Recorded on Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024
TRANSCRIPT
Jim Ellis ’91 Welcome, everyone. It's great to have you with us. Thank you so much for joining us for the SwatTalk entitled The State of American Community, featuring Robert Putnam, the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, and more importantly from the class of 1963 of Swarthmore. My name is Jim Ellis, and I'm a member of the class of ’91 and I will be the moderator tonight. Before we get to Bob, a few preliminaries, SwatTalks is a speaker series brought to you by the Swarthmore Alumni Council, of which I'm a member. Tonight's session will be recorded, so you will be able to find it online on the SwatTalks page on the Swarthmore College website within 2 or 3 weeks. If you're interested in watching previous talks, you can also find those on the SwatTalks page. For those of you who are new to SwatTalks, or for our regulars who need reminding tonight will go like this; Bob will answer my questions for the first half hour or so. Hopefully it'll be a little more of a dialog back and forth, and then we'll spend the second half hour answering any questions you might have. Please ask your questions by using the Q&A feature at the bottom of Zoom, and please be sure to include your name and class here. When you do so, I will collect those questions and we'll pose as many of them as I can to Bob during our Q&A session.
So I'd like to introduce Bob Putnam. Among his many achievements he is the star of a new movie on Netflix, starkly titled Join or Die. Though I'm sure as a leading political scientist and rigorous methodologies, I don't think he probably fully approves the title's monocausal explanation. He's the author of some of the most well known and well argued books in political science, such as “Making Democracy Work”. And I don't get paid for this, but here's my copy [shows the book], “Bowling Alone” and “The Upswing”. As one of our nation's leading public intellectuals, we could delve into a range of vital topics, but we have only an hour. Tonight we'll focus on the state of the American community.
Unlike some academics whose forays into public discourse are all too often off the cuff opinions, Bob's comments are always very well grounded in data and rigorous mythological approach. So when his research shows that America in the last 40 years or so has become increasingly polarized, unequal, self-centered, and socially fragmented it isn't just a gut feeling, and we need to listen and try to do something about it.
Before we dive in, a quick personal side, Professor Putnam, as I knew him, then taught in the government department at Harvard University when I was a grad student and even though I didn't study formally with him, our paths did cross. At the end of the second year, grad students at Harvard had to pass a written and oral exam to receive their master's and continue towards the PhD. Sound familiar? And like at Swarthmore, you couldn't select your examiners for the oral exam, however, you could veto up to three professors. Now, I didn't actually think any of my colleagues would actually veto anyone, so I didn't bother to submit any names. But as I found out later, pretty much everybody else did. And many had heard through the grapevine that there was one particularly demanding examiner - Professor Putnam. Guess, who was one of my examiners? All ended well, after all I had survived the Swarthmore Honors exams experience. So without further ado, I'd like to thank Bob Putnam for joining us tonight and let's kick off our discussion.
First, Bob the movie “Join or Die” is as much about your intellectual journey as anything. This includes the role of serendipity and sparking research agendas, whether it's you and your wife Rosemary, listening to a chorus at Lake Como, or Rosemary noting a story in a local newspaper about declining membership and a local group. I'd like to start off by asking you about the role of Swarthmore and beginning your intellectual quest.
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 Well, thanks, Jim, very much. And to the Alumni Association for hosting this talk. I can be, at least brief about and I'll be much longer but brief about Swarthmore going to Swarthmore in the fall of 1959 was the most important thing that ever happened to me in my entire life, because everything changed. Personally, I’ve done pretty well in high school, but I come from a very small town, very small high school. Of the people in my high school who went on to college, and that was only about only about 15% of the people in, like, high school. In other words, about 85% did not go to college. And of those who did go to college, in my class, I was the only one who went outside of Ohio. So I was basically a hick from Ohio. I was and I thought I was pretty smart, but once I got to it, because I was certainly smarter than other people in my class, we got along very well, but they thought I was a little weird because I was pretty smart. And then I got to Swarthmore, and I was definitely not the smartest person in the class. And even more, I was unbelievably unsophisticated culturally. I'll be very brief, one episode, an anecdote - we were allocated people to roommates and put me in with a guy named Leo Brody. And later on, I can figure out why they did. But Leo Brody had gone to the best high school, probably the best high school in America. It was a boys high school in Philadelphia, it was extremely sophisticated. He most notably one night in my freshman fall stayed up all night smoking, this is the early 60s or this is the late 50s and what he was smoking was actually some kind of I don't know…
Jim Ellis ’91 Well, I think the statute of limitations has run out.
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 It wasn't even that, but it was weird if you were from Ohio to be smoking, some kind of substance and playing all night endlessly ‘Rites of Spring’. I, of course, did not recognize ‘Rites of Spring’, but it was clangy and I was up all night. I had to get up early for a class, I think German class the next morning. And I woke up the next morning and I said, Leo, this is just not going to work, I really like you, but we've got to break up. So at the end of that first semester, we parted company again, good friends. And in retrospect, it turns out that Leo and I later, much later on in adult life, we both became professors. He's a professor, he's one of the leading professors of film at USC, and I'm pretty well known and we've very recently connected because he saw the film about me and was one of the people who endorsed the film. And so if I get a Nobel, I mean, not a Nobel, if we go to an Oscar, I'm sure that this guy who at the beginning of my professional career thought I couldn't be in the same room with, it was him. Okay, what I’m trying to say is I was very, I was a Republican, moderate Republican. That put me out of touch with most people at Swarthmore. I was fairly religious, not very religious, but I sang not just in the chorus and so on, at Swarthmore, but in the Methodist Church in the Ville regularly. And I was now what we would call a STEM specialist. This is just in the aftermath of my wife, who's Rosemary and who's about to be the subject of this, what I'm saying, is off camera interrupting me. What did you want to say, sweetie? [looks off camera]
Rosemary You were not the STEM specialist. You were [inaudible]
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 I'm sorry, sweetie. Off camera we're having a little family debate here. I was, but now…She apologizes, because I was what would now be called a Stem specialist. This was the aftermath of the Sputnik going around the world, I mean, around the earth, Americans were supposed to study either the Russian language or they were supposed to study science and math and so on. And I was pretty good at that. So, I'm trying to indicate this is a kid from Ohio, who's a fairly regular Methodist, and is a STEM specialist. And, that's the person who had to take a distribution course in the fall of my sophomore year. The fall in my sophomore year, if you're following the numbers here, was 1960. If you know anything about politics, you know, any year divisible by four is an election year and that was 1960, that means there was a presidential election going on. And I was taking an introductory policy course, in the basement of Trotter then, and I happened to sit behind a cute coed, that's the language we would have used. And so the class was at 11, so at noon we would have lunch, you know, and get a little I didn't have lunch. And then we started talking and started hanging out together. This is basically the late 1950s. So I don't want any of your listeners to let their imaginations run. Hanging out did not mean anything except we were just having lunch together. But, we talked about politics and it became clear this person was different from me in every possible way. She was a humanist. She was studying Russian. She was an active Jew. She was very much, very democratic. And she was unbelievably sophisticated culturally. She would have enjoyed listening to Stravinsky's ‘Rites of Spring’. So we started hanging out, but it was clear that we liked each other, but on the other hand, our very first date was something called ‘[inaudible] a Weekend’, which is sort of like was then, it's the equivalent of Sadie Hawkins Day, in which, unusually for that time, women could invite men out to date. And so our first day she invited me out to a John Kennedy rally in one of the suburbs. And that was her way of saying, up yours. I mean, she wouldn't have said it that way, but she was sort of making fun of me that I was this stoggy old Republican. And of course, the next week, turnabout's fair play, so I took her to a Nixon, drive by, right through the bottom of the Swarthmore campus. Well, one thing led to another, but not very much of the other and we and we sort of became, you know, we dated regularly throughout that fall. Remember the classes start in September, by late October I was already a Democrat. That's an incredibly powerful, incredibly powerful woman.
And then on January 20th, we had the idea, well, why don't we just go down to 30th Street station, you know, take the Media locally to the 30th Street station and overnight or not even overnight, but just spent a couple of hours going down to the inauguration, so we did and we went. And it was a very snowy day that day and we went and stood in the crowd and then on the east front of the Capitol. I could take you to the very tree under which we were standing, although it's a much taller tree now. This is, January 21st, 1961, and heard with my own ears, our own ears John Kennedy say, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country”. I am now 84, decades and decades after that, but the hair on the back of my neck is rising because I'm suddenly back there being that little adolescent feeling that he was speaking directly to me. And essentially at that point, I decided not to become a STEM specialist, but to go into social science or in some way see if I could contribute more directly to the country's well-being. So I'm just about done. I'll be very quick. So by this point, I've known this woman for 3 or 4 months. I've changed my profession, I've changed my political identity. It took a little longer or another year and a half, and then I converted to Judaism. So this is one powerful chick. That's why I went off camera now she's making faces at me. I'm paying attention to you, Jim and the audience, but I'm also paying attention to her. More than you want to know about Swarthmore, but it was enormously important. I can talk about Swarthmore all night, but probably that would not be a good use of our time.
Jim Ellis ’91 Well, one thing, from your Swarthmore experience, that would be sort of follow up. You mentioned your old roommate, Professor Brody, as a film professor. Usually professors are not topics for movies. That's not something that I'm pretty familiar with. I think of the Swarthmore related professors, the only one I know is Fred Pryor, whose persona was used in ‘The Bridge of Spies’ from the episode when he was a grad student. But could you say just a little bit about how this movie project came about?
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 Sure. I'll try to be quick, although it's an interesting story. The movie is made by a pair of rookies they have before making this movie, they had never done any movie at all. One of the two, Pete Davis, had been in my class. His sister, Rebecca Davis, had been in television news, but that's far different from being in movies. So they had that zero experience. It turns out now this movie has had a quite remarkable existence. I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment, but as I describe what's happened to the movie, I think it's important that people listening to this understand that these are rookies and we're not yet in the World Series. I'll say we're not yet in the competition for Oscars, but remember, these are rookies. And it's like rookies maybe on their way, they're in the playoffs, maybe in making their way to the World Series. So it's a quite remarkable film.
They came to me with the idea at the beginning, it seemed like almost a joke. Pete came to me and said, you know, Bob, we'd like to do a movie about you. What the heck? Why not? But I never expected that. They had to raise a lot of money, a lot of money, and you have to have 3 or $4 million to even just do a little documentary. And then Covid came, so that interrupted the process. But about five years after we began the process, they had a film which they sent around to various film festivals and to all of us were astonished that South by Southwest, which is for these purposes the most important of the movie festivals around the country, it's not quite Cannes, but for for this kind of movie, it was certainly important. We were invited there and so we showed up there and then it kept getting lots and lots of other invitations to other film festivals all around the country, In Cleveland, Ohio and I don't remember someplace in San Francisco and Boston and so on. Cutting a long story, a little bit short about a few months ago, it was sold to Netflix, so anybody now interested in the movie, I guess there's a way in which Swarthmore arranged for it to be shown, but you can just go on Netflix and watch it there. They also retained the rights as part of this good deal that they stuck with Netflix, that the movie can be shown in cinemas around the country for community groups. That's sort of an idea that in some little town in, you know, Poughkeepsie or the, I don't know, you know, Duluth or someplace, you get a group of people to gather, let's say, 200, 250 people together, and you can show the movie there. And then as soon as they made that information available now, about a month ago, in the first two weeks, 2000 groups across America signed up for this thing. Now, I don't know if you're able to do math, the math is so this is 2000 people, 2000 groups across the country want to see this? Maybe 250 people a shot, seeing the movie, that means a half million people are going to see this movie or have seen the movie even in cinemas, forget about Netflix. So now as part of the campaign to see if they could create some buzz for the Oscar nominations I was on The Daily Show a couple of weeks ago, that was kind of fun. It was a different kind of audience with people cheering and holding up signs and so it's not the kind of ordinary academic audience that I speak to. And tomorrow I'm going to be on, podcast with Trevor Noah. This is Walter Mitty, Dreams of Glory. This is an ordinary, meek kind of, you know, Goliath, a professor suddenly becoming a celebrity. I don't quite know how to have it, except to say that Pete and Rebecca, these rookies are extremely good. And the people who see the movie, they will realize this is not Masterpiece Theater, this is not languid views of a country, of an English countryside. There are lots of cartoons in the movie and quick cuts and cross-talk, and it's meant for 20-somethings who watch movies in a different way from people my age, or even even your age Jim, more than you wanted to know about the movie, but it's been fun.
Jim Ellis ’91 And it’s, I mean, the movie really is a kind of a culmination of your intellectual path. Not only, you know, a lot of your initial work and making democracy work was really grounded in establishing some descriptive facts and a theory to explain good governance, but from there discovering what has become, you know, now, trite, you know, social capital, everyone uses the expression, as being fundamental to good governance, but more importantly, discovering that social capital has degraded in the United States in the last 40 years. And I think one of the more dramatic scenes in the movie is when you read the description of politics and society in southern Italy from your own book, “Making Democracy Work.”, and it's not a pretty picture. And you reflect that, you know, this sounds more like America than we'd like it to be.
You know, at this point, we should probably shift gears and talk really about the message of not only the movie, but what we should do, to help improve the state of the American community. So how do we get to this place?
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 Well, the movie is about how I got to this place, that's the sense in which it's about Bob Putnam's life and times and his, as you say, that this long, winding trail that led me from Italy in the 1970s till I finally finish the book of “Bowling Alone”, in the year 2000, so a long trip and how did America get to this place? Well, it looks like, at the time I finished “Bowling Alone”, I didn't quite understand what I now understand, because in my last book, which is called “The Upswing”, I won't give you the whole account of that, but it's clear that for much of the 20th century, beginning around 1900 and going till around 1970, so for the first two thirds of the 20th century, America was steadily increasing in social capital. We were trusting our neighbors more, we were more involved in community life, we were more involved in bowling leagues, we were more connected to our families in many different ways. We had more social capital, lots more social capital in 1970 than we had in 1900. And we were also of that same period became steadily less polarized politically.Our politics had been tribal around 1900, and they'd become quite consensual, actually, by the middle of roughly 1970. Our economics similarly was changing rapidly very unequal back at the beginning of that period, at the end of the 19th century, that was the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain called it. And then we my by the 1960s, America was just about the most equal country in the world. Think about that. Just about we rivaled Sweden, social democratic Sweden in the degree of equality, but the low gap between American rich and American poor folks. But then beginning again, it was around, roughly speaking, the middle of the 1960s that turned. And now over the last 50 years leading up to where we are right now, our politics have become more polarized and our economy has become less and less equal and we become more self centered. Again I rode that whole curve, but in the beginning of the 20th century we're very self-centered, very narcissistic. In the middle of the 20th century, we had much more sense of the whole country being all in this together. I don't mean America, America was not perfect. I want to make sure I don't say this. America was not perfect at the beginning of the roughly 1960s. We were not perfect and there were a lot of demonstrations going on at that point about race and gender and so on. And so I'm not saying it was perfect, but we were closer to being perfect, much closer than we were than we had been at the beginning of the 20th century or than we are now. So that's the big trend and at the time I wrote “Bowling Alone”, I knew only one of those trends, I knew the social capital trend and I knew only the second half of it. But now I can see, no, no, there's a much bigger story. It isn't that kind of, ever since Americans landed on this continent, we've been going downhill and social capital, that's not true at all. There have been times when we have been just like us, the people at the beginning of the 20th century, faced problems just like us, and they overcame them. The good news is we faced problems like this before and Americans, we don't need to look elsewhere, we have faced problems like this before and we've overcome them. Not permanently, but we made some good progress. And so therefore, the question and I'm back to the question, what we do now is to say, well, what did we learn from that earlier period? And I'm going to be very brief here because I know that we're running out of time, but I'm going to and I also maybe we should talk about the election.
But before we get to Q&A and and before we get to the elections, here are my three takeaways from that earlier period. Have I gone too fast here Jim or are we tracking here? I'm saying what we’ve learned from this whole last hundred and twenty-five years about how they fix the problem and therefore the lessons we might draw from that? And I'm going to say three. First, go loca. Reforms and changes, positive reforms in a country like America does not begin at the top. It's not that there's one leader and that he or she sort of tells us we should do X and we all do it, and that makes us better. There was a person like that - Teddy Roosevelt the last time around, but he was not the leader, he was doing what people had said to do 20 years earlier. He was like the guy in the French Revolution who ever saw a crowd going in a certain direction, ran out in front of it. Our major social reform movements in America have all been bottom up, not top down, so go local. Secondly, if we're going to change these things, we got to go young. Old people like me have been around long enough that we know it doesn't have to be this way. So I can say to my grandchildren, I know it's terrible. Your whole life America's been going to hell in a handbasket, but it doesn't have to be that way. I remember personally when it was not like this, when I was at Swarthmore, it wasn't this bad, but it’s my grandchildren's generation. People who are now in their 20s and younger, who are going to have the imagination to think of the new ways in which we can come together, the new ways in which we can, re-weave the fabric of our society. So first go local, secondly, go young. And thirdly, and this is more, this brings me a little bit closer to your own interest in political philosophy. I have come to think that a crucial variable here is our moral commitments. This is not language that most social scientists would feel comfortable using. But I think a crucial part of this is we have to have a moral revival. And I'm not talking about sex at all. I'm saying we need once again to think - we are our neighbor's keeper. That is, we have obligated a golden rule. We have obligations to other people that are at least as important as our obligations to ourselves. Now, that sounds trite. If you're actually a religious person, it sounds, no matter what your religion is, that's part of your religion that you should care about other people. But America has become very self-centered. The guy who happens to be president, the United States, or will be president of the United States come January is incredibly narcissistic, incredibly self-centered. He didn't cause this problem, the problem of growing self-centeredness has been underway for some time, but he represents it. That is, the narcissism, you know, I'm now being fully political, the narcissism of Donald Trump is an accurate reflection of the culture that has elected him. And we've got it now. How do we turn our culture around? That's complicated. And if I had to name one thing, I'd say, how about youth service programs of some sort, like, you know, the equivalent, the contemporary equivalent of the Peace Corps or something like that.
That's a very short and inadequate answer to a very big and complicated question of what do we do about it? I'm trying to draw from my own research to say, what have I learned in my research that might help us figure out what to do next? Well, and I know we've got to go along, but we have to say something about this most recent election.
Jim Ellis ’91 Yeah, that's a good segway. If you wouldn't mind, how did the results of the November election affect, if at all, your diagnosis about what ails the American community and what we can do to fix it? For instance, you know, there were some signs of a less political polarization, according to some of the research in the voting data, as nonwhite voters, especially in urban areas, moved to support Trump compared to the previous time he ran. But what do you draw from November that informs your thinking about the state of the American community?
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 Well, the first thing, it's really important for us all to understand, actually, everybody understand, is that this was a completely normal election. Some people who thought about this have talked about this as a landslide or as a watershed. None of it. A landslide is like 1936 when FDR won by 24%. And that's cemented the New Deal. So that was a landslide, and it had big policy consequences. Or LBJ in 1964 ran against Barry Goldwater, he won by 23%. And that led to the Great Society and to Medicare and Medicaid and the civil rights bills. So big, big swing and big policy consequences or Reagan ran by won by 18% in 1984 and ushered in the Reagan Revolution. Those were landslides. Trump won by less than 1%. He has no mandate at all. He may try to claim that it was a landslide, but we should not accept that. This was a normal election and it was a normal election in another sense. All the analysis I've seen says the main issue in this election was the economy. That's not strange. That's it's about the economy. It's almost always about the economy. And in this case, it was the delayed reaction, economic reaction to the, to the Covid pandemic. And it's not an accident that throughout any place in the world where the governments are genuinely elected, whoever was incumbent over the last 2 or 3 years has lost in some cases as a center left government, In Britain it was a far right party that was in power, they got tossed out. So the election was completely normal, we've gotta get that out of the way. But on the other hand, in a deeper sense, you know, I'll try to be brief here, but in a deeper sense, I think the election was a major signpost, and I want to single out two points that not accidentally link to books that I've written. So I hope you'll forgive me, but on the other hand, you invited me to come, so I might as well, claim, I think accurately that, first of all Trump did not create an atomized, polarized, unequal, America. He was the consequence of it and he exploited it, that is to say, now let me be more specific, Bannon and Steve Bannon and JD Vance both have said publicly that they predicated their strategy for Trump winning on reading “Bowling Alone”. They said, oh, we read “Bowling Alone” and that we saw that's where Americans are isolated. And those isolated Americans are exactly the people who are going to be vulnerable to a more populist strategy. That's not Bob Putnam speaking, saying that “Bowling Alone” was their guide, that's them saying it was their guide. And moreover, that's what all the empirical research shows, that all empirical social research shows that controlling for anything else you like, low social capital in a place and we know what those places are. You can just look at my maps of where there's high social capital, low social capital - that's where Trump's doing well. And sometimes that's rural, sometimes it’s small towns, sometimes it's other demographics, but it's low social capital. And finally it's low social capital, particularly among working class people and this is something that some people have seen, but most people haven't seen yet, that the core, it was not a landslide, but it was a very sure landmark that the cleavages in America are steadily becoming more about social class, education especially. That is, people who have a college education versus everybody else, that's roughly one third, roughly one third of Americans have a college education, and they're doing quite well and they vote for Democrats. But the other two thirds of America aren't doing quite well, they've been left behind, they know it. They've been left behind in every possible way. Their kids have less chance of upward mobility than my children and grandchildren have and probably I'm guessing that most of the people in this audience are themselves college graduates. And that means good for you're in the upper third of Americans. I and your kids are almost guaranteed to do well, but there's another two thirds of us, of our fellow citizens who have been screwed. That's a technical, social, scientific term. They're less healthy, they die younger, they're less happy, of course, but they also have less material well-being. And they're not seen by us. It's not just that they're less well off, they think we're sneering at them. And that's why Hillary Clinton's reference to them as deplorables, that was the worst possible thing she could have said, because they're not deplorable, there are fellow citizens who, through no fault of their own, have not through no fault of their own, have not gotten this college degree that is a ticket to success. So I think the outcome of the election was normal, but very dangerous, not because of Trump, or at least not only because of Trump, but because of these underlying social changes that are driving us in a very unhelpful populist direction. And Trump is not the cause of this, he's the result of this. And when he goes, we're still going to have that problem. So American democracy is in danger, not directly from Trump, but from the things that brought us Trump. Does that make sense?
Jim Ellis ’91 Yeah. I think, pointing out Trump, I guess what we would have called him and the government department epi-phenomenal that he's, you know, a symptom of something greater and certainly, leveraged a lot and his people clearly leveraged, you know, a diagnosis that was grounded in part in your research, to try to supply people that they thought were able to be mobilized with what they needed. And it obviously worked enough to at least win a squeaker of an election.
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 Yeah. That's right.
Jim Ellis ’91 Yeah, I think this is a good point to move on to questions from the alumni audience. I think the first question, actually, I want to combine a couple similar questions from Gene Sonn, Leonard Nakamura and Katherine Applegate from class 57. I think Gene, you’re class of 95. All three of you have asked a similar question, so I'm going to kind of combine it together. And essentially it's about the role of virtual communities and to some extent, social media. Obviously, we're connecting with the Swarthmore community via virtual means for some of us who are either geographically isolated or have particular interests that are not we're not able to get together with like minded individuals. Is there a way that we can leverage online communities to fill in some of the gaps, or is it, you know, even if it's just having online communities occasionally meeting in person, but are there other things that we can do? Again, thinking back on your research about what it is about being in a group that builds capital, social capital, being in a city, if it's, it's heterogeneous. Oftentimes the online groups are pretty homogenous. And there are little rabbit holes that you go down, but is there a way that we can make this work, given the constraints of our technology and given what the tools that we have to work with?
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 Yeah, I got it. And as you can imagine, that's probably the single most often question on this. And, one way of phrasing that, I'm just going to use shorthand is, is Facebook better or worse than bowling teams? By which I mean are face to face groups better or worse than social media? And, I'll summarize that debate very quickly. That's not exactly the way you framed it, but I'm going to get to the way you framed it in a second. And when social media were invented, everybody immediately thought, you actually, you it's hard to read all those things people said that this was going to be, world altering, that everybody is going to be able to become friends with everybody else in the world, and universal peace will break out. And that lasted among enthusiasts almost a decade - that people thought that social media, that began while Facebook was invented, I think about roughly 2006, and for at least 5 or 6 years, that was the predominant view. The science was always much more skeptical and the science said, if you're just doing a comparison of social media connections, your connections you have on social media to your in person real friendships, there's no question that real friendships are somewhat better. For example, it's clear, this is part of the title of this movie, it's clear that the more friends you have, the longer you live. That's actually astonishingly true, but it’s not true that the more Facebook friends you have, the longer you live. There's just nothing like that. Facebook friends don't have anything like the effect that real friends have on your health and on everything else. I can tell you exactly when the rest of the world recognized what the science was saying and that is November 25th, 2000. I'm sorry, 2020, November 25th, 2020, which was Thanksgiving of the year of Covid and everybody suddenly realized that Zooming with grandma was not the same thing as hugging grandma. Or vice versa, Zooming your grandchildren is not the same thing as hugging your grandchildren. And so if that were the choice - face to face for real, I'm not saying that, I'm sorry, face to face or virtual - I'm not saying that social media are actually evil. To some extent they are evil. But if you had to make that choice, choose face to face. But that's wrong. And I want to use a metaphor here. An alloy is a mixture of two different metals, stick with me for a moment, Jim, sometimes metaphors work for me, and I hope this will work for you. You take, I've forgotten, you take copper and you put them together, and you mix them up and heat them or something. And you get brass, maybe, or bronze, I can't remember, let's say brass. But the relevant point is that brass is different from either of the characteristics. You can’t, I’m not just summarizing the characteristics of brass and the characteristics, I'm sorry, the characteristics of copper and the characteristics of tin - you get something new. Most of our social networks, most of your social networks, and most of my social lives today are alloys because almost all of us - the people that we know face to face, we're also emailing with or facing or messaging with or seeing on zoom. This woman sitting right there, this is Rosemary, the famous Rosemary, who is the star actually of the movie. I should say the one reason to see the movie is to see Rosemary who really is a star in this movie. She and I see each other a lot, but she has an office in a different room, and it happens a lot, including this evening, that I would send her a message, when I want to talk to her. When you walk into the room, I just send her an email or a, you know, a text message or something and all of us are like that. What I am trying to say is, there are our networks. Almost all of our networks are allies, but not all our allies are the same.
So here's the question and it's the question you ask me, you know, there are these three fellow alumni of ours ask - are there ways in which we can use the advantages of face to face-ness combine the advantages or meld the advantages of face-to-face-ness with the advantages of social media. And there are, it's certainly not true that all of them all social media have that possibility, but there are some that clearly do. For example, if you have even just a listserv, that's so old fashioned, but I mean even certainly a social media site that can actually, with your neighbors as we do here, really happen to be living in a, in a condo. And, and and it's so that's really easy. It's an alloy that enables us to be closer to the other people in our building, the other people in this condo. And it's certainly simpler than trying to wait and see if you can catch them in the elevator. But it also builds a sense of community. So that's what I'm trying to illustrate, that there are positive… And I want to say just one more thing. I know this is being recorded. But I'm hoping that Facebook will not sue me. A couple of years ago, Facebook invited me out to California to talk about social capital. They wanted to know how they could be positive, how they could contribute to social capital, or so they said. Wonderful time I had out there. And Facebook has a lot of really smart engineers. And one of them said to me privately, you know, Bob, we know how to use, he didn't use the word alloy, but he was trying to say, we know how to make Facebook part of a really productive alloy that encourages face to face, but also, has the advantages of, you know, a social network, I mean, a social media place. But we don't do that. In fact, we do the reverse because it turns out that if we try to get people angry at each other, our revenue goes up. So now that's the part that if Facebook happens to hear this, they may try to sue me, or maybe not. Maybe they don't. Maybe they think I'm not that important, but that's the fact. What's wrong? And so now where have I gotten here? What I've gotten to saying is it's not a technical problem. The question you asked me, how can we not use this language, but how can we get productive alloys? How can we use how can we combine face to face-ness and social media? That is not a technical problem. We do know how to do that. It's an economic business problem. Because as long as the high tech companies use the business model they do now, which is to sell products, sell advertising, by getting us angry at each other, it's going to go, it's going to keep going the other direction. It's not a technical problem. It's fundamentally a political problem, more than you want to know, maybe, but I want to make sure I hit hard on that basic problem. The basic fact.
Jim Ellis ’91 But I guess it's a good news, bad news story that we have the potential to leverage technology in a better way than we're doing now, but, you know, there certainly are some barriers that are pretty large, right? I do want to move on to another question. This one actually comes from David Halpern and it's a question I know that you'll appreciate given your background as a comparative-ist. What other industrialized countries have done a good job with social cohesion? Do you think mandatory community service of some kind, not necessarily military, would help? Israel may be an example of this or a country like Singapore. What do you think about that? Whether, you know, first of all, who does a good job of this and what can we learn? And you did allude to National Service a little bit earlier, but maybe you can say a little more about whether that is a top down thing, but maybe it's a catalyst, to prime the pump at a time when we might need external assistance.
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 Well, you're asking your, our colleagues are asking good questions. But they all tend to be complicated and long and I'll try to be short. It is true that some countries have a little more social cohesion than others. Actually, across nationally, America historically has been more connected than other countries. That's what Tocqueville said when he wrote about us in the 1830s that America was a nation of connectors. At the moment, we're not. But it's been within living memory, my memory, you know, in the 60s and 70s, America was very well connected and got along and we didn't have polarization and also that was America. So it's important to keep distinguishing, distinguish between what's crossed nationally, true or not true and what's true across time. And I've been focusing when I write about “Bowling Alone” and so and I'm talking about change over time in America. And there the question is are other countries facing the same problem that we are? That is, regardless of what their level is, are they having the same ups and downs? And of course, I'm not trying to claim here that the whole world is beating to one metronome, and so that every society in the world is going to be going up at the same time. But it is true that most places in Europe, like most places in the world, including Israel and Singapore, both of which I've studied, social capital, both of them are convinced that their degree of cohesion is much lower now than it was in the 60s. I mean, that's just as ours was much lower. So I could go on great to tell you, all you have to do is look at the newspapers in Israel. What is it looked like? Israel has as high levels of social cohesion. Not at all. I mean, there's huge differences in Israel between essentially between Netanyahu's side of the aisle and and the other, the more center leftists side of the aisle. And the story in Singapore is a little more complicated. But they do have a sense of I mean, I know because I spent time there doing research in Singapore, they actually have a sense that over time they have the same problems that we do. Most other countries that I visit and I've visited Rosemary and I have visited probably 40 or 50 other countries around the world over the last 20 years talking about these same issues and hearing from people. Most countries in the world think they have much to learn from us. Not that we've solved the problem, but they think we're a little bit ahead of the problem, and maybe they can try to avoid it. So I don't think that there was some other. If we only looked at, I don't know, Iceland, we would discover that they don't have the problem. I've also been in Iceland and they think they have a problem too, meaning a problem, meaning recent decline in social connections. I do think that national service is really important. Community service is really important. And I've said that and it's partly, I don't think it's top down. I mean, I think there's, you know, up in New Hampshire where we live half the time, there's a, there's an active, community service group up there that has kids come. It's got what I call bridging social capital. It's not just local white kids from, from our part of New Hampshire, it's kids from all from different walks of life. And they come and they're in New Hampshire. A lot of their efforts are spent in, you know, old fashion, like the CCC in the New Deal that is there clearing trails and so on. So we can get up the mountain more easily. That's real community service. It does build an ethic of service, and it does create bridges across these lines of cleavage, racial and ethnic and political. So yes, I think it's a very good step in the right direction. And it's local. It's not just top down.
Jim Ellis ’91 Great. So we have another question, from Laura Cohen. I think class of 01. And she's asked about, when I hear nostalgia for the cordiality of our elected leaders in the mid 20th century, I always think about how homogenous those leaders were compared to the more representative, diverse leadership we have today. Obviously, we have a long way to go, but still. How much do you think of our devaluation of connecting with our neighbors is a response to our broadening inclusion of who has value in society? Iit's a lot easier to have unity, quote unquote, when you leave a lot of people out who don't feel like unifying.
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 Yeah, that's a very good question. And, Jim, I think I sent you a link to or you've got a link to an article that I wrote with my coauthor, Sharon Romney Garrett in The New York Times about this issue. And so this issue of race and how, well it's race and immigration and so on, and also gender, to some extent, all of the gender situation is not is not… when you look at the detail not so serious, I don't mean that it isn't that women have an increasing role in American society, but that's been true. Women have been gaining influence and power and leadership in America and steadily over the last 100 years or more. People think it's all about Betty Friedan, but it's not. I'm trying to summarize a lot of things, and I think many of these listeners will not. All you can do is read my book, “The Upswing”, and you'll see I address the question of gender inequality a lot. The racial issue is a more serious thing and I'm going to try to be really quick here about a very complicated issue. It is true that America has never, ever approached equality of condition for non-whites and whites, that's a true fact. And nothing I say contradicts that. However, people are often surprised and hear the data. This is the data given in the New York Times op ed that I mentioned. Most of the progress made toward greater equality between whites and non-whites in America in the 20th century, most of the progress made in the 20th century was made before the 1960s, before the civil rights revolution, that is, during that long period in which we were becoming more connected, we were also widening our sense of ‘we’. I know that people will find that a little hard to believe and I just look at the data, the gap between, let's say, blacks and whites in life expectancy or infant mortality or homeownership or income or college education or high school education, any of the standard measures of equality. Those gaps were narrowing between, roughly speaking, 1910 and 1965. And then they stopped narrowing and in other words, up till the middle 60s, we were gradually widening. Not perfectly, I've said it's never been perfect. We're gradually widening. Are we having a more inclusive sense of ‘we’. But then there was a backlash, a white backlash. And so since the 1960s, there's been no progress. Many young people came of age afterwards don't believe that and all I'm saying is just look at the data. For example, the ratio of white homeownership to nonwhite homeownership today is worse than it was at the time of the National, the whatever it was called the, racial, I've forgotten the name of the bill, but of the bill in 1965 that equalized, allegedly equalized access to homeownership among blacks and whites. We've been going backward since then, in the period that most people think we must have been getting better. And what makes it even worse? And again, I know that what I'm saying is somewhat controversial, but it's really important, but the data are clear on this, actually, increasingly, the axis of discrimination and of inequality in America is not defined by race, but is defined by social class. The article in the Washington Post that you referred to a little earlier, Jim, about, you know, how blacks, I mean, Democrats were losing votes among blacks in the inner city, I think it was the example you used. That's true because the class cleavages within racial groups are of increasing importance and the similarities are by race across class, another way to put it is the line of cleavages is increasingly between rich and poor whites or rich blacks and poor blacks. Remember when I say rich, I mean well-educated. Increasingly, people share interests as they see them and vote similarly with people who are like them in class terms, in educational terms, and not in racial terms. I recognize how controversial that may be, but it's my work and the work of a guy named Raj Chetty, it's all I don't say it's completely turned, but the axis of conflict in America, this is the most important thing that's happening in American politics today. The axis is shifting from being purely about race, as it was for a long time, to being more about social class. And if we don't recognize that, especially if Democrats don't recognize that we're in for a pickle. If we focus all of our attention on the racial differences and the symbolic differences and not enough on the material conditions of social class, we're in a pickle.
Jim Ellis ’91 Thank you. Unfortunately, we have dozens of great questions in the Q&A. I think we're up to 43 or so. And I think we're about at the end of our time. We have a minute or two for closing remarks. But again, thanks for everyone for their questions again as you may have noted, Bob mentioned that in ‘Join or Die’, there's a segment in the movie where they talk about how, being connected and whether it's a membership in group or having friends can add, some life to your, your time on this planet. So hopefully we've all gained at least, what, a couple months here. Bob. I don't know what the calculator, what the conversion rate is.
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 Your life expectancy, your chances of dying, your chance of dying it turns out are high. But your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group. That's a true fact. That is one. Now, since I first said it's been proved by many, many other scholars. So, you know, if you I don't know if just sitting in on a Zoom session quite counts, but go out and join a group and I promise you you'll cut in half your risk of dying over the next year.
Jim Ellis ’91 And it doesn't really matter the group, does it?
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 No, I mean, there's some I mean, I like singing groups, but and, and neighborhood groups are particularly good because you're likely to see them, you know, around the corner. But it's all good. Join, ‘Join or Die’.
Jim Ellis ’91 Well, I guess eventually. All right, I'd like to thank you, Bob, very much for sharing your time with us. I think we all learned quite a bit. And also to thank the Swarthmore alumni, Administrators of the college for helping make this possible. And also just a reminder of of how important Swarthmore has been to a lot of us and the community that, Swarthmore allows us to create, both within our class here and sometimes across class, whether it's Zoom sessions or an engagement with current students or alumni in job activities or other kind of outreach situations. So again, thanks for everyone for joining us. And, I hope you do get a chance to do that. And I think, Bob, you have a comment.
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 I only want to say, it's really easy to find me on email. Just Google Bob Putnam and you'll get right to my, you'll come right here. And I try to answer every single message I receive, I don't promise, there are 37 people there, and I'm not sure how quickly I can respond to all 37, but if you have questions or doubts about what I've said, or particularly if you're if you're skeptical about the last point I made about the the the declining, diminishing importance of race and increasing importance of class in American politics, by all means, get in touch with me and I'll try to at least explain myself. Thanks a lot and thanks a lot to Swarthmore for giving me this chance to to speak through a lot of other smart, well, not a lot of other, but a lot of smart, people. That's it's the culture of Swarthmore that is so damn important. It's based on the Society of Friends. Look, friends, it's all about friends.
Jim Ellis ’91 I'm glad Swarthmore figured it out before anyone else. So it's in the founding statement. With that, I wish everyone a good night. And thanks again. Thanks again, Bob, for your time.
Bob Putnam ’63 H’90 Thanks.
