University Times

Strong social networking has more to do with success in life in America than practically any other single predictor, according to a nationally known public policy expert who spoke here Sept. 23.

“Social capital, by which I mean social networks and the associated norms of trust among people — your connections to your friends, your parents and your family, your community and institutions — those turn out being incredibly important,” said Robert D. Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard.

Putnam spoke on “Social Capital and Equality,” delivering the Wherrett Lecture, sponsored by the Center for Metropolitan Studies, part of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

“For the last 10-15 years, I and many others have been working with the concept of social capital, which simply refers to social connections with other people and their effects,” Putnam told a packed house in the University Club.

Having tools and skills, and the training and education to use them, are important, he said, “but so too is the social context in which you live and work. If you have the good fortune to live in a community or work in an organization in which people are pitching in and helping out one another, you can get a lot more done, you can be a lot more productive than you can be with the same tools and training if you have the misfortune of working in a social environment where you can’t count on others to help you out.”

Robert D. Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard

The maxim that social capital has considerable value has a broad range of individual and societal implications, Putnam noted, including affecting lifetime income and health, crime rates, community cohesiveness, the quality of the educational system and, especially, an effect on economic equality and income distribution.

First of all, social networks have great value to the people in them. One example is that most Americans get their jobs more often because of whom they know rather than what they know, Putnam said. “Most get their jobs from hearing about a job from a friend or a friend-of-a-friend or from somebody who knows you or knows of you,” he said. “In other words, and I hate to say this because I’m a professor, it’s less important what you learn here [at Pitt] than who you meet here.”

In addition, strong social interaction in neighborhoods has been shown to reduce crime rates sharply. “Criminologists have taught us the lowest crime rates are in neighborhoods based on how many neighbors know one another’s first name,” he said.

Health is affected as well, he said. “There are health effects on your life expectancy from your friendship networks. Holding constant all the other things — whether you drive, whether you smoke, how old you are, your gender — your chances of dying in the next 12 months are cut in half by joining one group, and cut in three-quarters by joining two groups,” Putnam said research has shown. “As a risk factor for premature death, social isolation — not having many friends, not knowing your neighbors — is as great a risk factor as smoking,” he said.

Putnam noted that not all social networks necessarily lead to positive outcomes, citing Al-Qaeda and the Ku Klux Klan as examples of organizations that share generalized reciprocity but put it to malevolent use. “So social networks can be pro-social or anti-social programs,” he said. However, the vast majority of social networks, characterized by trust and reciprocity, aid the common good.

The larger question becomes: What is the connection between social capital and equality? Putnam said, adding that most research into that question has been misguided in its assumptions.

“You can imagine a community being high or low on social capital, that is the strength of the community, and high or low on equality, that is, economic distribution equality,” he said. “How are they connected?”

In a nutshell, he said, the answer is that economic equality and social capital, or social cohesion, are correlated very strongly. “Because America over the last 30-40 years is becoming increasingly a less-equal place, and if we have rapid reductions in social capital and much less social cohesion, most people assume it’s the inequality that drove the decline of cohesiveness. I want to argue that it’s the other way around: The decline in social capital affects the economics.”

Putnam said one might ask: Who cares?

“The answer is: You should care a ton. Because if you want to fix a problem, if you’re worried about economic inequality in America, should you try to attack the inequality problem directly, assuming then people will feel better about one another, or do you need to get them to feel better about one another in order to get the support policies that will reduce the gap between rich and poor?” Putnam pointed out.

“From a practical public policy point of view, this is a big deal, because there is a strong correlation between economic inequality and social cohesiveness at every level of society” — globally, nationally, regionally and locally, he maintained.

One measure of social capital is the extent to which people trust other people, he noted, something Putnam has studied.

Brazil, for example, has a very wide gap between rich and poor and has a corresponding distrust among its citizens, he said. “Brazilians say they don’t trust each other. When asked, only about 10 percent said they do trust others.”

On the other extreme is Sweden, which has among the most equal distribution of wealth of any country in the world, and the highest percentage of its population — 65 percent — who said they trusted their fellow citizens, Putnam said.

“In America in the 1950s, we looked more like Sweden is today, with about 60-65 percent of Americans saying they trusted people. That figure is down to about 25 percent today. Also, in my lifetime, we’ve become much less equal economically,” he said.

On the national level, other research shows that within the United States, Mississippi and Louisiana are the two most unequal states in income distribution and also the lowest in terms of social capital. Citizens in Vermont, North Dakota and South Dakota, which have the narrowest gap in income levels, also have the highest levels of social connections, Putnam said, adding that Pennsylvania is near the middle in both categories.

“But if we look at these trends across time, look at the same place over time, you discover a clear pattern of the relationship between social capital and equality,” Putnam said.

To demonstrate that claim, he showed a graph that depicted the percentage of the American population involved in groups and organizations mapped over the 20th century.

“This number — the more kids who belong to the Scouts, the more women who belong to women’s groups, the more doctors who belong to the AMA, the more men who belong to clubs like the Elks or Lions Club, and so on, continued to go up over the 20th century from 1900 to the 1960s, except during the Great Depression, when memberships in those kinds of groups declined,” only to shoot upward again in the 1940s and ’50s, Putnam said.

“Since the 1960s, there has been a steady decline in this social capital measure,” Putnam added.

“If you chart the trends in income equality in America,” almost the identical pattern repeats, he said. The gap between rich and poor also began to widen in the late-1960s and has continued to widen right through the first decade of the 21st century, he said. “Your jaw should drop when you see a graph like this.”

But there is one extremely important feature of the analysis, Putnam maintained. “Which started going down first? If you look at that graph, you can see the first thing to decline was social capital. When you measure equality versus social capital across space and not across time, most people assume the hard facts of the economy drive the soft facts of community. But this shows the complete inconsistency of that story. Why? Because we didn’t start becoming more unequal until about 10 years after we stopped connecting with one another,” he said.

If his conclusion is correct, the public policy implications are immense, he said, “because it means we have to solve the social capital problem before we get to the inequality problem. Maybe we should pay attention to how we can restore a sense of connection to one another, then we can work together on ways to reduce the income gap.”

There is one large-scale historic example where increasing the social capital actually created more economic equality, Putnam said: World War II.

“It’s well known that big wars, or at least big wars that you win, cause a burst of connection, a sense that we’re all in this together. In 1941, Pearl Harbor was a huge unifying event. The group of people who lived through World War II, all their lives have felt an intense level of social connection as a result,” Putnam said.

The result included booming membership in groups like the P.T.A., he noted. Philanthropy increased, blood drives were more successful, voting participation skyrocketed.

“What we see in that group of people is that all their lives they have believed that there shouldn’t be big gaps between rich and poor, because we’re all in this together. They were voting for parties that wanted to minimize that gap, peaking in the voting for the (1960s-era) Great Society legislation,” Putnam said.

“The Great Society, the war on poverty and other efforts for racial equality tried to minimize the gap. That was all being driven by a generation that lived through a big boom in social capital. But their kids and their grandkids, not having lived through that experience, are much more likely to put the emphasis not on the we but on the me. That’s the point when our inequality began shooting sky-high,” he said.

“In that case, it’s quite clear what came first. The attack on Pearl Harbor had the effect of creating a jolt in social capital. And that jolt induced people to prefer a society where people were more equal. In turn, that lowered the gap between rich and poor in America, which was at its lowest in 1970. And that generation with those values of being aware of the we — not that they were intrinsically more saintly people — but they had been exposed to an experience that made them aware of the link,” Putnam said.

“As soon as they stopped being the dominant force in the electorate, we saw inequality begin to rise again and it’s getting worse and worse even as we speak,” he said.

“We’re now in a vicious circle between declining equality, which has an effect on social capital, and declining social capital, which has an effect on equality. For the generation of younger people, it will be a crucially important public policy issue. We didn’t get here overnight. It will take a long time to get out of it, but if we don’t, America will be an extremely different place, a society of me, just me.”

—Peter Hart