Week 8: The collapse

Putnam's measurements of decline, the arguments about what caused it, and the harder question of how you would know.

19 April 2027

More Americans were bowling than ever before, and league bowling had collapsed. Putnam finds that shape everywhere he looks — clubs, unions, churches, committee membership, card games, having friends over for dinner. The behaviour survived; the together part of it did not.

His causes are still argued about. Television, suburban sprawl, the pressures of two-career households, and generational replacement, which is the one that has held up best: the decline is substantially a matter of one cohort ageing out and the next never taking up the habit.

Two cautions, because this is a book that is easy to quote badly. First, the associational forms Putnam counts are specific ones, and a decline in Elks Lodge membership is not self-evidently a decline in sociality. Second, his data end before the internet arrived properly, so the confident extrapolation you have heard people make from it is not in the book.

What survives the cautions is the method, and that is what Thursday uses. The serious question is not whether things got worse. It is how you would know — what you would have to count, what records exist, and what you would accept as evidence either way. Putnam’s answer runs to 500 pages. Yours runs to an hour in an archive and a number you are willing to defend.