Robert Putnam
Appearances
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Let me see if I can explain it this way. If you see people regularly and you're good friends, I don't mean intimate friends, but you have a good friendship, much less a deeper friendship, what tends to evolve is a norm of reciprocity. That is, I'll do this for you now.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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without expecting something back immediately from you, because down the road, we'll see each other at choir practice, and you'll do something for me. I'll do this for you now without expecting something back.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And indeed, if everybody in the community is connected, I'll do something for somebody who I don't actually know, because if other people see that I'm cheating him, they won't play games with me. So in other words, everybody learns that the people in this town are nice to each other. Wouldn't you love to live in a place where people were nice to each other?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And moreover, and this is the main point of Bowling Alone, we learned when we carried those ideas back to the United States, that that has changed over time. There have been periods in American history when we did have connections with other people. I grew up in a small town in Ohio. in the late 1950s, and nobody locked their door.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And when I tell my children and grandchildren that, they think Grandpa's lying. But no, in that period, and it wasn't about race. There were black kids. I played football. There's a picture on the cover of Bowling Alone of me and my bowling league. When I was in junior high school, and there are three white guys, I'm the tall, skinny one in the middle, and there are two black guys.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And so this was not about race. I mean, it wasn't bounded. This trust and reciprocity was not bounded then there by race. I'm not saying race was not a problem. Of course it was. But I mean, in terms of this, in a small town in the 1950s, people left their door unlocked. And that's because of what I and my jargon call social capital.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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So all I'm saying is not that every single person in America has lost trust or has become untrustworthy, but on average, and we've now shown this to be true all over America, people are less connected and therefore less trustworthy than they used to be. There are differences across America. And the places that are still relatively high in social connection are somewhat more trustworthy.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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I'm sorry, I'm going to tell you more social science than you want to know. People do an interesting study. They drop letters on the street with money in them. Sealed, but with money in them and addressed. And then they ask, in any given town or a neighborhood, how many of those letters are actually put in the mailbox so the owner can get their money back?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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There are cities in America where your odds of getting your money back, if you drop it in an envelope, drop it on the street, are zero. And there are places, this is hard to believe, there are places in America where if you drop an envelope with money in it, you're 80% likely to get the money back.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Actually, he would say, Bob, I've been over this. There's a really funny New York Times interview in which the New York Times interview was trying to say, I'm New York Times reporter, pretty well connected. I know Robert Putnam. And Barack just says, no, it's Bob.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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There's been virtually no decline in bowling itself. But it used to be that people bowled in teams, in leagues. And there has been a complete collapse of team bowling, of league bowling. And when I told a friend of mine that, he said, oh, you mean we're bowling alone? And I thought, that's a good title for a book. If ever I write a book about this, it turns out to be a good title.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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But what is the difference? What is the experiential difference? Yes. Christiana, have you ever bowled alone?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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So actually, I know where every bowling alley in London is because whenever I've gone over there, I'm selling... selling books, every journalist thought their clever idea would be to interview me in a bowling alley. So I can take you to every bowling alley in central London. In bowling, in bowling in a league, there are five people on a team and two teams are playing against each other.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And how well you do depends on how well the team does, not how well you individually do. And at any given time, two people are up at the lane throwing the ball down. But the other eight people are sitting in a semicircle at the back of the alleys.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And they're mostly talking, you know, and they're talking about what was on TV last night or they're talking about occasionally they're talking about, you know, the local schools or, you know, whether there should a bond issue should be passed to cover the costs of the new sewer system or whatever. Right. And now I'm going to suddenly change that description.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Occasionally, they're having a conversation about public civic life. That's highfalutin for saying they just got into a discussion with people they know well. Remember, these are people they see every week. And they know how to interpret what the people say. They're not total strangers. because they ball in a league and with other members of the team, but they're also real human beings.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And so the reason I decided to use that as a metaphor is that does say, here are people who know each other. If you're in a team, they know each other. And they're not doing politics, but occasionally it helps with the politics. Does that make sense? I mean, occasionally they're able to have a conversation that's a kind of a responsible conversation.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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It's not just two guys yelling at each other or two gals yelling at each other. It's two people who are going to have to get along because the next week they're going to be back in the same bowling alley. And so it seemed to me a useful way of describing how bowling in a league, in a team... it's not just fun. I mean, it's important to emphasize this. I really wish I'd done emphasize this more.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Social capital can't just be eat your spinach. It's got to be fun too. I mean, it's, it's, it's so, and that's why I use the example of bowling leagues. It's not saying, Oh, go to a good government meeting. Well, good mother, good government meeting. It's got to be fun. And bowling is fun, but it's also a little bit like a good government meeting.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Is that I may be exaggerating here, but that's, that's where the idea of bowling is. A Bowling Together came and then the opposite of that was we are just less opportunity for encountering people that we know well to talk occasionally about public affairs.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Remarkably, I've got good data on how people spend every hour of their day going back to the 1960s. Would you believe that's 60-year time trend? Wow. And it's very interesting. Invite me back for another two hours and I'll talk about how our lives have changed. For example, back in the day, in the 60s, we slept, the average American slept 7.5 hours a day.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And that average is exactly 7.5 hours today. There's been no change on average. Some people speak more. That's impressive, though, still. But here's the complicated part, actually. We're spending less time at work than we used to. Less time at work. No ways. So less time at work. So what do we do with our extra time? All of it is spent in front of screens.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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There's been a steady, steady long-term rise in the amount of time we spend in front of screens. And the most recent data, you might think, well, okay, it used to be screens like television and now it's screens like, you know.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Yeah, yeah, no, but it isn't. We're actually spending more time watching TV than we used to. And we're adding to that. I now don't. Quote me exactly, because I've got the data. I just don't have it in front of me at this moment. I didn't know you were going to ask me this question. We've added, since the advent of social media, another two hours a day. Two hours a day.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And yet we're spending less time in the presence of other people. I mean, the data are just the worst you could imagine. We've got more free time. We do have more free time. Wow. And we've spent more than all of that free time. In front of a screen. Damn.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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But of course, I want people to watch this podcast. This is a different kind.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Christiana, you ask lots of really good questions and they're all complicated. And I'm going to try.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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about 20 years ago, well, maybe not quite that, 15 years ago, maybe, I was trying to run a seminar. I was running a seminar of people. And the idea was to bring people from very, very diverse backgrounds together Once every three months for a couple of years to try to figure out how to solve the problem of social isolation in America and its political consequences. It's not just loneliness.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Did you say Robert? No, it's Bob, please.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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I mean, if I get a call, a phone call, and the person says, Robert, I just hang up right away. If they know me, it's a nice screener I use as answering the phone. Okay, Bob, Bob. Okay, I want to say a couple of things about social media and virtual connections, and how they compare to real face-to-face connections, what some people call IRL, in real life.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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When social media first came out, everybody thought it was you know, unbelievably great. World peace was going to break out. We would all have, and we would all be friends with each other because we were all connecting across. That always at that time seemed a little strange to me, but the academic work about that's true was always fascinating.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Join or Die with Robert Putnam [VIDEO]
more skeptical than the people who are making money by getting us onto their websites. Yeah, of course. But the real question at that point, if I can put it this way, was, is Facebook better or worse than bowling leagues? I'm using that as a synonym, I mean, just as labels for those two things.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And then he at one point said, well, OK, maybe Putnam is right, but we're going to create a new kind of Facebook that's going to be even super dandier. And it's going to be wonderful, even better than bowling leagues. But the academic research, I repeat, was always skeptical about that. But then came a terrible natural experiment, COVID. But now I promised you I was going to get more complicated.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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But I can tell that Christiane likes to deal with complications, so I'm going to... I have so far been phrasing this problem as if the choice we had was between either face-to-face or social media, right? Yes. But actually, that's not true. Almost all of our networks today are simultaneously face-to-face and internet-based.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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My wife, Rosemary... and I do see each other a lot every day. That is, there is a face-to-face relationship there, but she has a different office than mine. And astonishingly, much of the time I sent her an email or sent her a text and she responds, it's not, we have one set of relationships that are face-to-face and a different set of relationships that are internet-based. They're the same.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And I want to use a metaphor here, if I can. In chemistry, we have the idea of an alloy is a mixture of two different base chemicals. like tin and copper, and you stir it and heat it and so on, and you get something that is neither tin or copper, but I never can remember, bronze or brass or something like that. Right. And brass is different from either the tin or the copper. Okay, so far so good?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Now what I'm saying is all of our networks today are alloys. So the question really is... How can we get an alloy that has the benefits of both? That is to say, could we find a way to create a network that has the advantages that the internet has of not depending upon space, but that has the advantages of face-to-faceness, namely you can actually get together and cooperate with somebody.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Do we know how to do that? And the answer is we sure do. We know how to, for example, there are networks that are that are internet-based for neighborhoods. And it's easy to contact the other people. Just whenever you get the idea, you want to borrow a rake or something, you just send out an email. But then they're also in the neighborhood. So I could go and get the- You go get the rake in person.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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It's also affects, as you said, and we're going to come back to that, the chances of democracy surviving. We had a big multidimensional matrix. We want to make sure we had enough men and women and blacks and Asians and Latinos and whites. whites and old and young and rich and poor and business and labor, et cetera. You can imagine this multidimensional scheme.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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So it's not a technical problem. So why don't we have lots of these things? It sounds like we're wonderful to have this, right? And it turns out the real answer is these big companies. They know how to do it. They know, and I know this because I've talked personally, they invited me, Bob Putnam, out to wherever it was in Silicon Valley to talk about social capital. Amazing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And we had a wonderful conversation. They clearly knew what I meant, and they knew the difference between face-to-face and connected, and they knew how to use, they conveyed the idea that they knew how to... Oh, they knew how to use their tools to get people to connect in person. Yes, but why don't they do that? Answer...
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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When it's much better for their business line if people fight than if they cooperate.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And we got it all filled, but we had one box that we had not yet filled for a young black community organizer. And my son, who had been at Harvard Law School, said, you know, you ought to check out this really bright guy I know who I play basketball with. Because it turns out my son, this is going to make you believe in the conspiracy theory of American life.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Yeah. And there's wonderful data on that. If you were worried about crime in your neighborhood and you had one of two strategies, you could have a lot more cops on the beat, pay cops more and, you know, arm them and so on. Or you could know one another's first name. The second is the more important crime-fighting strategy.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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That is, it's more effective to have eyes on the street from your neighbors, just as you're saying. And what I'm talking about is big, huge studies that have done this experimentally.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Yeah, well, at any rate, I don't want to interrupt this conversation Except that I hope we have a chance to go back to Bowling Alone and explain and say why it explains Trump.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Right. Remember, bowling alone said 25 years ago that we had been for 25 years. At that point, had been... It'd been 25 years we've been going downhill in terms of our social connections. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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My son happened to be on the Harvard Law Review with Barack. And they played basketball together. Wow. He said, well, he's a community organizer out in Chicago. I said, bingo, that sort of fits the right matrix. So we got this guy here. He's one of the youngest people in the group. And he's very ambitious. It's clear he's very ambitious. But he's also cute. He's a little bit like the mascot.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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That's right. And that had been happening for 25 years. Now, 25 years later, we've gone back and done the same study, and it turns out nothing has changed. It's still going downhill. Despite all of my pleading and talking with people, it's going downhill, which now means for 50 years we've been going downhill. Wow. Donald Trump did not cause that. And this is the main thing I want to say here.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Donald Trump is not the cause of our problems. He's the symptom of our problems. American democracy had these problems long before Trump appeared on the scene. And most importantly, we will have those same problems leading to faltering democracy when he's no longer on the scene. Donald Trump exploited this. And I mean that, so this is Bob Putnam saying, you know, Donald Trump,
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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exploited what I had discovered. That's not just me. Steve Bannon has said, I could show you the quote. Well, we were trying to figure out how we could get Donald Trump elected. And then we read this book by this crazy guy, Putnam, about bowling alone.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Yeah. He's quoting, you can find, I mean, later on.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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They said, effectively, as I said in the book, but I wasn't doing it, You have all these isolated people. They're ripe for having a kind of populist come to power and say, you're all unhappy and isolated. Trust me, I'm the one. Does that sound familiar? Does that sound like he's the guy?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Well, that's what Bowling Alone said, and I didn't act on it. Maybe I should have. Maybe I could have been president. You could have been president. President Bob Putnam. Yeah. And J.D. Vance has said something very similar to this. There's lots of empirical evidence. I won't bore you with all the data.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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There's lots of data that's saying the strongest predictor, actually, of support for Donald Trump, of places that support Donald Trump and people that support Donald Trump is social isolation. Now we're not just talking hypothetically, oh, it'd be nice to have more people joining clubs. We're saying the pickle that we're in as a country is precisely due to the fact that we're
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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I'm not trying to say we ought to reconstruct bowling leagues, but it's got to be something that brings us face to face. Is that making sense, Trevor?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Like a mascot in this group. And so, you know, like in a summer camp, people develop nicknames. And our nickname for him was the governor because we thought, what a joke. This guy's ambitious and he thinks he's going to eventually become governor of Illinois. This is a guy who five years later is the president of the United States. So you weren't wrong. Governor was a joke.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Or is that even necessary? Well, yes, I think it is necessary. There are different kinds of social capital, different kinds of networks. And one important distinction is between what I call bridging social capital, that is ties that link you to people unlike yourself. And bonding social capital. Bonding social capital are the ties that link you to people just like yourself.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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So my bonding social capital are my friends with other elderly, white, male, Jewish professors. That's my bonding social capital. And my bridging social capital are my ties to people of a different generation. I have a little bit of bridging that I rely on heavily across generations because I've got my grandchildren.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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There was something else that's important about him. Yes. You know he's very smart, but he's also, at least he can be very... quiet. So, and this is a group of big eagles. And so the first, you know, we gather on Friday night, Friday night and all day, much of Saturday up until lunch, everybody else was doing what we called station identification.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And I'm not saying, this is important, bridging good, bonding bad, because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to reflect your bonding social capital. That's a little bit what Christiana was earlier saying, the people who would really take care of her, who would bring her chicken soup or the equivalent would be Bonding social capital.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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I'm saying bonding social capital is not necessarily bad, but bridging social capital is crucial for a modern, diverse society like ours. Bridging across racial, across age, across gender, across party and so on. So far, so good. Right, right, right. But bridging is harder to build than bonding social capital. My grandmother knew that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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My grandmother said to me, Bobby, birds of a feather flock together. Right. She didn't think I'd understand. What she meant was, Bobby, bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. But she didn't think I'd understand that, which is why she used the avian metaphor about birds. But that's the basic point. So here's the challenge.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Much of Trump's support, it draws from different kinds of demographic groups, of course, but it's bonded heavily on politics and not bridging at all. And so now I'm back at the question, why isn't Putnam saying he wants lots of Ku Klux Klan? And the answer is, I don't want lots of Ku Klux Klan because it's bonding and I want a lot of more bridging. Does that make sense to what I'm saying?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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That is, they were telling us how important they were and why their views were the most important. And Obama kept silent during all of that. And then after lunch, he'd say, you know, I've been listening to this. I've been listening, especially to Susan and to Josh, and they think they disagree. But I think underneath Susan and Josh agree. And they did.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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So this is, sorry, you didn't invite me on here to cite all my books, but I'm going to cite yet another book.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Okay, I want to talk about The Growing Gap Between Rich Folks and Poor Folks in America. And the book was called Our Kids. The book was focused on a whole series of charts and graphs that showed the gap between rich kids and poor kids growing. And I'll say more about what I meant by that. But in particular, by rich, I didn't mean literally having lots of money. The book is based on
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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The upper third of American society, which is basically college-educated folks.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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And the lower two-thirds of America, which is basically people who didn't graduate from four years of college. And what that book showed is a growing gap also among their parents. Those two groups are increasingly... They don't marry one another. It used to be that there were people would marry across these class lines, but they don't now.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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They used to be that they would live in the same neighborhood, but they were increasingly living in not racially segregated, but class segregated homes. And what I'm trying to say is that class lens... was when I wrote the book, at least as important as the racial lens. And it's becoming, relatively speaking, the class lens is becoming more important
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Relative to the racial lens, the plight facing working class whites is the same as the plight facing working class blacks. That's what Bernie Sanders noticed. He was talking about everybody. It's down, not at the bottom, meaning the poorest of the poor, but the lower two thirds of the country. Right. And.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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I think that the Democratic Party, this may be controversial, I think the Democratic Party has got to start focusing more on those class differences and less exclusively on the racial or other identity issues. Now, it sounds like I'm saying let's forget about black folks, and I'm not saying that.
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I'm saying let's really focus on working class black folks because they're the ones who are falling further and further behind.
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And everybody around the table was open-mouthed. How did he see that? We've been all sitting through the same conversation. And the whole conversation was polarized in many different ways. But he saw a way in which he could frame an issue in ways that would be productive for the whole group going forward. Oh, wow. He's able to see through... All this, you know, all the fighting.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Yes. And there's certainly... Much more likely to be socially isolated. I mean, they've got at least two strikes against them. Well, maybe three. A, they're more socially isolated. Okay. And B, they're poorer financially. And C, they have got less education. So all those folks are... in a pickle. And what that means is it's important to just understand the math. This is simple, simple arithmetic.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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We could have a clean system here in which we had all the colleges that could be educated people, you know, vote for the Democrats and all the non-colleges educated people vote for the Republicans. What's wrong with that? Well, there are a lot more of them than of us. We, the Democrats, if we're going to retain power democratically,
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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We've got to begin appealing, not ignoring race, I'm not saying that, but appealing more to the class-based interests. I want to try to end with three to-dos.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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I'm going to try to keep it simple. Not because you guys couldn't understand something more complicated, but because I think we've got to understand in very simple terms. One, go young. It's much more important that we focus on young people, regardless of where they are right now, because they are the future. And I'm now talking as an historian, looking back, not just over the last...
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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you know, 5, 10, 20, 50 years. I'm looking over the last 125 years. In my last book, which was called The Upswing, I looked over the whole of American history over the last 125 years. And big changes are not the creation of old guys like me. Old guys like me, sometimes we've been around so long that we understand that it doesn't have to be the way it is today.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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But we're not the people who have the ideas that will... work to build social capital and save America in the, I don't know, 2050s or something. I'm going to be long gone. So first thing is go young and inspire the young people to come up with the new bowling leagues. It's not going to be bowling leagues.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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It's going to be something else, but almost surely will involve something of high tech, but it will involve real personal relations with other people.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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Go local. all the times that there've been major social revolutions, they bubbled up from the bottom. And at local levels, people can more easily cooperate across party and other lines because somebody's got to fix the sewers. And so you don't have to have an ideological discussion about how important is, is the environment. Everybody knows that the sewer has got to be fixed.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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If we're going to be able to survive in this town or the schools, you know, you can have a national debate about, I don't know, some issue in education, but somebody's got to fix our schools right here. And so sometimes left-wingers are in favor of national solutions.
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And for race, we did have to go national because there were whole regions of the country which were, if we went local, we would have stayed segregated forever. So I'm not saying always go local, but if you want to have a major revolution, and this is exactly what MLK did, right? He didn't start with his march on Washington. He started in Montgomery.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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What do you think is the most important social reform in the history of America? I'm going to tell you in just a second. The high school. When was the high school invented? The high school was invented in 1910. God did not invent the high school. It was invented in 1910. And where was the high school? By high school, I mean a secondary school, a public high school that everybody could go to.
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We'd had private schools, of course, like Eaton or whatever. But I'm talking about public high schools. First place in the world. was in 1910 in flyover country in America. It was not invented in Massachusetts or in Chicago or in LA or what it was invented in small towns in the middle of America. And it went, viral.
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And within 20 years, every city in America, every city and town in America had a high public high school. That's viral. 20 years it went from- That's amazing. So what I'm trying to say is the really good ideas, policy ideas, the next time- They spread. And thirdly, and I want to come back now to this issue of religion, go morality. Stick with me.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
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I'm an academic, but I'm about to start preaching at you, both of I apologize for that. When we look at long run changes, long run changes in political polarization, in economic inequality, in connections and so on, the leading indicator, it turns out that people in any given period and place actually think they have obligations to other people. We need to have a moral reawakening in America.
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I'm talking about simple golden rule. Read the Sermon on the Mount. I mean, any religion says worry at least as much about other people as you do about yourself. Religion should be a we phenomenon, not an I phenomenon. So if I had a magic wand... I don't, but maybe somebody listening will have a magic wand.
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I try to make the magic wand make young people, remember young, in localities across America think that they have obligations to other people. Is that making sense? I mean, that sounds like, and my basic message is, if we want to fix America, and I desperately want to fix America, it's probably not going to come in my lifetime, but I want to have it come at least in my grandchildren's lifetime.
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And we got to get about it now. And that requires mobilizing large numbers of people. large numbers of young people at the local level thinking about their obligations to other people and not just about themselves. Sorry, that's the message.
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So you guys are going to, you're going to lead this revolution. Find me up. Let me know how I can join.
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Well, of course, there are reasons to worry about people being lonely. That's indeed the title of this film that's now out and about on Netflix and in theaters. That's Join or Die, yeah. Join or Die. Your chances of dying, well, your chances of dying are high, actually. Sorry to say that, but your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group.
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And that is their real serious health effects. And this is controlling for everything you like. It is really social isolation that causes premature death, but it also undermines the foundation for democracy. And that's
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Another part of the title, Join or Die, refers to the fact that Benjamin Franklin, at the time of the founding of the American Republic, said, unless we join together, our democracy is going to die. That is, it refers both to the personal effects, which are big, and to the collective effects. And the collective effects, by the way, are not just democracy. Our economy grows more slowly.
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Our society becomes more unequal. The political polarization is a big consequence. of the lack of social capital. And Bowling Alone, the book Bowling Alone, first published in about 2000, but most of it was written in the late 90s, said we've been going downhill for a long time in terms of our connections. All sorts of connections.
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We've been going to fewer club meetings, but we've been going on fewer picnics, and we trust other people less, and we're less connected to our friends and to community organizations, but also to our family. All those ways in which we connect, all of them turned out to be going down. when I wrote that book. And now, 25 years later, it turns out they've gone down even further.
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Well, first of all, bowling is big in America. You may not know this, but more Americans bowl than vote, for example.
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Well, I want to step back just a little bit. If you were a botanist and wanted to study plant growth, how a plant was influenced by its environment, you'd take genetically identical seeds, you'd plant them in different pots of soil, you'd water them differently, and then you'd measure and see which plants flourished and which faltered.
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And then you knew it'd be something that you did in the soil or how much you watered them. That's what Italians did in Italy in 1970. They created a new set of regional governments all across Italy from up in the Alps to down in Sicily. They all had the same powers and money. They looked the same on paper, but the environments into which they were implanted were very, very different.
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Some were very advanced economically. Some were very backward economically. Some were Catholic. Some were communist, et cetera. And so we, over for 20, 25 years, followed those regional governments. We could see that some of them were very successful, not only in terms of were they able to build daycare centers when they planned to, but also in terms of what did the people think.
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And so we could see there were some successful governments and some failures. And then the question is, well, what was in the soil? And we had a lot of different ideas. We thought maybe it was just economic wealth made the difference, or we thought maybe it was education that made a difference.
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But we didn't guess what it turned out to be, which was choral societies, singing groups, and football clubs and so on, by which I mean, in some places of Italy, people in the region connected with one another across various lines, singing together. So that's what we came to call social capital. We were talking about these bonds
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that brought people in a given region or community together across lines. And in Northern Italy, especially North Central Italy around Bologna, for example, there was a lot of that kind of what I came to call social capital, that is these connections among people. And they had very effective, still do, very, very effective regional governments.
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But some places, especially in the South, they didn't. They didn't have those kinds of groups and they had terrible, corrupt, inefficient, never answered the phone even, regional governments. Now I'm coming back to what Christiana asked about. Did they just have no groups down there? No, they had very tiny little groups. Families.
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They looked after their own immediate family, but weren't involved in groups with people, you know, even on the other side of the street, much less on the other side of town. Now, what I'm trying to say is their we was strong, but very narrow.
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And what was characteristic up north was that they had much broader groups in which people from different families and different walks of life would come together to sing. Now, Christiana, I may not have persuaded you in what I've said now, but I've tried to convey the way I hear your objections.