rubric of “community policing,” police departments across the country began to implement a kind of “applied social capitalism,” seeking to fight crime by building working partnerships between law enforcement officials and community residents. Some evidence suggests that community policing does reduce social disorder and crime, at least in part through the creation and activation of local social capital. Evaluating the Chicago experiment in community policing, the so-called Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS), Wesley Skogan and Susan Harnett report that “by creating relatively uniform opportunities for participation, CAPS took the first step toward mobilizing wider participation among all segments of the community.” Similarly, Jenny Berrien and Christopher Winship report promising results from Boston’s 10-Point Coalition, a working partnership between the police and the public, brokered by local ministers. Only these local ministers, they argue, had the connections and trust within the community—the social capital—to make the strategy work. One reason for the drop in crime in America’s big cities in the 1990s may well be that their residents and their leaders have learned to capitalize more effectively on local stocks of social capital, dwindling or not.41
In this chapter we have reviewed some of the most salient evidence that social capital contributes to safe and productive neighborhoods, while its absence hampers efforts at improvement. (Of course, social capital is not the only factor that affects crime rates, so a decline in social capital will lead to a rise in crime only if other relevant factors remain unchanged.) Much of my evidence has been drawn from studies of inner cities and their residents, because for more than a generation scholarly energies have been invested in studying the problems of those settings. In seeking evidence of the impact of social connectedness on community well-being, I have found in this body of literature a wealth of empirical evidence and sensitive interpretation. However, it is worth underlining that had the “culture of suburbia” and the social pathologies of middle-class white communities attracted equal attention, we would be able to draw a more balanced assessment of the impact of social-capital deficits in Grosse Point as well as in the central city of Detroit. There is no reason to suppose that the effects (good and bad) of social capital on neighborhood life are limited to poor or minority communities.
A second reason for emphasizing the role of social capital in poor communities is this: Precisely because poor people (by definition) have little economic capital and face formidable obstacles in acquiring human capital (that is, education), social capital is disproportionately important to their welfare. Thus, while our evidence in sections II and III makes clear that the erosion
of social capital and community engagement has affected Grosse Point in essentially the same degree as inner-city Detroit, the impact of that development has so far been greater in the inner city, which lacks the cushioning of other forms of capital. The shooting sprees that affected schools in suburban and rural communities as the twentieth century ended are a reminder that as the breakdown of community continues in more privileged settings, affluence and education are insufficient to prevent collective tragedy.
CHAPTER 19
Economic Prosperity
JUST AS AREAS HIGH IN SOCIAL CAPITAL are good at maintaining livable spaces, they are also good at getting ahead. A growing body of research suggests that where trust and social networks flourish, individuals, firms, neighborhoods, and even nations prosper.1 What’s more, as we have seen in the previous chapter, social capital can help to mitigate the insidious effects of socioeconomic disadvantage.