Centers on America's civic unraveling through the journey of scientist Robert Putnam, whose research on the decline in A | dG1fNG9EVmY4c09HOXc
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00This is Bob. Bob's a big fan of clubs.
00:05I belong to everything.
00:07That's my high school bowling team. I'm the tall one in the middle.
00:10And this is a film about why you should join one.
00:13And how Bob discovered that the fate of America depends on it.
00:19It's Harvard professor and award-winning writer Robert Putnam.
00:22You've been described as the poet laureate of civil society.
00:25Robert D. Putnam.
00:27Deepening our understanding of community in America.
00:30He made people pay attention to a concept that most people had never paid attention to.
00:34Social capital.
00:35Social capital.
00:36Social capital.
00:37Social networks have value.
00:40I'd like to call on professor Robert Putnam who gave us the concept of social capital.
00:45The number of people who know one another's first name,
00:47the number of people who take part in community organizations,
00:50the level of trust and reciprocity in the community.
00:52The places that have better government are the places that have a long history of social networks and social capital.
00:59Your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group.
01:05Bowling Alone. Where'd you get the title?
01:08I happened to run into a friend who owned a bowling alley.
01:11And he said, gosh Bob, you don't know it, but you've stumbled onto the major economic problems facing my industry.
01:17Because although more Americans are bowling than ever before, bowling is up in America.
01:21Bowling in leagues, bowling in teams is off by about 60%.
01:26Everything that reflects connections with other people are going down.
01:29How many times last year did you go to church?
01:31Down.
01:32How many times did you go to a dinner party?
01:34Down.
01:35How many times last year did you go to a club meeting?
01:37In barely a couple of decades, half all the civic infrastructure in America had simply vanished.
01:43It's equivalent to saying half all the roads in America just disappeared.
01:46Everyone has a feeling something's happening, but then he's got charts.
01:50To actually show what's actually happening.
01:52Whatever's happening to people's sense of mutual obligation, to their understanding about the common good,
01:57to their willingness to trust their neighbor.
01:59It's no longer going on because people are bowling alone.
02:01The book Bowling Alone, which you're familiar with by Robert Putnam.
02:04The activity may still be going on, but there's no social capital being built.
02:08That decreases the trust we have in one another.
02:10How lonely Americans are, how divided.
02:12You know, he may have been onto something.
02:15We have to see loneliness as a threat to our health security and to our overall national security.
02:20We are trying something that hasn't been done before, which is growing and sustaining a multiracial democracy.
02:25Politics and policy ultimately depends on the social health of our country.
02:30Organization, connections with other people is the only way you get big change.
02:35Democracy is a pain in the ass.
02:37If it was just easy, no one would have to go to a meeting and it would all just be fair and easy.
02:42You should join, your kids should join.
02:44And if there's not an organization you want to join, create one.
02:47America doesn't have to be the kind of America that you've lived in your whole life.
02:51You could decide to change history.