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Professor ROBERT PUTNAM (Author, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse &
Revival of American Community"): Well, my theory is that connecting
with other people has great value for us personally and for our
communities. I use the term social capital in the book to refer to
the fact that social networks have value. They have value for the
people who are in them. Most people in America, for example, get
their jobs through them. You know, I did--I did and most people do.
I don't mean that in a nepotistic sense. I just mean we--we learn
about jobs through--through social connections. And there are many
other values to us personally from our social connections. There are
positive effects on health from connecting with other people.

But social connections also have value for people who are not directly
in the networks. If you live in a neighborhood where people know one
another, for example, as I do, that holds down the crime rate in the
neighborhood, even for people who don't themselves go to the barbecues
in the neighborhood; that is, the general effects of social capital,
of social connections spread across the community. They lower crime
rates, they improve performance in schools, they have many positive
effects. And so the theory of the book is that social capital, social
connections, community connections have value for people.

America has historically been blessed with very high levels of social
capital compared to most other countries. We do connect with one
another and that's been an important part of our advantage
historically as a country. And for most of the last century or so
that was more and more true of Americans. We were year by year
connecting more with one another. We were going to meetings more,
belonging to PTA, belong to civic groups, having friends over to the
house, giving more. Our generosity was rising year by year in terms
of the fraction of our income that we gave to other people. And then
somehow mysteriously about, oh, 25 or 30 years ago all of those trends
turned downward and be--we began doing all of those things less,
connecting less with other people, and so this book is about, first of
all, the fact, demonstrating that that's a quite pervasive trend
across American society and then trying to explore why it happened
and--and what difference it makes and--and what we might do about it.

LAMB: "Bowling Alone." Where did you get the title?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, I was doing some work on the question of
membership in various organizations, the fact that people were no
longer belonging to the, you know, Elks Club or the Rotary Club or the
League of Women Voters. And I happened to run into a friend who owned
a bowling alley. And he said, `Gosh, Bob, you don't know it but
you've stumbled on to the major economic problems facing my industry,
because although more Americans are bowling than ever before--bowling
is up in America--bowling leagues, bowling in teams is off by about 60
percent.' And the money it turns out, in bowling, is in the beer and
pretzels. Because when you buy--when you dr--when you--when you bowl
in a league, you drink four times as mer--much beer and you eat four
times as many pretzels. And the money in bowling is in the beer and
pretzels, not in the balls and shoes, so they were in this funny
situation in which he was aware of the fact that people were bowling
more but not bowling in leagues.

And so I thought that captured the fact that we were--we were not
connecting with our friends and neighbors as much as we--as we once
did. And I wanted to get across the idea that it wasn't just in kind
of do-gooding ways that we were not connecting. It wasn't that we
were just no longer voting, although voting is down, as everybody
knows. It wasn't just that we were, you know, no longer belonging to
some kind of organization that does good. But it--it was also that we
were not even connecting in informal ways with our friends and
neighbors. That's why I used the title.

LAMB: There was a time where you panicked...

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah.

LAMB: ...because you had a data problem. What was that?

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah. Well, as--in writing this book, as--as in
writing other books that I've done, I followed a plan of writing an
article in which you sort of lay out where you think you're going and
trying to listen to what people have to say about it. Usually in the
past, since I'm an academic, most of the books that I've written I got
responses from two or three people in response to that initial
article. This time the--the article Bowling Alone happened to get a
lot more attention and so I got letters and comments and so on from
thousands of people and...

LAMB: What year was that? The article?

Prof. PUTNAM: 1995. 1995.

LAMB: In what magazine?

Prof. PUTNAM: A little journal called the Journal of Democracy,
which I think had a total paid circulation of about five people. It
was really very obscure. But the--but the journal--but the article
happened to catch people's attention. I don't know quite why. I have
some suspicions about that, but at any rate it--it caught a lot of
attention and got a lot of positive attention. And--and a lot of
people said, `Gee, but, wait a minute, if you just took a broader
view, maybe things wouldn't look so bleak. Maybe--maybe the things
you looked at are declining but other things are not declining.'

And so I spent some time trying to figure out whether that was true,
whether there actually--whether maybe I overstated the case in that
initial article. And early in that process, I discovered that one of
the data sets that I had been using had a flaw--a technical flaw in
it, not actually one that I had put in it, but it meant that there had
been an undercounting of group memberships. And so al--when you made
a correction for that, although the trends were still down, they
weren't down nearly as much. And so that was a point at which I
thought, `Well, maybe, I really did get carried away with this
original argument in--and maybe the trends really aren't down as much
as I thought.'

LAMB: So how was that d--how did you correct it?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, we were--easy to correct that particular data.
But the main--the larger--just by--by, you know, doing the--doing the
numbers in the--in the proper way, they had forgotten to count PTA
memberships or something in their--in their total count. What--the
more important thing that happened was that we discovered after the
original article--and remember, it--it was--it was intended to be a
kind of preliminary thing--we discovered two massive new archives of
survey evidence whose existence I hadn't even known of before.
Indeed, nobody had known of the--these two massive archives based on
surveys with large numbers of Americans every month in one case, every
year in the other case, since 1975; year after year asking people
about how often they went to meetings and how often they went to club
meetings and how often they volunteered and how often they had friends
over to the house and went on picnics and so on.

And until that point we had no idea that anybody was even gathering
data on picnics. Who knew whether picnics were up or down. But--but
once we had this really amazingly rich evidence, it provides a deep,
kind of like a moving picture of how Americans' social habits have
changed over the course of the--of the last quarter century. And I
was shocked when I discovered that evidence, because what it turned
out was when you took into account--people had said, you know, `If
you--if you take into account a broader range of things, it'll turn
out things are not so bleak.' And I took into account a--a broader
range of things which not--turned out things were even bleaker. Then
I thought it was not just that we were stopping going to meetings. We
still claimed to be members of groups, but we stopped going to
meetings. So we were--we were not showing up. We were not--and we
weren't going to--we weren't involved in other sorts of community
activities. We weren't signing petitions as much as we used to. But
also we weren't having friends over to the house, we weren't going on
picnics, we weren't having dinner parties, we weren't going to
bar--going to bars was down by about 35 to 40 percent. We were not
even having dinner with our own families, this fuller evidence
suggested.

So it turned out once we had the full range of evidence--and that's
what's reported in this book--that the original article was mistaken
only in that it understated the full range in depth and
dread--and--and breadth of these--these kinds of declines in our
connectedness.

LAMB: Where is your neighborhood?

Prof. PUTNAM: I live--well, actually, I'm fortunate. I--we live in
two places. I live in Lexington, Massachusetts. I teach at Harvard
and I live in Lexington, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. It's
a--it's a nice little neighborhood where people do actually have
barbecues and so on. And then we have a--a h--little house up in New
Hampshire where I go when I want to write, and so I--we have friends
and--and local connections there, too.

LAMB: So what's the difference between Frost Pond, New Hampshire, and
Lexington?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, that's a very, very good question, Brian.
In--in the Boston metropolitan area, there are--generally speaking,
people are less connected with one another, with their neighbors, than
they are in a small town. That's true and--specifically of--of
Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where Frost Pond is located. People in--in
Jaffrey all the time know each other by going in to, you know, the
grocery store to get potato salad. They know what kind of potato
salad I want. If I--if I go into the grocery store in--in Lexington,
you know, no one would ever remember who I am. So there are big
differences in the level of social connection. People are more likely
to vote in--in the small town in New Hampshire than they are
in--in--in the Boston area. They're--they're more likely to
volunteer. They're more likely to shovel one another's sn--you know,
walks or whatever. So there are differences that mirror, in fact,
differences nationwide between smaller places and--and--and bigger
urban areas.

But the striking thing is if you compare Jaffrey, New Hampshire,
2000--well, if you compare Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in the year 2000
with Boston in the year 2000, Jaffrey has a lot more social
connections. But if you compare Jaffrey, New Hampshire, 2000 of
Jaffrey 1960, which I can do--which you can do just by talking to
old-timers or--or looking at the newspapers or whatever, there's been
a big decline there, too. In other words, what I'm trying to say is
these--these trends downward in social connections, whether we're
talking about clubs or just having friends over, are true everywhere
across America. This is really an equal opportunity affliction
that's--that's struck our society.

LAMB: Harvard, you teach what?

Prof. PUTNAM: I teach public policy at the Kennedy School of
Government.

LAMB: How long have you done that?

Prof. PUTNAM: I've been about 20 years. Before that I was at the
University of Michigan for a little more than 10 years. And--and
there, too, I've got--I've taught international relations and--and now
American politics.

LAMB: Where did you grow up?

Prof. PUTNAM: I grew up in a little town in Ohio--a little town
called Port Clinton, Ohio. Population then and now 5,000.

LAMB: What was the family like?

Prof. PUTNAM: My family?

LAMB: Mm-hmm.

Prof. PUTNAM: My dad was a--a building contractor. My mom was a
schoolteacher. We'd come there after the war. My dad had been
injured during the war and he was recovering. And I had a--a younger
sister--still do. And it was a--it was a pleasant place to grow up
and a pleasant time to grow up. And, I mean, I--it was a much less,
you know, cosmopolitan place than Harvard or--or the East Coast in
general. But I was really blessed in growing up in a place that had a
lot of social capital. And, frankly, I've--I've spent some time
learning in writing this book about the degree to which what I'm
indulging in here is simple nostalgia for kind of a--of a--of a past
that one wouldn't necessarily today want to re-create. I haven't been
back to Port Clinton for a long time--until I--until just recently I
went back there. And it turns out it still is, in fact, unusually
civic. People do--do connect with one another.

LAMB: You do mention that, in spite of the fact that you find that
people are bowling alone in your own environment, you've got a
tremendous amount of support for this book.

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah. Sure did.

LAMB: And your own daughters worked with you for 10 years.

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah.

LAMB: Tell us about Laura and what--what role she played in this.

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, it's interesting that you ask that question.
Laura is a professional woman. She'd just gotten her PhD at the
University of Michigan in Latin American history. She's married to a
Costa Rican and now lives in Costa Rica and she's got three kids. I'm
extremely proud of her 'cause she's, you know, one of these kind of
super moms who's raising a family and taking care of her mother-in-law
there in Costa Rica and also writing. And we are very close,
personally; have been for a long time. She's been the person who's
been my most severe critic, 'cause we know each other well enough that
she feels free to say things that people might not say, about, `Gee,
that's a dumb way of phrasing that idea or--or I think I would toss
out that chapter entirely.'

And we--at the time I was writing this book, she was also doing her
dissertation and we both happen to be night people. We work--write
late at night, so lots of the time we'd--we'd spend, in the middle of
the night, me at Frost Pond and she in--in Costa Rica and exchanging
e-mails about how--how we were making--how well we were making out
that evening.

LAMB: Does she feel the same way you do about the--the bowling alone
concept?

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah. She does, actually. Absolutely. She's been
very helpful, very helpful, in fact, in getting me to see the trend as
well through the eyes of someone of a different generation. Because
there are such big generational differences in the degree to which
Americans are connected with their communities, and in the ways
that--that they connect with their communities, there's a risk that
someone in, you know, late middle age, my age, may just be blind to
new forms of social connection that were--that are emerging among
younger folks. And I don't want to hold her responsible for any
remaining blind spots, but we did talk a lot, actually as I was
writing it, about, `Well, how would this problem look if it--if it
were--if the book were being written--being written by a--a
20-something or a 30-something rather than a 50-something?'

LAMB: You spent a lot of time on--not a lot of time, you spent a
chapter on television...

Prof. PUTNAM: Right.

LAMB: ...and media and the water cooler effect. What's that?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, the water cooler effect. People say that
if--you know, we all watched "Survivor," we can get together around
the water cooler and that's--that's almost as good connections as--as
if we, you know, were--were connecting over the back fence. But I
don't find any evidence that that's true, actually. I think that
enter--entertainment television, especially commercial entertainment
television, is really lethal for civic connection. I always have to
phrase the point carefully when I'm talking about television to say
commercial entertainment television, because I know from news
statistics, the watchers of C-SPAN and--and--and some of the other
news programs are among the--the most civic people in the America.
They're also on average older than the rest of Americans. And
there--that's--there--they represent really civic America. But,
unfortunately, that's not the--most people in America don't watch
those sorts of programs. Most of them watch, you know, "Survivor" or
"Friends" or--or any one of a number of other television shows. And
those--watching those shows is very negatively correlated with all
forms of social connection, not just the--you know, going to meetings
but even just spending time with your family.

LAMB: There's one statistic--I may not be perfectly accurate on this,
but sixth graders with television sets in their bedroom went from
something like 6 percent in 1977 up to 70 percent in 1997 or whatever.

Prof. PUTNAM: Correct. Yup.

LAMB: What does that say?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, I--I thi--what it says is absolutely that we're
watching television, especially our kids, are watching more television
alone. I actually had not any idea that that trend had occurred
because our--my kids are a little--a little older than that and so
we--that--that happened after we had young kids. And--and I
don't--don't know that we would have been immune to it if our kids had
been that young. I don't want to claim status here as somehow a saint
with respect to television watching. But what it--what the trend
means is that more and more of the time of our kids is spent alone
watching television without anybody else present or certainly without
any adult present. I--I think that--that study that--that--that I
cite in the book comes from the--a Kaiser Family Foundation study
which also, I think, shows that 95 percent of the time that kids are
watching television, their not--their parents are not present.

And that ki--and, by the way, it's just not ki--it's not just kids.
It's adults, too, who are mostly watching television alone. But with
respect to our kids, that can't be a good--that can't be good
actually. And there's another interesting finding recently actually.
Just this spring, the YMCA released a survey in which they had asked
kids, ad--adolescents, `Would you like to spend more time with your
parents or the same amount of time you do spend with your parents or
less time with your parents?' Adolescents, remember. These are kids,
Brian, who don't--you know, adolescents in general are not wanting to
spend a lot of time hanging out with--with Mom and Dad. But, in fact,
two-thirds of American adolescents say they'd like to spend more time
with their parents. What that says to me is that, for a variety of
reasons, we've disengaged from our kids. We're using televisions
as--increasingly a kind of cheap day care. And--and that's, I'm
afraid, laying the groundwork for yet more civic disengagement down
the road.

LAMB: How much did Vietnam and/or Watergate have to do with this
change over the last 25 years?

Prof. PUTNAM: That's--that's a good question. It's--it's not an
easy question to answer because it certainly is clear that the
generation of people who--who were exposed to that and only to
that--that is, who came of age during the midst of Vietnam and
Watergate and so on--are less civically engaged. And I can believe
that people, say, have stopped voting because they're upset about, you
know, Watergate or Vietnam or Monica or whatever. But remember, the
picture that's being described here is much broader than that. It's
not just that we're dropping out of politics. We're dropping out of
connections of all sort. And it's harder for me to believe that
people have stopped going on picnics because they're upset about
Monica or they're--they've stopped, you know, having friends over to
the house 'cause they're still mad at Dick Nixon. I just--that--that
kind of connection doesn't seem to me very plausible. And that's why
I think that probably in the big patterns of social disconnection that
I'm talking about here, these purely political causes, the political
aliena--alienation that did certainly arise out of Vietnam and
Watergate probably isn't the main explanation for the broader trend, I
think.

LAMB: Are we happier or un--more unhappy than we used to be, in your
opinion?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, generally speaking, we're--we're less--a little
less happy than we used to be, despite the fact that our income has
doubled or tripled over the last 30 years. We're less--a little less
happy.

LAMB: How do we know that?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, because in--there are several different
reas--ways. One is we've been a--you know, pollsters have been asking
people about the state of their happiness for--well, for the last 50
years actually. There's a more--and--and there are other ways, too.
For example, depression, clinically measured depression. I don't mean
just feeling a little blue in the morning or I don't mean going to the
shrink more but clinically measured depression has--has increased
tenfold over this period. I don't know how many of your viewers will
know that we're in the midst of a--of a depression epidemic
nationwide. And, as I say, this is not just that we've become more
sensitive to that problem. It's that the real symptoms have--have
increased a lot.

But there's another subtlety here which is even more telling. It used
to be that as you got older, you got less happy. There--there was
a--there was a negative correlation between age and happiness; that
you--young people were happier and, you know, they had more--their
whole life in fronts of them and so on. And gradually over the course
of the last 30 or 40 years that correlation between age and happiness
has reversed be--so that now young people are much less happy than
older people. And the reason is, I think, tied up to what we're
talking about here. The same thing is true with the depression, by
the way. The depression epidemic has hit distinctively younger
generations, not older generations, and it's the younger generations
also who "Bowling Alone" shows have been disengaging.

So I don't want to be practicing psychiatry here without a license,
but I do think that the circumstantial evidence is that a whole
generation of people, beginning with the boomers and then increasing
with the X-ers, have become less connected with one another and less
connected with their communities. And they at the same time have
become less happy. There's been a substantial increase in depression,
and I have to say also a substantial increase in--in--in suicide rates
in that generation where suicide rates among the--the connected
generation, the old--the long, civic generation have been--been quite
low. So I think we are less happy is the short answer to the
question.

LAMB: Go back to something you said earlier about how this all got
started. You wrote the original article again in what magazine?

Prof. PUTNAM: The Journal of Democracy.

LAMB: Whose is that?

Prof. PUTNAM: It's an academic article--academic journal published
by the National Endowment for Democracy. It's--it's a journal namely
for academics about--about, you know, how democracy works.

LAMB: And you said you had a theory about how that moved on from
there.

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, yeah. I've written a lot of books and a lot of
articles in my life as an academic. And some of them, I think, were
maybe even better than the Bowling Alone article, but that got about a
million tons more publicity. I mean, I got, you know, invited on
pe--you know, shown on People magazine and Bill Clinton invited me to
Camp David. And there was just a lot of hubbub about--about the
article Bowling Alone, much more than, as I say, for things that were,
I think, equally valuable intellectually. And I think the reason was
that I purely, blindly stumbled into articulating a trend in our lives
that lots of ordinary Americans knew is true in their life, that they
weren't--you know, their mom had belonged to Hadassah and they didn't
or that their dad had--had gone to the Moose Club or the Rotary Club
and they didn't do anything equivalent or that they, you know,
remember that they used to--their parents used to play bridge every
week and--with friends and have friends over to the house and they
didn't.

And everybody kind of knew in a personal way that they were less
connected with their community than their parents had been and felt a
little uneasy about it, you know, felt they knew probably why, because
they were busier or whatever, but they--they felt a little uneasy
about it. And they--but they--it was defined not as a public issue
but as a private issue. And then along comes this Harvard professor
who says, `Actually, no, it's not just you, it's all of us.' And I
think that the reason that the--the--the original article got so much
attention was that it seemed to put a label to something that all of
us felt in our lives but didn't realize that everybody else was
feeling. And that's the only reason I can make of the fact that it
got so--so much more attention than I--than I had ever dreamed of.

LAMB: When were you called to Camp David?

Prof. PUTNAM: Essentially right after that--that article came out.
The president had a number of--of academics to come to Camp David to
talk with him about--this was the--this was January of 1995. And it
was shortly after the article had appeared. And he was thinking about
what he--what he would say in the State of the Union message that
year. And so he was talking with me and some other people about...

LAMB: What did you learn from that experience?

Prof PUTNAM: Well, I--I learned--of course, it was a treat to be--to
be invited. And I--and I very much enjoyed meeting the president
and--and--and the vice president. And they're smart people.
They're--I learned that they--they'd do just fine in a Harvard
seminar. And I also learned that it's complicated to think
about--that the movement from describing these issues in a purely
academic way--which is frankly what I had done before; I was--had
entirely been an academic--is different from the problem of figuring
out what would you do to fix it. And what I was increasingly
confronted with--not--I don't just mean at Camp David, but that was an
example of it. As there came to be more discussion about the
so-called bowling alone phenomenon and--was, `OK, if you're so smart
to descr--to diagnose this problem, how do we fix it?' And so I spent
actually much of the last five years in what is a somewhat different
task than the pri--pri--than the problem of diagnosis, which is
to--what can we do to change our lives or our community or our public
policies or whatever to enable us to reweave the fabric?

LAMB: Let me go back to the water cooler thing for a moment because
this network is about 21 years old. And for 20 years we've had
call-in programs where people every day for three hours communicate
among the group that watches. You can go from this network to any
other--Dr. Laura or...

Prof. PUTNAM: Sure.

LAMB: ...Rush Limbaugh or any number of national call-in programs
which weren't there, haven't been there but 22 years or something like
that.

Prof. PUTNAM: Right.

LAMB: Larry King started it all in 1978 on a national basis. That's
not discussed in your book and I wonder--that's a community. We
all--we have all formed communities where people are involved, albeit
in--in many cases, alone.

Prof. PUTNAM: Sure.

LAMB: But they're talking to a community. What im--wh--what impact
has that had on this, you know--and is the water cooler thing better
for us as a country or worse for us, that we all watch the same thing
and talk about it the next day?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, if we actually did talk about it with people
we--we--in a--in a face-to-face setting in which we really know one
another, it would be fine. I don't see anything--there's anyt--you
know, nothing bad about talking about "Survivor" anymore than talking
about the--you know, the local bond issue or whatever else you talk
about with friends. I do think the face-to-face connections are
really important; that is, I don't doubt for a second that--I know
this from my own experience that your viewers feel that they have a
kind of a personal connection with you and I think the same thing is
true for any of the hosts of these--of these programs.

And in a certain sense, they feel part of a larger community, a--a
community of people who identify themselves with, you know, watching
Larry King or Rush Limbaugh or whatever. But the--the horizontal ties
among the member of that aud--among the members of those audience are
much weaker than the--than the horizontal ties that would be true
among people over a back fence. And I--so I do actually look at
the--I did look, in the course of doing this work, at the--the
question of--of talk radio and--and talk television. And--and I do
think that, for some people, those sorts of--of being an audience of
that sort does give them a sense of belonging to something wider than
themselves.

But the other watchers are--the other people--the other viewers are
not going to bring you chicken soup if you get--if you get sick; that
is, there are certain kinds of things that only real face-to-face
connections can do. Being in a community of identity--that is, a
community that--that shares basically only the fact that they think of
themselves in the same way--the community of Adida--Adidas shoes
wearers, for example. People--I mean, now communities--the term
community is used in marketing all the time--the--you know, the Buick
community or something, being--is very different from a community of
interaction, in which you actually do connect with other people in it.
And so I don't want to be dismissive of communities of identity,
pure--pure identity. But I don't think it solves the same--serves the
same kind of functions, either the functions for our own physical
health or the--or the social functions in our community. Your--you
know, the--I don't know of any evidence at all that--where people are
more likely to watch Rush Limbaugh, their schools work better. I know
of a lot of evidence that where people are involved in community
organizations, the schools work better. So the kind of social capital
that I'm talking about I think does require more than you merely--more
than you merely be in an audience. It requires really connecting.

LAMB: Would the country be better off with a strong, active federal
government or strong local governments in the environment that you
think is the best for us as citizens?

Prof. PUTNAM: I try to avoid, in the book, and in my own thinking
about this, any simple dichotomy, would we want a top-down solution or
a bottom-up solution, because I think we want both top-down and
bottom-up solutions. I do think that the evidence is that smaller is
better for connecting. Smaller towns or smaller schools, for example,
small--because you feel a greater sense of efficacy if you're--if
you're close up to--if--if you can actually, you know, connect with
other real people, and it--and that's--that's an argument, I think,
for--for a more decentralized form of--of--of connection.

On the other hand, there are people examples in our history in which a
crucial role has been played by the federal government in building
community. Let me give a--a couple of specific examples. Many people
in America don't know that the 4-H Club, which, for a certain
generation of us, the 4-H Club was, you know, the place where you
learned--learned to connect with other people, especially in rural
communities. The 4-H Club is a government program run out of a--a
government bureaucracy, run out of the Department of Agriculture. And
it was created by people in the--around the--in the progressive era by
people who thought that if the government--it was the government's
responsibility to help people connect with other people in their
communities.

And the--the--the whole--many of the forms of social connection in our
rural areas are--the grange and so on, are the creation of county
agents. County agents--I mean, you know, always thought that county
agents were people who told my mom how to can goods or--or taught
farmers how to--what kind of--what kind of plants to grow, but county
agents were paid community organizers, paid by the government,
bureaucrats. To phrase--I'm trying to phrase it that way not to
castigate them, but to say, `Look, deep in our own history, as a
country, are many examples in which the government played an important
role in building the preconditions for--for a community.'

And that--take another example. The GI Bill after World War II, I
think it was an important factor in giving that generation--basically,
the GIs out of World War II--a sense of civic involvement, a sense of
reciprocity. The government--you know, they had given a lot to the
country, in--in terms of their service in war. The country gave back
to them in terms of the--this opportunity that most of them had never
imagined they would have to go to--to go to college. And they, in
turn, over the rest of their lives, gave back.

That long--it--it appears very clearly in the book this long civic
generation, that World War II civic generation, all their lives had
been more involved in the community: giving more, trusting more,
schmoozing more, joining more. And I think you can't get around the
fact that that must have been in part because of policies of the
federal government. So I want to say, `both/and.' Both small, local,
grassroots initiatives are important, but also there are important
federal policies that I think we need to--to recognize in the past and
to--and perhaps to push for in the future.

LAMB: If you had to put everybody that worked on your book on the
statistical side and--and all the research in a room, how many people
would be in there?

Prof. PUTNAM: Over the years, probably nearly 100 people. I mean,
they didn't all work at the same time, because I was mostly using
graduate students, and it happened over a--over a five- or six-year
period that I was working with people. So sometimes we had--sometimes
a team got up to, oh, eight or 10 people. And--and sometimes it was
less than that. But there are a lot of them.

LAMB: What were they doing?

Prof. PUTNAM: Part of it was gathering statistics. I mean, we
looked really hard to try to find data on membership in organizations
and trends in--in--all sorts of connect--connect--forms of, you know,
connection. We wanted to try to find out what were--what were the
trends in restaurant eating and so on. And it turns out that was hard
to track down a lot of those things. And partly they were reviewing
for me, helping me look at the very wide range of--of research, of
other people's research, that we were drawing on. Because much of
that book is really based on summarizing a lot of other people's
research.

For examples, to take the issue that you talked about before, talk
radio, we had--we had--I had one--one of my graduate students who
spent the better part of a semester looking at all the research that's
been done on talk radio, who watches, who talks, who calls in, has it
changed over time, are people who call in to talk radio more likely to
be involved in their community? Apart from talk radio, are they less
likely to be involved? So--and doing the same thing in--in, you know,
dozens of other areas. We wanted to--we wanted to look in some
detail, for example, at the medical literature on the health of
exosocial--social connections. And we looked a lot--spent a lot of
time looking at history. So I had researchers who went back
and--and--and explored the pa--trends in--in social connection over
the last 200--200 years in--in Syracuse and Poughkeepsie and so on.

LAMB: How do you get students to do this?

Prof. PUTNAM: Partly--you pay them. I mean, it's--it's
a--employment, and--and a way that they're working their way through
school. And--but ma--partly because they enjoyed working on a project
which was actually exciting. It really is--this is a--really neat
stuff. We had the feeling that we were kind of exploring a big
problem. Most of the time academics, including me, work on, you know,
pretty small problems, narrowly defined so we can get the--get the
facts quite straight in a really narrow little area. And I had all my
life done that kind of work. And I will in the pa--in the future do
that kind of work.

But this was a big, expansive problem, and it was one that you
could--when kids went home over Thanksgiving they could tell
their--their aunts and uncles what they were working on and they'd
recognize it as--their aunts and uncles would recognize it as a--as a
serious problem. So there was a certain amount of excitement in being
involved and doing hard, careful research on a big topic.

LAMB: In the back you go into great explanation of how you put this
all together. But the thing that was interesting, and I wanted to ask
you about, was the number of well-known endowments and institutes that
participated in this in one form or another. I guess helped
underwrite it?

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah, it--mostly the foundations that are listed there
in the back--they were very, very helpful--were not actually
underwriting the research for this book. They were underwriting a set
of other activities that we've been doing at the same time. Because
at the same time that we'd been carrying on this research, at the
encouragement of--of many of these foundations, I had been working
with a group of leaders across the country--that is not just
academics, but preachers and businessmen, businessmen and women
and--and community organizers and union people and so on. We had been
meeting in a--in a group called the Saguaro Seminar to try to figure
out what are some possible solutions to this problem. And that group
has met roughly every three or four months over the last three or four
years. We've looked at issues like the workplace--What do we need to
do in the workplace? Or--or religion--How--how can religion help to
reinvigorate American democracy? Or schools--What can the
school--what role can schools play in--in trying to fix this problem?

LAMB: What is the status of religion?

Prof. PUTNAM: Religion is--as a whole, religious participation is
down, as everything else is, in terms of social connections. Down
about, oh, 25 percent over the last--that is, take going to church,
for example, is down by about 25 percent over the last 25, 30--30
years. But, obviously, there are some parts of the religious spectrum
that have had ena--enormous growth during this period. And there are
others that have had substantial falls. I mean, the mainline
Protestant churches, for example, and--and--and--and attendance at
Mass among Catholics, has dropped off a lot. But that's t--partially
offset by the growth and participation in evangelical communities.
And what we were talking about in the Saguaro Seminar was, well, OK,
su--suppose we were to have a--another one of these what people call
great awakenings, which we've had periodically in American history,
where people began--began to be more engaged and interested in
religion. How would that--how could that contribute to a broader
sense of--of civic revitalization?

LAMB: I just want to name some of these organizations: Aspen
Institute, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Lilly Endowment, Trilateral
Commission, Pew Charitable trusts, The Norman Foundation, the
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott
Foundation. These are--support the--is it called--is it pronounced
Saguaro?

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah.

LAMB: What's that mean, by the way?

Prof. PUTNAM: Saguaro is a cactus out in--out in the West. We use
it as a metaphor for social capital. Because the saguaro--it's one of
these big cactuses with the big arms, you know. Saguaro cactus, as it
turns out, grow invisibly, almost underground, for the first 20 or 30
years before they shoot up these big stalks, which then turn out to be
hosts for many different kinds of communities--for birds and insects
and--and people. So we thought that was a kind of a metaphor for
social capital--it takes a long time to develop, and then it serves
lots of unexpected purposes.

LAMB: Carnegie, the Li--the Lila--Is that the way you pronounce
it?--Wallace Reader's Digest Foundation.

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah, Lila. Yeah.

LAMB: Why are all of these groups--and, by the way, a lot of our
viewers--I don't know what the number is, but some of our viewers,
when they hear Trilateral Commission, immediately think conspiracy.

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah.

LAMB: Why would the Trilateral Commission be involved?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, the Trilateral Commission, frankly, was involved
only because I'm a member of the Trilateral Commission. And--and--and
part of this work on democracy was--I was doing is--o--on--looking at
how these same problems occur elsewhere. Yeah, I know that there's
a--there's a view out there--a--frankly, it's a quite silly view,
that--that the Trilateral Commission somehow runs everything. But it
was a--it played a very minor role, frankly, in this.

LAMB: Well--well, let me stop and ask you, what is the Trilateral
Commission and why is it people are afraid of it?

Prof. PUTNAM: The Trilateral Commission is just a group of--of
businessmen and--and public officials and academics from--it's called
`trilateral' because it has the three--it comes from the three
devanced--advanced developing parts--developed parts of the world,
North America and Europe and--and Japan. It's been--I mean, I'm a
member of it. But I'm not, by no means, a--a--a--a spokesman for it
or anything. And...

LAMB: What's the goal?

Prof. PUTNAM: And--well, you should talk to them about it, Brian.
Actually, I'm just a--I--I mean, it's--doesn't make--anything to do
with the book, frankly. But it's...

LAMB: No, but what--the reason I ask this is is what--what are the
goal of all these--what--what do they want to learn out of this?
What's--what do you sense that--when you meet with all of these people
from these different foundations, what do they want?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, I think they want the same thing that other--of
ordinary Americans. They're a very diverse group out there, I mean,
as you--as you may know, but--from looking at the--at the list, as you
read it off. There's some conservative groups there, and some liberal
groups, and some--you know, all sorts of different groups are in that
list. And the...

LAMB: So what is your sense of why somebody, I mean, begins to
underwrite something like this?

Prof. PUTNAM: I--I m--because they--they have--in different ways
each of those organizations has an interest in trying to fix some
social problem in America that they think would be improved, whether
that's child care or--or education or economics--that they think would
be improved, correctly, if we could connect more. And I think
they--you know, there are lots of folks on that list who don't agree
with one another, but they do all share the view that America would be
a better place to live in if we connected a little bit--bit more, that
we would have lower infant mortality rates. Some of the groups in
that list, for example, are interested in--in teen pregnancy, and
infant mortality, and--and the way kids are.

That we--and some of the groups in there are interested in--in
education. And I think test scores would be higher, which they would
be, if American parents were more connected with their kids. And some
groups in there are worried about American competitiveness. They
think the American economy would be stronger. And some groups in
there are worried about American health, public--the health and the
psychological health. And they think Americans would--Americans would
be healthier if we connected a little bit more. So I think people
have a very--just as ordinary citizens, ordinary folks have a very
different set of interests in this.

LAMB: In--in--near the end of the book, Chapter 24, toward an agenda
for social capitalists, I'm going to read your points and then
the--have you expand on them.

Prof. PUTNAM: Sure.

LAMB: `Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 the level of civic
engagement among Americans then coming of age in all parts of our
society will match that of our--of their grandparents when they were
that same age and at the same time bridging social capital will
substantially--will be substantially greater than it was in their
grandparents' era.' How do you do that?

Prof. PUTNAM: Gosh, I think there's not any single solution. And,
as I say, in the--in the chapter that you're reading, I think the
purpose of my efforts in that last chapter to try to provoke people to
suggestions that may come from others. But let me be more specific
about my own ideas. I think, with respect to schooling, we know some
things that would work. We want to increase our--the next
generation's interest in public involvement, in--in public affairs.
We know things that would work. We know that smaller is better.

We know school--in small schools people are--have an opportunity to
take part in community activities and they--and they develop civic
habits. We know that--we know that extracurricular activities work.
We know that band and football and chorus and debate and so on, all
those extracurricular--curricular activities give people skills that
they carry with them their whole lives. And we know that what
predicts in adulthood who's going to be involved as an adult
in--in--in community life is who's been--you know, played left tackle
or played trombone or--or--or--or played King Lear or something. So
we know that that works.

And we know it was, therefore, really dumb, as American--as many
American school districts did, to cut funding for extracurriculars as
a frill during the--during the 1970s and '80s and '90s because it was
not a civic frill. We know that public service and community
le--community service works in the sense that kids who get involved as
young people in school in community service develop habits of mind and
values that stick with them. So we know some things that would work
in the current--in the area of schools, that would make it likely that
now another generation would be more involved and we can reverse this
decline.

LAMB: Second, you say, `Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010
America's workplace would be substantially more family friendly, and
community congenial so that American workers would be enabled to
replenish our stocks of social capital both within and outside the
workplace.'

Prof. PUTNAM: Let me go--go back for just a second to give a little
historical context. America, between 1865 and 1900, underwent the
industrial revolution. Basically, a third of Americans moved from
fields to factories, is where they--is--in terms of their place of
employment. Then we spent some time adjusting our labor law to the
fact that we were mostly working in factories now and no longer
working in fields. Take child labor, for example. Women mostly
worked in fields. Child labor meant, you know, Sarah picking beans in
the back 40 with Mom. And that didn't seem like such a bad idea. But
when we were mostly working in factories, after that transformation,
child labor meant Sarah working in--you know, sewing shirts in a
sweatshop. And that wasn't so good.

And so we had a series of kind of clicks in which we saw the world
differently as a result of that change in the structure of the
workplace. Now fast forward. In our adult lifetime, over the course
of the last generation, we have all been through a bigger change in
the character of work in America as more than a third of the American
work force has moved from the kitchen to the office. And yet with
respect to the consequences of that transformation, the movement of
women into the paid labor force, we're still--with respect to the
consequences of that for the rest of our lives, we're still pre-click
in the sense that we haven't yet seen that now that most adults are
working outside the home, and most of us don't have a "housewife" at
home to take care of, you know, kids and so on.

And I'm not--for a moment would I want to return to that--those days
in which--my daughter, as we talked about before, is a--is a
professional woman. And I'm very proud of her. So I don't want--I
don't want her to stop her professional career. But the workplace has
not yet adjusted to the fact that most of us have two--two adults
working outside the home. So that means with--what we need over the
course of the next decade or so are some quite radical changes in the
structure of the workplace to enable us.

We--we talk about this as if it were your problem or my
problem--`Who's going to pick up the kids at sch--tonight?' But it's
not. It's how is--how are America--how are Amer--is America going to
educate its k--kids when most adults are working outside the home?
That's a collective problem. We need to have a collective discussion
about it. It may or may not, but probably will, require some
government action. Just as it required government action to outlaw
child labor. So I think it means radically increase--radical
increases in, for example, the Family & Medical Leave Act, which
allows you to take time off for sick kids. Well, sick kids are an
important obligation. But it's not the only family obligation. And
you should--the burden of proof, I think, ought to be on the employer
to say why you have to work from 9 to 5 as opposed to having much
more--a flexibility in your work life to enable you to--to fit your
family and community obligations in--into the rest of your life. So
that's--I'm--I'm giving some general outlines here of some kinds of
radical changes that I think would enable Americans to--to be more
civically engaged.

LAMB: Your third point: `Let us act to ensure that by 2010 Americans
will spend less time traveling and more time connecting with our
neighbors than we do today, that we will live in more integrated and
pedestrian-friendly areas, and that the design of our communities and
the availability of public space will encourage more casual
socializing with friends and neighbors.'

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah. One of the things that I was surprised to find
when we did this research is that in a measurable way, urban sprawl,
metropolitan sprawl, has contributed to civic disengagement. I mean,
the--the--the general fact, as you know, from reading the book, is
that every 10 minutes more of additional commuting time cuts all forms
of social connection by 10 percent. Ten minutes more commuting time
means 10 percent fewer dinner parties, 10 percent fewer dinners with
your own family, 10 percent fewer club meetings, 10 percent less
church-going, and so on. Twenty minutes more means 20 percent less of
all those things.

So urban, metropolitan sprawl, and the time we spend sitting in--in
metal boxes, has had a negative effect on our connections with our
family and our community and our--our friends and so on. And,
therefore, I think that there are--there are good social reasons, not
just environmental reasons, for the sorts of anti-sprawl initiatives
that--people in Atlanta, for example--Atlanta now has a quite--has
engaged in--and the state of Georgia has engaged in a quite systematic
set of public policy initiatives designed to reduce sprawl. Largely,
for--there, I think, for environmental reasons. But I think it's also
true that our family community life would be better if we could avoid
that proliferation of long commutes.

LAMB: Number four: `Let us spur a new pluralistic, socially
responsible great awakening so that by 2010 Americans will be more
deeply engaged than we are today in one or another spiritual community
of meaning while at the same time becoming more tolerant of the faiths
and practices of other Americans.'

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah. Religion is an important part of American
social capital, Brian. About half of--as a rough rule of thumb, about
half of all social capital in America is religious. Half of all of
our--philanthropy is religious, half of all of our volunteering is
religious--in a religious context. Half of all of our social
membership--group memberships are religious. So it matters a lot for
the total stock of American social capital how engaged we are in
religious activities.

And, as a citizen, I think it would be valuable if we had another one
of these periods in which Americans--in which we've had historically,
which Americans have become more aware of the values of religious
communities, of religious values. Of course, there's a lot of talk
about this--in this year's presidential election. And, by and large,
I think that's a good thing, not a bad thing, that we're talking
about. We're--we're aware of the role of religion and its positive
contribution to our society. There's a qualification one has to add
to that which is that sometimes involvement in religion is associated
with intolerance of other people. And I think any of us who talk
about increasing and--and having respect for the role of religion in
American society, at the same time, have to say, always, `Yes, I'm
willing to do this in a way that is tolerant of other people's faiths
and other people's ideas.' And I think that's possible. I don't think
that's a contradiction in terms. I think we can have greater--a
greater role of religion in American life and still have tolerance.

LAMB: Five: `Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 Americans will
spend less leisure time sitting passively alone in front of glowing
screens and more time in active connection with our fellow citizens.
Let us foster new forms of electronic entertainment and communication
that reinforce community engagement rather than forestalling it.' How
can you do that?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, you know, as I said before, I think
entertainment television is really not so good for civic health. And,
frankly, of all of the areas in which I--you can tell I have a kind of
an activist-reformist's attitude. Of all the areas, this is the one
that makes me the most--most pessimistic. Because, obviously, we're
not going to abolish TV. And I don't--I'm not campaigning to have a
`national turn off--turn off--turn off televisions.' But I do think
that the Internet, which is in some respects evolving and in some
respects merging with television--I don't mean
immediately--immediately, now, but, I mean, the Internet industry and
the--and the telecommunications industry and the entertainment
industry are, to some extent, merging.

It does, to some--some degree, open opportunities, for those of us who
are concerned about community-building, to be more creative in
thinking about how we can have electronic communications contribute
positively, not detract from or subtract from, real face-to-face
social connections. I think there are ways in which television itself
can contribute to community activity by shining spotlights on--on
opportunities for people to get involved. But I also think that the
Internet opens up the possibility. It doesn't guarantee that we'll
make use of it, but it opens up the possibility of--not creating some
fictitious cyber, you know, virtual community out there in space but
using those techniques to reinforce real face-to-face connections in
our communities. Community bulletin boards, for example, in which
you--or neighborhood--neighborhood networks. A--a colleague of
mine--colleague of mine at the University of Michigan, Paul Resnick,
is a--computer science, and he's working on how to use the Internet to
strengthen face-to-face ties within neighborhoods. Well, that's the
kind of creative way in which I think electronic
television--electronic entertainment may have a positive role to play.

LAMB: You have two more points, number six. `Let us find ways to
ensure that by 2010 significantly more Americans will participate in,
not merely consume or appreciate, cultural activities from group
dancing to songfest to community theater to rap festivals. Let us
discover new ways to use the arts as a vehicle for convening diverse
groups of fellow citizens.' Why would you throw rap festivals in there
among cultural events?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, because I think it is an example of a cultural
event. It--there--there--the--there's a--there's a great example that
I cite here right here in--in--in Washington of--of people using rap
groups and poetry slams to reach to communities, in this case,
African-American young people, who would otherwise not be reached
by--by cultural activities, and using them to build community, to
build connections. The reason that I think arts and culture is
important is not, you know, out of reverence for Shakespeare or
something, but because arts, culture,
participatory--participatory--participatory arts and culture, and
sports, too, provide an unusually good vehicle for making connections
that cross these other barriers in our society.

It's easier to make connections across lines of race or class or--or
gender or--or generation, oftentimes, if one is doing that in the
context of singing or--or making cultural productions of various
sorts. I happen to be a--have a soft spot in my heart for choral
societies because I--I, in my youth, spent a lot of time singing. And
I think you can--you can make kinds of connections that are important
in a s--in a--in an artistic and cultural context--I don't mean just
watching or listening, I mean doing art--that would be harder to make
if you were in a, quote, more "civic" context in which you were going
to do eating your civic broccoli. I don't think that's--I think
connecting can be fun. You know?

LAMB: Why did you pick 2010, by the way?

Prof. PUTNAM: Well, 10 years out from when the book was published.
I think I was trying to ha--ha--be--I talk about goals, aspirations
that couldn't happen overnight. But on the other hand, I didn't want
to talk about something that was going to happen, you know, after my
lifetime.

LAMB: Let me get the last one in here. `Let us find ways to ensure
that by 2010 many more Americans will participate in the public life
of our communities, running for office, attending public meetings,
serving on committees, campaigning in elections, and even voting.'

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah, I think in the end I return to--to politics. I
am a political scientist. I am interested in how Americans can take
part in--in politics and not just in voting. I think it is a--this
long-term, steady decline in political participation is a very bad
sign for our--the health of our democracy. And I think there's a
direct relationship between the fact that people are dropping out of
politics, and dropping out of connecting with one another, as the
decline of social capital, and the rise of all of this money in
politics.

The reason--if you ask why do we have all of this money in politics,
it's because politicians no longer can get their message to voters
through social connections, through churches or org--or clubs or
unions or whatever because those organizations have become weaker.
And, therefore, they're relying on electronic mass media which costs
money. And I think the role of money in politics is really quite
dangerous to American society. So I'd like to see a kind of revision,
reform of American politics, in which we gave social capital, that is,
connections, greater weight, and less weight was given to financial
capital.

LAMB: Did national politicians have impact on bringing us to where we
are in the last 30 years, and can they have impact on the future of
changing things?

Prof. PUTNAM: I don't think they--I don't think that politicians
specifically blame--bear--bear much blame for the general decline in
connectedness. It's not--it's not because of politicians that we've
stopped going on picnics or having friends over to the house. I do
think that as they respond to public demand for greater opportunity
for people to connect with their family and communities that, yes,
polit--national politicians can play a role. I think that the
presidential candidates this year in both parties are genuinely
interested in trying to find ways to make it possible for people to
reconnect. This is very high on the private--it's a kitchen table
issue. It's high on people's private agenda. How can I just find
more time and opportunity to connect with people that I care about?
And--and I think public policy changes could attribute to that.

LAMB: Have you gotten less or more attention when the book came out
than when the article came out?

Prof. PUTNAM: Probably more. I certainly have talked to a lot more
people, doing a lot more lecturing. Yeah, probably more. I think
it's not necessarily a sign of me or the book. I think it's a sign
that the country--this problem is maturing in people's consciousness.
I think more people now than five years ago recognize that this is
something we've got to do something about.

LAMB: What's your next book?

Prof. PUTNAM: How to look at this problem--seen from abroad. How we
can--how--what lessons we can learn from other countries about
connecting.

LAMB: And we don't have much time, but this all started with Italy
and a study you did. How long did that study go on?

Prof. PUTNAM: That took 25 years so I'm a slow writer.

LAMB: What was the number one thing you found there?

Prof PUTNAM: That if you wanted to know where loc--where Italy was
governed best, where people can actually--where people were most
likely to enjoy the benefits of good government, it was a number of
choral societies and football clubs.

LAMB: Do you have any idea who did this cover for you?

Prof. PUTNAM: Yeah. It's an--it's an artist in--in New York City.
He's done a lot of other--a lot of other fine work.

LAMB: "Bowling Alone" is the name of the book and our guest has been
Professor Robert Putnam. Thank you very much for joining us.

Prof. PUTNAM: My pleasure, Brian.

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Bowling Alone