I'd seen this referenced in several other books and finally got around to reading it. It shows the decline in community over the past several decades. I'd definitely read a follow up for how trends have continued in the past twenty years.

A fascinating statistical deep-dive into the nature of "social capital" - the inherent value of networks and human connection - and the ups and downs it's gone through in the US during the 20th century. Or rather, the big up and the big down. Because of when it was published (2000) it stops just as things started getting interesting. The internet was only getting started and social media wasn't a thing yet. Nevertheless, the downslide in the US's social capital can't be blamed on the internet, GenX, or Millennials, since the wider social trends that have been eroding the country's social cohesion started as early as the 1950s. However, I've no doubt that internet echo chambers are only magnifying the problems Putnam talks about.

So what does Putnam blame for the US's decline in social capital? Two things: First, the cohorts we now refer to as the Greatest and Silent generations had world-shaking, unifying events in their lives - the Great Depression and WWII - that brought them together and spurred a surge of community-building activities that carried on well after WWII was over. While the following generations have certainly experienced world-shaking historical events, none of them have created unity in the way the traumas of the early 20th century did.

Culprit #2: Television. As soon as TV enters the picture, people started to spend more time staring at screens and less with their friends and communities. Putnam is clear in all his analyses to point out that correlation doesn't mean causation, but the stark impact of TV (and now laptops, smartphones, etc) on people's time and willingness to socialize - much less their efforts to organize into large groups - can't be chalked up to coincidence or some external factor. TV rots our social lives as much as it turns our brains to jelly.

Two complaints: I hate that that the book is so US-centric. The way Putnam presents his arguments, you'd think the US exists in some kind of economic/political vacuum untouched by the rest of the world. The other thing I didn't like is the final chapter, in which Putnam suggests solutions to the decline. I hate it because he presents all his ideas as pompous "I challenge this group to do this" statements, as if he has the authority to issue such demands.

Robert D. Putnam lays out the case for social capital extremely well in this book. He tells us the trends, why they may be occurring, why it matters, and then what we can do about it. The afterword in the anniversary edition may be my favorite chapter, I love how he can come back after 20 years with the same energy and vigor as before to go into deeper detail on the internet's effects on social capital. This book is everything I like, a data-driven and comprehensive overview of an initially complex topic dissected into easily understandable sections. My only gripe is that he didn't end the book by saying, "And that's why I don't go Bowling Alone."

You have to want the book to be what it is—the presentation of deep, broad research into the state of our national community. But it is that, and as such it’s really valuable. Some of the research is a bit dated at this point, of course, but the overall analysis is still highly relevant.

I found that the first third of this book that that is trying to convince you that people aren't as social as they use to be seems the most dated. It's been 20 years, and while much of it is likely the same, just didn't feel as relevant now. Enjoyed the book talking about the comparison to the early 1900s.

Recommended by a course instructor this fall, "Bowling Alone" explains all the related reasons why we don't join/belong/commit to social, civic, service or religious groups as our ancestors did. More importantly, the unintended consequences are explored - what happens when we disconnect with one another, our "social capital" compromised. The author is a respected economist, and this book is well researched, substantive reading, and sobering.

All I can say is the circumstances in which I was reading this book became aggressively ironic about five chapters in, and I kind of relished the irony of that in committing to still reading it all through

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how everyone is so Online. We're all (definitely including myself!) addicted to social media and shifting even further into digital space. Myself and many people I know have complained that it's difficult nowadays to meet people and be engaged in-person with your area or community, and that it doesn't feel good. We crave that sense of community and sometimes feel disconnected.

Although this book predates social media, I think it still applies — maybe even more so today. It describes the erosion of community groups and civic engagement in America. It explains that people are feeling increasingly unhappy, alienated, and dysfunctional, possibly because of this disconnect. It places a lot of blame on the rise of television (in my opinion rightly so; I think TV is absolutely awful for your health) but also describes how urban sprawl and other factors play into it. Even though there are ways for modern media to increase community engagement, potentially replacing the need for conventional forms of civic and community engagement, much of it feels hollow and is missing something genuine. One of the topics this book tackles is social isolation and how it's incredibly damaging for individual and community health.

How can you and I connect with one another and our community more? Not online, but in a real way.

If you, like me, are really curious about this phenomenon, I highly recommend despite its age.

Putnam's ideas are important, critical even, for identifying reasons for the "strange disappearance of social capital." His article in the Journal of Democracy encapsulates them. Read this excellent article (widely available on the web)and then, if you want to know more, buy the book.

The idea/complaint/gut feeling that motivated this book is one that probably resonates with most Americans today: we're too disconnected from each other, too disengaged from our communities, too uninvolved in politics, too apathetic about helping other people, and too passive and solitary in our choice of hobbies and leisure activities.

Frankly, this book could have marshalled a lot less evidence, been a lot shorter, and used much less fancy sociological analysis, and I still would have bought into the underlying premise, because it just feels so true to me. I think anyone who remembers or at least has heard how things used to be in America, or how things still are in other countries, can share this feeling of there being an emptiness and hollowness to how most Americans spend their time, and a sense that there is a better way to live that isn't quite so lazy and self-centered. So Putnam certainly gets points on tapping into the zeitgeist and articulating something that's important to a lot of people.

This book's main flaw is that Putnam took a very compelling idea and made it drier and more academic than he needed to. The numerous charts and graphs were illuminating, but got a little overwhelming as I got further in the book, and the same applies to his overuse of statistics, percentages, etc. to make his points. A good 1/5 of the book is devoted to appendices and detailed data sets (and I did appreciate him putting all of that stuff outside the main body of the text), but even so, I think even more of his stats could have been shelved in the appendices. His overall argument could have been more concise and compact.

I thought it was good that he had a chapter devoted to the "dark side" of greater community involvement, socializing, association membership, and so on, because if it weren't for that I would accuse him of falling prey to misplaced nostalgia brought on by old age. After all, if you follow his argument logically (and the implicit value judgments within it), more people joining bigoted, intolerant groups like the Ku Klux Klan would be seen as a positive growth in our "social capital" -- the term he uses for our level of social/community ties. The section discussing how the decrease in club-joining and community involvement was happening at the same time as an increase in tolerance in American society (as measured in surveys asking about mixed race marriage, freedom of speech, non-religious people, women in the workplace, etc.) was very interesting and provocative.

I assume the chapter on technology is the most controversial -- he attributes about 25% of our general cultural malaise to the increased use of television and computer-based entertainment, and despite a few funny antiquated terms (like referring to people who surf the internet as "cybernauts" -- the book was written in 1999, after all), his arguments felt spot-on to me. In particular, he compared people who watch TV intentionally (i.e., they only turn on the TV when they have a specific show in mind, and turn it off when that show is over) vs. people who watch TV habitually (just turn it on and leave it on as background noise). He found that people from the pre-Baby Boomer era were much more likely to watch TV intentionally, whereas everyone afterwards was more likely to watch TV habitually. His data points about the detriments of habitual TV viewing were extremely compelling, especially studies showing that most families were unwilling to swear off TV for a month in exchange for $500, even though they reported enjoying TV only about as much as cleaning their house (which together indicates the presence of a national addiction).

I'm certainly no "technology is the cause of all our ills" type of person, but I do think most people watch way too much TV, and that it's sad how often an entire family or group of friends will retreat to their solo electronic devices rather than engaging with each other. As a matter of fact, I was reading Bowling Alone one day in a cafe where I was eating lunch, and I saw an elderly woman eating lunch with a lady who was presumably her granddaughter. I say "with," but since the lady was absorbed in using her smart phone and flipping through a newspaper while ignoring her grandmother, I don't think she was really "there" in any real sense. That sad scene was a perfect example of the sort of endemic distance and alienation from others that Putnam describes in this book.

Somewhat in contradiction to my earlier statement that this book should have been shorter, I would have liked the author to look at a few more avenues relating to this issue. For example, in his chapter on modern time and money constraints on community involvement, one thing that seemed conspicuously missing was the increase in the volume of homework that students at all levels are assigned now compared to 30 years ago, which can have the effect of not only restricting kids' involvement in extracurricular activities, but can also restrict their parents' time if the students are young enough to need regular help with their piles of homework.

Another factor that Putnam didn't mention was whether/how the increase in the U.S. population has played any role in our alienation from each other. It's obviously easier to connect to people in a small town, and that's not because small towns have some inherent property that makes people want to connect, but because there are simply fewer people around, which means you take what you can get. But if you live in a city of 800,000 people (like I do), it's unlikely that you'll ever see the same stranger twice, much less strike up a friendship with them. It seems intuitively true that as the country's population increases, it will get harder and harder to have meaningful relationships with more than a few select people.

In addition to discussing how the suicide rate has changed over the years, with more people committing suicide at younger ages than ever before, it also would have been instructive for Putnam to mention the disintegration and dissolution of the traditional social structure of Native American tribes, leading to the alcoholism, alienation, and suicide in the face of white American culture that many of them contend with today. I think that would have been an interesting case study that would have supported his position that American society is headed in the wrong direction and that we're suffering because of our lack of community and group affiliation.

Overall, the tone and writing style of this book is pretty tedious and academic and not nearly as reader-friendly as the title and cover would have you believe, but I think the author's choice of topic is deeply interesting and his argument is convincing, which makes it worth the somewhat high cost of admission.

The most concise summary of this book might simply be its subtitle. For me, the greatest service Putnam provided by writing it is his "naming" of the issue of declining social capital, by meticulously documenting other trends that it correlates with: Mental, physical, and economic health; crime; trust in our peers as well as in our government; general malaise and anger. Maybe many of us don't know why we are so unhappy and cynical as a generation, or why we don't act the way ideal citizens probably should; the dry statistical measures in this tome describe why, as well as offer solutions (join and start more voluntary organizations, preferably bridging over bonding ones, when possible - everything else will arise from that).

In addition, the chapter on television in the second "Why?" section was particularly profound and prescient. The effects habitual television watching used to cause - para-social relationships that drain our energy allotment for socialization; further curtailed attention spans as programs became more frenetically entertaining - have been reinforced, as I see it, by certain new kinds of social media entertainment. The Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok "Doom Scrolls": low barrier, passive entertainment, that makes us feel more connected and important, while slowly expunging a natural desire to genuinely be so.

As recently as the mid-1970s nearly 40 percent of all American adults played cards at least once a month, and the ratio of monthly card players to monthly moviegoers was four to one. Between 1981 and 1999, however, the average frequency of card playing among American adults plunged from sixteen times per year to eight times per year. By 1999 card playing still order movies four to three but the gap was closing fast.