Rebuilding A Civil Society Is Government the Friend or Enemy

good evening and welcome to the forum i'm bob cutner co-editor of the american prospect which is co-sponsoring this forum on rebuilding civil society is government the friend or enemy and you are all good to give up your bowling night to come out to the kennedy school as you all know professor robert putnam former dean at the school now professor of international affairs and director of the center for international affairs at harvard has captured national feeling of unease about the decline of social capital he's written about this in the american prospect and in the journal of democracy and elsewhere and has documented and anatomized what lot of people intuitively feel that our social fabric is not in good repair through his research and writings professor putnam has stimulated national debate one with which we are very pleased to be associated and you have some of that debate in the packets that we handed out one of his two articles from the american prospect and three forthcoming follow-up articles which will be published in our march april issue tonight we have very distinguished panel which dean joe and will introduce momentarily who will offer variety of interpretations on these underlying trends all on the panel but adam meyerson have or will have addressed the subject in the pages of the american prospect and adam of course his editor of policy review has his own journal and has his own version of this debate in reading professor putnam's work think the the interesting missing actor is government and politics his work is about society and so tonight we are going to reintroduce government and politics is government the ally or the culprit in the erosion of civil society and in the task of rebuilding social capital and what does the erosion of social capital mean for politics what effect does the kind of disappearing social fabric have on the disappearing political fabric so with that prologue i'm delighted to turn the program over to dean nye who will moderate he's back from back to harvard from sabbatical in washington where he did no known damage to civil society thank you very much thank you bob and thanks to the american prospect little advertising here for its very important role in this debate what i'm going to do is just give you quick rules of the game as you notice we have large panel the one way to make this uninteresting would be to have lot of people talking for long time what we're aiming at is interaction with the audience so we're gonna make the assumption that if you're here on rainy night you know something about this debate if you don't you're going to have to either read between the lines or retroactively read the american prospect so i'm going to ask bob putnam if he will be brief and say about 10 minutes of thoughts but not recapitulating his whole thesis just what he wants to add to it and then i've asked each of the panelists if they will merely catch couple of themes for maximum five minutes each and that will allow us to have maximum amount of time for audience participation and questions so those are the rules of the game and with that will very briefly introduce bob putnam he's the dylan professor of international affairs at harvard as as bob cutler said but probably best known as one of the leading social capitalists bob putnam thank you very much joe every time take my wristwatch off in setting like this i'm reminded of story that my father told about that my father experienced firsthand of methodist minister who was known for being somewhat long-winded talker and he took his wristwatch off very flamboyantly sat on the table and in front of him and my father turned to his the person sitting next to him and said what does that mean when he takes his wristwatch off like that and the man sitting next to my father said absolutely nothing well want to remind you of the four central questions think that there are work that are worth debating here in this area of civic engagement first of all what's been happening to civic engagement in the united states over the last 30 years secondly so what does it matter thirdly why why has it been happening and fourthly what can we do about it if we think something needs to be done those think are the four basic questions here and want to simply remind you very briefly of of what my position in these debates has been this is debate that whose evolution i've been following with great deal of interest i've been learning lot from the interventions of other people in the debate in particular i've learned from the interventions of the other people on tonight's panel and so i'm as eager as you are to hear what they have to say my basic argument as you know is that americans connections with their communities especially with their local or place based communities have become attenuated over the last 30 years or so this is visible in politics visible in membership and political parties visible in voting turnouts visible in in frequency of attendance at local meetings about politics it's visible in our unions and churches and in other large conventional civic organizations like ptas and and fraternal groups and bowling leagues and it's visible though less easily measured in other sorts of less formal settings i'm not talking here only about decline in membership in particular set of organizations i'm talking about all sorts of ways in which we connect less with people regularly than we used to have gotten some notoriety for talking about bowling and i've decided that i've overused that metaphor so want to introduce different metaphor this evening by asking you first of all how many people in the room have ever heard of the game bridge good how many people in the room have some idea of the rules of the game bridge okay how many people in the room have ever played the game bridge more people have played it than know the rules well there are three other people fun yes how many people in the room have played game of bridge in the last year right see one person well here the here are the facts as can as far as can ascertain them in 1958 charles goran was on the cover of time magazine and one third of all american adults played bridge regularly that number is now down to nine percent of american adults play bridge regularly and almost all of them are over 50. bridge is dying game it's dying in part because mean it's the the measure of the fact that it's dying is that at certain point if there are few enough people who who are in your community not play bridge it doesn't make sense for you to learn the rules the reason that think is an interesting metaphor is because those of you who have played bridge or remember the game of bridge know that there was characteristic about bridge that there was lot of table talk not talk about the game it's actually strictly speaking illegal to talk about the game but talk about other things and in certain period in american life large numbers of americans got together regularly with the same people often in gender mixed groups to not only the prey bridge but to talk have conversations now most of the time they were not talking about civic affairs but occasionally they were talking about the bond issues or the other features of their community with people they knew regularly the people saw regularly and knew well and knew how to read and put with whom they were taking responsibility for their views that is less true now don't mean to say that the whole fate of the republic turns on the the the collapse the disappearance of the game of bridge but do mean to say that it has it is metaphor for ways in which both in formal and informal settings we're connecting less with people but no it's not true that every organization in america has lost membership it's certainly not even true for every type of organization there have been growth has been growth in what call mailing list organizations organizations in which membership means moving pen there's been growth in some forms of self-help groups like alcoholics anonymous there's been groups in some form there's been growth in some forms of groups that are actually quite harmful to the civic fabric that is for example malicious and my hypothesis my general hypothesis is that when we're through sorting out as result of the debate that's now underway about about civic engagement and its trends when we're through sorting out what's been rising and what's been falling what we'll discover is that what we've lost are the groups that were particularly important particularly useful at generating positive externalities i'd like to use words like that when i'm at the kennedy school just to show that deserve to be on the faculty of the kennedy school positive externalities is economic talk for meaning the groups that have benefits beyond the interest of the people who belong to them immediately and there are negative externalities that flow from some groups like like the michigan militia and there are the groups that that are quite can be quite important for the individuals involved like alcoholics anonymous tend not to be generating lots of positive externalities for the wider community so there is this decline in in social connectedness believe and decline as consequence in social trust and social trustworthiness it's occurred simultaneously with rising educational levels which makes it all the more surprising since on the whole the more education you have the more engaged you are with your community and it's concentrated generationally it's concentrated in the generation of people who've come of age after world war ii that's at least my claim about what's been happening to civic engagement does it matter well my claim is that it does matter lot and not just because of an absence of warm cuddly feelings my claim is that it measures it matters in measurable ways for the ways in which our communities operate our social institutions our schools our communities don't work as well when we're not engaged in the life of the community most important our capacity to have conversations with one another what might be called deliberative democracy is undermined by the replacement of bridge tables by talk radio that is talk radio which is in which our conversations are anonymous in which we shout at one another we express views but in which we don't have to listen to other people and respond in kind of give and take that's that's why believe this is this emergence of calling politics is not really deliberative and the kind of politics that even the kind of micro politics that could occur across bridge table or even on bowling team is is is an important loss why has this change happened it's complex change it's due think in part to changes in the family structure it's due think in part it's connected at least in part to changes in the workplace and to changes in the workforce and but the thing that's most striking as look at the statistical evidence is that the general the change is although it's true of almost every subgroup in america it's true of men and women when say it's true mean it's decline in connectedness it's true for men and women it's true for blacks and whites it's true for people in all all levels of the income and educational hierarchy it's true for people on the east coast and the west coast and in small towns and central cities it's very general trend except that it's not true for all age groups it's generally speaking not true for older people older people means older than me that's what older always means when anybody uses the word older and the the general trend is sharpest among people who were born and raised after world war ii think that that's one bit of evidence that suggests to me that something that happened after work to the generations who were socialized after world war ii must be implicated in this change and my suspicion is that television is an important part of that story that's not the only bit of evidence that leads me to think that television is an important part of the story but it's in one bit but what is to be done this is think the most most important question in some respects and here want to conclude by asking you to enter with me into time machine we're going to go back exactly 100 years now remember my my sound bite of what's happened in america today today is that we've been through basically 30 or 40 years of dramatic technological and economic and social change tvs and working mothers and and changed family structures dramatic social change technological change economic change that's what we've been through that has caused us to have an erosion in the stock of social capital in america that's the sound bite for for what think has happened today now we go into the time machine go back 100 years it's 1896. we get out this time machine we ask what's going on in america and lo and behold exactly the same thing was true america had been through 30 or 40 years of dramatic technological economic and social change that had caused there to be social decapitalization that is america had whole stock of american social capital had been rendered obsolete by the industrial revolution by massive waves of immigration urbanization when say stock of social capital had been rendered obsolete simply mean that people had left their friends behind in appleton when they moved to chicago or they left their family connections and their community connections behind in the stettle when they moved to the the lower east side so that america at the end of the 19th century faced suffered from many of the same symptoms of social capital deficit that we do today high crime rates even higher in rising crime rates than than now problems of great gaps in the income and economic structure of the country these had multiple causes of course but they were part and parcel and symptoms of society in which social connectedness had been had been lost as result of this dramatic technological economic social change and then we fixed it in relatively short period of time virtually all of the major civic institutions of america today were invented in the period between roughly speaking 1880 and 1910 almost all of them it's hard to name major civic institution in america today that was not in that was not created founded in that in that period the american red cross and the league of women voters and the knights of columbus and most trade unions and the sierra club and the boy scouts and girl scouts and the ymca and the urban league and the naacp and the sons of poland and kiwanis club and so on it's easier to name organizations today that were not founded during that period at the end of the 19th century now at that point if you'd been around at that point it might have been approp you might have been tempted to say you know it was lot nicer back in appleton everybody back to the farms please but that actually isn't what we did as society what we did was to invent new set of institutions that corresponded to the ways that we had come to live similarly today it would be possible to say some people have indeed have interpreted my argument as saying it was so much nicer back in the 50s would all women please report to the kitchen and turn off the tv and that's not what i'm saying i'm not engaged in in demand here or suggestion here that we should return to the 50s am saying that we have to in certain sense reinvent the ymca when say that you know that i'm not talking at all about the particular organization what mean is we need to engage in the activity of institutional creation analogous to those of us those of our forerunners our ancestors at the end of the 19th century who also invented new set of institutions labor unions and so on to enable people to reconnect with one another and with their communities in ways that fit the way they had come to live well one of the implications of this in in practical terms don't the question that's that's been suggested for debate today is whether government is the enemy or the friend where the government is the solution or the problem and that frankly is an important issue to debate but think the answer to that is yes think the answer is that yes government can be the enemy but yes government also can be the friend think there were important examples in that earlier period in which our we helped to reconnect with one another because of government programs my favorite example is the county agent system that helped people to connect with people in their local communities somewhat earlier in the 19th century but think also that we need to explore changes in our school curriculum and not just in the in the civics education in the sense of how does the bill become law but in the way suggesting ways to kids that they can become better engaged with their communities some of the evidence that's recently coming out on the real long-term effects of of service learning are quite encouraging that service learning does have positive effects on the connectedness and the civic engagement of people who've gone through it but finally guess do believe that this is problem that is going to be solved in the end only with grassroots initiatives and not with made in washington programs think that the single most important social invention of the last last part of the 19th century relevant to this debate was the settlement house and many of the other organizations from that period emerged from the settlement house movement and i'd rather like to see grassroots nationwide movement analogous to the settlement house in which people particularly younger younger people but all of us would become in more full-time way connected with the lives of our communities well don't know that those any of those solutions that i've suggested will solve the problem but do hope that this tonight is merely the beginning of national debate about how we can become better connected with ourselves with one another and with our communities thanks very much thank you bob and i'm asking the other panelists to stay seated just in the in the interest of saving time adam thank you deny ladies and gentlemen good evening have been condemned for my sins to as suppose many of you in this room have are to be boston red sox fan and am more optimistic about the future of civil society than am about the red sox winning the panic this year i'm optimistic because see great tidal wave of social entrepreneurship sweeping the country it's just starting but we're at the beginning of great wave much like that wave that professor putnam talked about from 1880 to 1910 or that you saw in the period that tocqueville wrote about in the early 19th century you're seeing americans step up to the plate to solve problems without waiting for government to sell them for them sometimes there are people in government themselves who are doing this but they're not waiting for bureaucratic centralized government to do it you can catch this wave in houston texas victor trevino has organized 250 volunteers armed volunteers to arrest the parole violators in their burial he's done great job pacifying that community you can catch this wave in cleveland ohio where charles ballard an ex-convict came out and took responsive came out of prison and took responsibility for his sons and is now helping other ex-convicts reconnect with their own children they're learning that the best way to get responsibility themselves is to connect with their own children you can catch this wave here in cambridge massachusetts let me give you two examples of great social entrepreneurs many of you probably know about jeffrey ash working capital has financed 2200 micro enterprises in inner cities and poor rural areas around new england he's basing this idea on an idea for he's basing his his program on an idea from bangladesh the grameen bank and connor craig institute for children again here in chile in cambridge she is finding homes for foster kids who are ready to be adopted they are legally ready to be adopted but they cannot get adopted bureaucratic reasons are stopping them from being adopted she helps find homes for them and she is trying to organize operation moses all across the country so that every church every temple every synagogue will adopt family child from foster home so those kids don't have to so the system kids can have what she wanted when she was foster child mom and dad and last name now ladies and gentlemen these social entrepreneurs who are mending the social fabric the social fabric that has deteriorated so terribly in the ways that professor putnam has talked about so very fast interestingly and provocatively these men and women who are mending america's social fabric don't usually think of themselves as conservative but they are practicing the conservative way of life and they represent what conservatives want in this country but they also represent what the founding fathers had in mind for this great republic of ours they wanted republic of self-governing citizens the question before us is what can government do to help civil society and one of the most important forms of government is self-government and these people solving problems taking responsibility for their families their communities their neighborhoods without the government telling them what to do that is the central idea that the founding fathers had for this country now let me get more direct more specifically to some questions that where government can be of some help to to civil society there are several things as mentioned some of the people we talked about were actually people in government we need great police officers great teachers who will inspire kids city governments one of the most important things they can do is to stop looking to washington for resources and look at the resources that are much closer to home the middle class and businesses that are right outside that that are right outside in their own metropolitan areas and city governments could stop driving the middle class out of the suburbs i'm out to the suburbs know this myself as resident of washington where the city government is doing everything it can to drive me out as middle class taxpayer bringing middle class residents and businesses back to the cities is not only good for the tax base it's good for civil society and the way to do this is to lower taxes to lower regulation to improve schools and to improve police protection the way bill bratton did in new york city second idea positive thing government can do tocqueville called juries the most important institution of citizenship it's where we learn about how to be citizens because we're evaluating whether people can we're evaluating the life whether life or liberty can be taken away from somebody we have to take juries much more seriously and use them much more much more dramatically and earnestly as institutions of citizenship not kick people off of juries not give juries opportunities to be better informed than they are tax relief for families with children as father of three children and with somebody as father of three children have vested interest in this but let me just ask you this wouldn't it help civil society for me for tax relief to help me quit my job at the heritage foundation so can spend more time with my kids work at the schools and then work in neighborhood watch my time is up if you want to know about what conservatives think about this issue and how we are looking at social entrepreneurs across the country policy review journal of american citizenship 1-800-304-056 thank you very much let me turn now to bill galston from the university of maryland but previously working at the white house on these issues well this is probably the most dangerous speaking engagement i've ever had because everybody whose work want to cite is either on the platform or in the audience and so if get it wrong want to you know want to put three ideas on the table very quickly all within the context of explaining the or trying to explain the the phenomenon of declining social capital that professor putnam has done such marvelous job of laying out for us there is rich emerging vigorous empirical debate you know as to whether this phenomenon is as professor putnam states it for the purposes of my remarks in the next four minutes and 30 seconds will proceed as though it is more or less as he describes it but there's bracket an empirical bracket think around around the discussion first of all think professor putnam is absolutely right the answer to the stated question of the panel is indeed yes government can certainly act in ways that weaken civil society professor allen wolf who's in the audience has written very important book on this subject and there was very interesting front page new york times story couple of months ago about how neighborhood organizations are springing up all over new york city why because previously they counted on the city government to perform range of functions they've now decided the city government will not again in their lifetime perform those functions and they are not there they are determined not to live without them and so they are now finding ways of trying to substitute for you know for government that's that that's failed from which infer that government in some important way displaced those neighborhood activities and capacities when it was performing those those functions we can have long discussion as to whether it's better or worse that neighborhoods are now doing this as opposed to government but that relationship does exist believe on the other hand when government fails to act or put it the other way around government can act in ways that strengthen civil society and create space for civil society my favorite argument here is crime believe that there is an important connection between the failure of government to fulfill the first duty of government and that is to protect public peace and safety on the one hand and the decline of various sorts of social activities on the other if people do not feel safe in public spaces they will not come out they will not walk they will not associate this is particularly true for the elderly but not only true for the elderly my son has never walked the neighborhood park three blocks away by himself don't think that's an accident and think it's profoundly symptomatic so government can both displace civil society and it can nurture and strengthen civil society that's the first idea idea number one the role of the economy in all of this think this is this is under discussed dan yankovich who's also in the audience has written some wonderful piece on what he calls the affluence effect and there's no question about the fact that economic growth rising per capita incomes are strongly correlated both in this country and throughout the industrialized world with the rise of kind of culture that some called expressive individualism now the question want to put on the table is what happens when after period in which the economy has been growing vigorously producing culture of expressive individualism it suddenly stops growing that briskly does individualism go away or does it become meaner and competitive and more competitive than it was in periods in which economic growth was vigorous economic growth was assumed what want to suggest is that in the past quarter century or so we've shifted from an experience of the economy as positive sum game to the an experience of the economy is more and more zero-sum game and would would suggest that the combination of the experience of the economy as zero-sum game with culture of of individualism has produced decline in social capital as professor putnam has defined it or at least has contributed to that third idea and this is an area where finally think know something if you ask where is it that trust is developed what are the seed beds of trust one answer to that question is believe the family there is an emerging body of evidence that if people live alone or if they've had the experience of family disintegration that their capacity to trust others and to enter into trusting relationships with them is diminished sharply as professor putnam and others have noted the percentage of people living alone has risen very dramatically in the past generation the rate of divorce went up by 250 percent between 1960 and 1980 after 40-year period of relative stability to level which is now much higher than any other advanced industrialized nation and have been driven to the conclusion that family instability and social trust are not compatible peter scotchvolt of course is professor of government and sociology here at harvard start from the premise that two of the things that bob putnam talks about together are not automatically interrelated social connectedness is important and civic engagement are important but don't think they're the same thing and don't think social connectedness simply causes civic engagement think we need to be agnostic bit about what's happening to social connectedness in the united states don't have time to talk about that but will say my sister was visiting last week from west virginia and told her about bob's thesis and she said send that guy down to west virginia nobody bowls alone in west virginia she said the bowling alleys are full and you can never get lane think people aren't bowling alone i'm sure they're not bowling in leagues as much as they used to but think they're bowling together in different ways and know that wouldn't have made his cutsce title but think that's what we may need to look into but let me move on to politics and government and want to agree with couple of the points that bill gallston made think that trends and family life which are related both to what we've seen in the culture the flowering of individual freedom and options which are very important to women but may have another side to them when it comes to holding together marriages and commitments to children think those are an important part of what's happening with social connectedness and civic engagement and certainly think that what we've seen in the economy which is growth of an economy where the tide lifted all boats from the end of world war ii to and then change not only to an economy that isn't growing as much but to an economy that's produced more and more inequality and more insecurity for the bottom three fifths of the society has to be brought into an analysis of both social connectedness and civic engagement let me get to the point about government his government the friend or foe when we think about that question we tend to think in terms of government action we're always thinking can we think of government actions that hurt voluntary associations or social connectedness or can we think of government actions that encourage those things that we may think are good we also need to think about the arrangement the institutions and the arrangement of government not just actions and would simply point out that american federalism the coexistence of three levels of government local state and national and the activation of those levels in very complex and often contradictory ways by vibrant electoral competitive politics those two things together as organizational arrangements and ways of doing politics nurtured vibrant association life in the united states from the 1830s until very recently that's because there was space for people to organize to do things that wasn't being done directly by bureaucrats but there was also leverage for people to organize and make their collective voice heard often by contacting their city council or their town council or their state legislature or the congress that coexistence of an open government responsive to collective political action partly through parties and partly through voluntary groups and government that didn't do everything but did quite lot when asked to by organized groups was very very important for the vibrancy of american social capital or at least civic engagement over long period of time would also say and this is where dissent strongly from our friend from policy review think agree with many things he's saying but disagree about one thing government resources are really good to have if you engage in collective action and think you can look back over the scope of american history and see that many of these volunteer groups were now romanticizing like the pta or the grand army of the republic or the american legion or the farmers groups all of these groups were organizing to ask government to be their partner in doing things and they were definitely rewarded by flows of resources coming from the federal and the state level would sum it up very briefly by saying government that does everything through rules and bureaucracies destructive in many ways to social collective action but one that responds by by generating resources and spreading them widely as american government did and as the economy did for much of our national life rewards and encourages collective connection and collective civic engagement now very briefly think we've begun to lose both the economy part of this and the government part of this since the 1950s and the 1960s our electoral politics is no longer vibrantly competitive and inclusive it is more and more run through pollsters and advertising and manipulation and people are turned off and are dropping out in larger and larger numbers maybe some of our functions were switched too much not just to the federal government but to rule making through the federal government and through the courts and that encouraged the proliferation of advocacy and lobbying groups in washington dc of kind that kevin phillips has written about very eloquently in arrogant capital while perhaps discouraging or at least not rewarding collective action at state and local levels and the connections of groups across state and localities to influence legislatures we're left think with polity now in which we've got lots of advocacy group politics we've got lots of elite people privileged people managers and professionals with special access through social networks and advocacy groups to the centers of power in new york city and washington dc but the rest of the society is facing more and more economic pressure and more and more isolation in communities and families that may still be bowling together think they are but they're not feeling connected to the larger centers of civic action and political power so that's my analysis of the problem and it's little bit different with what bob putnam has said but think complementary in many ways however it suggests that the causes that we need to look to are not simply television but we need to repair our democratic politics and repair the balance of government and society and economy to revitalize social capital in america kay scholzman is professor at boston college and has written on civic volunteerism in american politics friends colleagues country persons lend me your flagging attention come to amplify putnam and not to bury him we've all read critiques of what putnam has to say have feeling there's some people in this room who've actually written critiques and don't want to quarrel with putnam's data but instead want to talk about some of the implications for politics of one of the developments in civil society that putnam and his critics seem to agree about and that's the growth of large numbers of political organizations that require nothing more of their supporters than the writing of check and i'm not sure know what the implications for civil society are of the explosion of this form of organizational involvement but can report with some certainty on what some of the implications are for politics of the disproportionate growth in forms of political participation that demand inputs of money rather than inputs of time and here i'm going to be talking little bit about the results of an in-depth study of voluntary activity that consumed as my daughter reminded me her entire life and that did with sid verba of harvard and henry brady at berkeley one of the consequences of the fact that in an era of professionally managed and electronically based campaigns and burgeoning activity by organized interests the role of the citizen activist is increasingly that of signer of checks and the effects of this transformation in civic volunteerism are sometimes not heard in the debate about bowling alone and in fact they're not heard all that much in the debate about our political and social life and america in contemporary america and in fact those effects are felt in terms of the great unmentioned variable class making contributions to political campaigns and causes is distinctive as form of political activity first of all it varies most in the volume of input in contrast to the vote which is the single form of political participation for which we have mandated equality all forms of getting involved as participant whether it's writing letter or going to protest or working in campaign or being involved with your neighbors to solve some community problem all of them are in essence form of multiple voting giving is the form of activity for which the ratio of those of us who do most to those of us who do least fec regulations to the contrary that ratio is most pronounced the the big giver does so much more than the little giver or the giver of nothing at all as opposed to letter writers or protest attenders furthermore when you look at the things that predict who's going to give and how much they'll give we find real difference between giving and all other forms of political participation when we look at all of the kinds of activity that require us to to give time we find that there's multiplicity of factors that predict who's going to get involved and how much they'll be involved education matters how much you care about politics matters having particular issue about which you care deeply matters even the skills that you learn in the adult venues of of civil life on the job in church and non-political organizations all these factors make difference but when it comes to giving to politics there's only one thing that makes difference the only factor family income is the only factor that matters significantly for whether and how much is given to political campaigns and causes and taken together these characteristics of political giving imply that giving is the form of political activity for which what we call participatory input is the most skew that it comes from the smallest sectors of society to give you just some very elementary statistics if we took the richest nine percent of americans in terms of their family income we would find that their nine percent their 11 percent of the votes there are 12 percent of the bodies that show up at demonstrations they're 18 of the hours that are given to campaigns but they're whopping 55 of the dollars that are contributed to politics and at the other end of the scale the poorest 19 percent of us with respect to family income give only 2 percent of the money that's given to political campaigns and causes and what this means is that the greater weight that's given to cash intensive forms of political participation in modern day political citizen life has consequences for what and from whom the government hears all kinds of citizen activity and politics but especially contributing over represent messages from the well-educated and the well-heeled and these are people who have special characteristics they're less likely to be white and male they're less likely to have problem they think the government should solve that has to do with the basics of human need like health or housing they're less likely to have had to cut back in the last year on necessities like the rent or food they're less likely to receive means-tested benefit like medicaid or medicare and so to the extent to which policy makers form their understanding of what are the fundamental problems of the american people that need to be addressed to the extent to which they learn about that from what they hear from citizens the transformation of political participation in the direction of money away from time leaves policy makers almost unexposed to the problems of the needy finally marshall gans is lecturer here at the kennedy school who spent 16 years of the united farm workers and currently doing phd in political sociology marshall thanks jim seem to have been seated on the far left of the panel here by that but sure coincidence guess from the right if you look from the other direction as longtime organizer want to thank bob for bringing attention to the fact that relationships matter because that's what organizers do build relationships of course was little disappointed to hear that television might matter more so you sort of took away with one hand which you gave with the other but think relationships matter too but think they matter as part of bigger story about identity and interest which has dramatically reconfigured the contours of our political life and that and our patterns of social connectedness with them and that coming up with with what to do about these relationships or these networks depends on coming up with what to do about these larger issues rather than simply the relationships themselves specifically it seems to me that what's occurred is disconnect between communities of identity which have become significant to us over the last 20 to 30 years our political institutions through which those communities are supposed to find expression and the structures of economic power that those political institutions are supposed to somehow hold accountable which creates major problem for democratic polity in terms of communities of identity the diversity which emerged from the powerful social movements of the 1960s generationally driven about race about gender redefining in profound and substantial ways how we thought of ourselves what we thought was acceptable what how how we thought our institutions should operate have had major effect many of the institutions which were based on exclusion based on gender or race or other ascriptive qualities were marginalized others were changed others have the new rise has been given to new ones as well so think one reality is that new communities of identity have substantially challenged what we look back at sometimes with false nostalgia as what we're pretty homogeneous and pretty restricted institutions secondly restructuring the economy in the 70s and 80s has resulted in galloping inequality the creation of two-tier society in which those with the resources to do so flee from it behind the walls of private schools or gated communities and those who don't have the resources well they make do with what they can that's second fact third our political institutions whose challenge was to construct common interest out of all this new diversity in order to do things in the common interest including holding economic power accountable it hasn't happened in fact these political institutions have become progressively weakened think there's three ways or three elements of this first the way campaigns and elections has been are run that's been alluded to marginalizes participation by all but narrow swings slivers of the electorate who are accessed primarily through mail and media it enables politicians to know the electorate without having relationship with it has resulted in sharp declines in the number of people contacted resulting in sharp declines in voter participation especially among the young poor dark and less educated as kaye indicated secondly the way we elect representatives means that 50 percent of the vote gives you hundred percent of the power now we're rapidly becoming majority of minorities but we have representation system that's based on majorities in fact that representation system as lani guinere has observed think is coming to marginalize more groups than it includes and so instead of providing us with way to acknowledge our differences in order to be able to find common interests among them we simply are expected to repress them in terms of electing representatives and thirdly the scuttling of the economic and institutional capacity of public institutions whether in the form of turn limits the term limits or or devolution makes them less and less capable of dealing with the challenges with that we thrust upon them now the consequences of this in terms of the world of advocacy and organizing there's three kind of curious bifurcations the first one is localism and globalism community organizations community groups operating locally but unable to develop strategies because their problems aren't really local problems they're really national or international problems but advocacy organizations that operate with global strategies but have no local roots and have they're sort of like heads without bodies and bodies without heads which sort of hamstrings the capacity of those groups to operate effectively secondly love and justice great emphasis has been placed on the work of love compassion for the victims of unjust arrangements rather than work of justice anger with the with the injustice of the conditions that produce those victims and when you ask people why not work on trying to change the arrangements rather than simply care for the victims they say well there's no way to act effectively on it there's no way to do anything about it i'm getting the time sign so i'm going to wrap up third service and advocacy the emergence of non-profit sector which is expected increasingly to take up the slack of social service we've heard some examples about but is increasingly restricted from advocating on behalf of those whom they serve so the project is reconstruction of democratic community which requires as think bob indicated reconstruction of institutions but institutions through which we can engage in purposeful political activity to solve real problems now pat buchanan offered one way to address the challenge of diversity and equality reduce the diversity restore the homogeneous community and that way there'll be less inequality for those of us that are part of it the challenge for those of us that don't share that view is to come up with an alternative assault on sources of inequality based not on denial of diversity but incorporation of it and that's the challenge of the construction of new political community that think we face in the 90s this has been remarkably well behaved panel hope you all appreciate that if we're going to have questions and we're not going to be able to have answers from each member of the panel so i'd like when you ask question and there are two mics here on the floor if you would direct it to panelist and we'll have the panelist answer it and occasionally some other panelists answer as well but we're not going to get six answers to every question or we'll have about two questions so let's start here hi my name is ben khan i'm kennedy school student and i'd like to direct my question to one person but i'm not sure which person to direct you so let me ask you can choose two well let me let me pick one does anyone do any one of you live in house or an apartment that you would have to leave if it weren't for the income of spouse then i'll ask my question of that person okay have to say i'm not surprised at which ones raise the reason i'm not surprised is because the views the views that we've heard from mr putnam and mr meyerson more seem to me little bit more than the others to ignore the problems of two-income families and not to mention just two-income families but families in which both incomes depend on 40 hours more than 40 hours of work and so my question is is there solution to the problem of two-income families that doesn't rely on simply changing civic institutions short of raising wages someone wants to handle that mean think we have to raise wages but think we also have to reconfigure the the the time greediness of our workplace bob yeah agree with that act mean just want to spell out what theta just finished saying it seems to me that time constraints are an important part of the problem here think it's as read the evidence it's not the most important factor but it's probably an important factor the fact that the fact that is why are we no longer as engaged as once we were because we don't you know all at least the women in america are working outside the home war and that that has meant they are less able to take part in civic activities and although don't have good data on this have the feeling that there has been over the last 10 years increasing pressure on the workplace in which which means that it's there's just less flexibility for people to to be engaged in their communities and there's public good feature here that seems to me that this is it seems to me to indicate this is an important area where there is role for public policy that is to say if if community if corporation provides more relax flex time or release time to its employees and their involvement in the community as result contributes to the quality of the community that benefits the the corporation why we didn't have to pay the costs of that of that release release time flex time and that's exactly the circumstance in which there's case for some kind of public action either by way of subsidy or by way of encouragement or requirement so did you mean flex time per week or in general you have large number of other folks here who want to ask questions enough over here hi my name is alexi demanes i'm first-year student at the kennedy school and as citizen from france and careful reader of turkville was really interested in this topic of social capital in america and coming from france didn't have at first this feeling that social capital in america was really declining and thought it was pretty vibrant still despite what has been said and well argued but i'd like to have some input about what's happening in other countries especially european countries and know that you've been some studies you've done some studies in italy for example which is pretty similar to france as far as structures are concerned thank you well guess that question is directed to me and the and the only thing can really say is yes agree it's very important very interesting question even for those of us who are focused mainly now on the united states to find out what are the trends in other countries because we can learn very much from the experience of other countries it will be in it and i'm engaged with other people on the panel actually on the on in just about to begin large cross-national study looking at exactly these questions that is to say what are the trends in social capital in other advanced industrial countries japan france sweden spain and others so it's an important question don't want to say what the results of the studies will be before they're done they will be interesting however whether it turns out that it's only in the united states that there is this trend or whether it's true in other countries the reason that it will be particularly important to those of us concerned with institutional reform in the united states is that in that earlier era that talked about many of those institutional inventions that spoke about the boy scouts in the ymca in the settlement houses for example were actually not invented in the united states we borrowed those ideas from other countries in particular britain that had just been through very similar process so i'm hoping that as this study of other countries expands we'll discover that there are lessons that we americans can learn from other countries about techniques for re-engaging with one another and with our communities any other panelists on cross-national comparisons all right over here yeah have question on the sources of this dissolution of community and wanted to maybe direct my comments to mr golson and mr gantz he touched on issues related to this it seems to me that there's that the community it's the question should really be how does it come how did community survive three three decades of battering mean in the 60s there was sort of democratic demographic boom of people who said question authority look at look at these orthodoxies with cynicism because put it put bowling league in quotes it's not something to worship and emulate it's something to be suspected in in the 70s as tom wolf says this is the me generation celebrate yourself he talked about the loss of an of stigma attaching to any kind of behavior like wife shocking was his phrase you you you know your wife has gray hair and big hips well goodbye dip with the secretary there's kind of celebration of self and one's own needs and then in the 1980s there was kind of celebration of ambition and materialism of quite overweening sort it seems to me this is sort of the serial epiphany of the baby boomer generation and mean as far as the 80s mean people now argue about the remote control of the the big screen tv and my parents argued about 49 nut grinder which wasn't in the budget they couldn't afford it so this kind of the cynicism about community self-aggrandizement and this kind of materialism that people really do live awfully much better than our parents did mean aren't these three things just battering rams against community yes and and let me think that my my generation i'm about the oldest boomer possible january 1946 and think my generation has done lot of good things it also has lot to answer for if you want you want shorthand think in in addition to the important social changes that we've helped achieve we've also spent 30 years squandering the social capital that we inherited from our parents and think we ought to spend the next 30 years trying to replenish it another answer marshall guess yes too no am don't think it's all such negative story think that we made lot of changes that needed to be made and think in doing that we've been groping our way toward new understandings of how to collaborate work together respect difference respect heterogeneity understand how to be autonomous in different ways and think it's very exciting exploration that we're involved in and think we need to go forward and and and figure out how to do that don't think we squandered anything think we stood on the past but we now have to create our own future and and and find our way to do it and don't mean just us of that generation but mean even more particularly those of the generation that are just now sort of coming in to challenge and note there's meeting tonight up at seaver hall of new student organization here called unite which is trying to bring together all the diverse different campus organizations into single one with common agenda of social change and renewal and think those kinds of institutions those kinds of efforts are the direction that that hopeful hopefully we'll go in why don't you let's have all the questions just give their brief identification richard cash with the harvard institute for international development i'd like to direct this to professor schlossman and possibly professor putnam it seems that in this country there is very little requirement to be citizen other than to be born here or to pass citizenship or maybe pay taxes you don't have to participate in the military or any other type of group and particularly you don't have to vote there are certain countries in fact that require voting of their citizenry we can elect president now with maybe 23 percent of the eligible voters 24 percent so that very small special interest groups have enormous power do you think that it's possible and what you think of the idea of voting being mandatory in this country as this would limit the power of the czech writers it would mean that politicians would have to visit the most disadvantaged parts of the country because they would also be participatory is this an idea that is so far-fetched as to be unacceptable or is it something that could be done australia for example requires everybody to vote and there are other countries that do as well thank you okay suppose have to to address that on two grounds one is that the specialist in voting of which am not generally tend to suggest that if all the non-voters went to the polls the outcomes would be the same anyway in terms of the substance in terms of the idea that it is that in sense citizenship is the requirements of citizenship are relatively voluntary in american democracy and think that that goes along with long tradition of individualism and american society and politics and so it would strike me as somewhat infeasible to think that voting could be made requirement and in certain ways to contradict some of the most fundamental principles that americans hold dear on the other hand guess certainly think it could be made easier to register and since the proportion of americans who go to the polls among the the poor the proportion of registered voters who go to the polls in the united states is comparable to many democracies in which registration's simply easier and we'll see how motor voter works out so you raise an important question and i'm going to be interested to see how the motor voter piece of it works out pop well think voting is important obviously but do think that with respect to turnout as an indicator of civic health i've always thought that this was not actually the most important measure because it seems to me that voting from this point of view is little bit like temperature in child that is you worry about the temp low temp mean high temperature in child because it could do some damage itself but mainly it's symptom that something else is wrong and only addressing the fever might lead you to ignore what the underlying problem was that caused it and think that the the fact that we've had this decline in turnout in america over the last well really over the most of this century is mean there are multiple causes and there are huge there are many books written on the subject but think from the civic point of view it's it's primarily symptom that something is wrong in the in the body politic and just to dress to address the symptom without trying to worry about what the other causes might be would be mistake theta and bill also going to check quickly think that we should think about reforms in the electoral system but we should think about reforms that will encourage groups to form and and and politicians to have more time and incentive to reach out to diverse sets of groups but also want to point out that america is not one just one big place where democracy has never cost anything some of our biggest spurts of civic engagement have come in the wake of the most massive wars this country has fought the civil war and world war ii where large proportions of the male population were required to serve in both cases and came out of it with connections across regional and class lines that were embodied in powerful political movements and voluntary organizations so let's not stereotype american history to too completely here bill yeah chance would have it i'd like to build on theta's point because think it's it's very suggestive and important one if you look at what bob putnam has called the civic generation you find that their lives were characterized by sequence of shared experiences they went through the depression together they went through world war ii together and they went through the incredible spurt of prosperity after world war ii together and you know as economic historians have documented there was indeed period when the maximum rising tide lifts all boats was more or less descriptive so set of shared experiences what's characteristic of the generation that followed them would say was the absence of pool of shared experiences on the basis of which these sorts of connections could be forged and so the question then arises is there role for government in creating the arena the possibility and perhaps even the necessity of shared experiences there have been some suggestions about you know universal national service between high school and college along those lines controversial and in some ways in feasible suggestions but think that they they point to this issue of of the creation of new opportunities for shared experience and must say think an underexplored issue is the relationship between public or civic engagement on the one hand and social connection on the other and think though and you know think that the the things that drive the decline in the one are not necessarily the same as the things that drive the decline on the other but there is complex and important relationship between the two that needs to be probed yes i'm lynne williams i'm fellow here at the iop and the retired president of the united steelworkers of america and would like to affirm and and ask about the role of the labor movement in all of this it seems to me that first of all the labor movement has been the traditional mechanism for social connectedness for working people and very that's very important element that we need in all of this discussion think the labor movement provides the opportunity for workers to really have an impact on the civic processes on the legislative processes on the political processes their principle mechanism for doing so think that's an important element of what we're discussing here in this situation we're talking good deal about the problems in the economy in terms of the low wages and the fact that wages and incomes need to rise there's nobody deals more directly with that than the labor movement does think we're looking for something the government do for government to do one of the most important things they could do is help facilitate the the opportunity for american workers to organize as government did indeed in the mid 1930s in the face of the depression and the roosevelt era resulted in an enormous growth in the labor movement enormous improvement in the circumstances of working people enormous opportunity for them to impact in circumstances instead of that today we have laws which make it very difficult for workers to organize and deny them that opportunity frequently i'd like to ask everybody in the panel to respond to that but particularly professor putnam and professor ganz you're here well absolutely agree that labor unions have historically been very important to use my jargon form of social capital in the united states they've been form of social capital with positive externalities in the sense that they've they've generated benefits that go beyond the members of the union they were in prime example maybe the single most important example of that period of civic connect invention at the end of the 19th century that that talked about earlier and they were important for another reason that think we need to emphasize at least many of them where there are differences among unions of course have been talking to some extent we have been talking about social connectedness as if it were homogeneous thing you could have lot of it or little of it but there's question also connected to whom whom connected to whom there are different kinds of social in my terms social capital there is social capital that is bridging that cuts across the lines of clinician that is inclusive that is that it brings together people of different kinds of backgrounds in particular in because of the importance of race in american society brings together people of different races and there's social capital that isn't the michigan militia is social capital it's just social capital particularly malign sort and is non-bridging social capital my concern about the united states is that it is especially the bridging forms of social capital the forms of social capital that reach parts of the society that otherwise don't have an opportunity to become engaged with their communities that has just have have declined unions are prime example of that obviously you know better than do that not all unions have been in the in the forefront of of movements of integration but especially racial immigration but many many were historically and think that's another reason to be to regret the passing of the decline of unions and and to hope that there will be some resurgence of some newer and more vital form of workplace civic connectedness marshall and then adam yeah think one of the most significant things about focusing on unions is that it addresses both the issue of how to construct community out of diversity with common agenda as the cio certainly did in the late 30s and was an exemplary example of bringing together wide variety of different ethnic communities into common effort with addressing the problem of inequality and so if we wanted to both address diversity and inequality we would figure out ways to facilitate legislatively the organizational unions and it seems like the labor movement itself with the new direction that it seems to be taking is is moving in that direction adam would agree that the unions have been major source of social capital in the future and have accomplished many good things for their members but workers now are concluding that probably they aren't as important as they used to be last heard last looked 12 percent of the private sector labor force was member of the unions and these are workers who do have choice about whether to join them or not and think they've concluded that for the moment they don't want to need it think we have to bring the government in here as well as the economy but just let me mention the government mean the period 1880 to 1910 was not period of growth of inclusive unions in the united states it was period of general defensiveness before that you had the knights of labor which was short inclusive attempt and then the great period of growth is from the mid-1933 world war ii when government both by deliberate policy in the case of the wagner act and through series of steps taken to mobilize the nation for world war ii didn't create unions but created social and regulatory climate in which it was possible for them to mobilize that kind of complementarity between little bit of help for those who are in more economic vulnerable and more dispersed socially dispersed situation and but yet leaving the challenge for the unions themselves to achieve through pulling people together that's not what we have not seen in the period since the 1970s and so well would agree that workers to some degree aren't choosing unions it's also true that the regulatory and social climate has made it harder for them to see that as viable choice my name is cannot conchala and i'm graduate of the college from 1994 and work now in national service program called city year that was founded in boston city year's mission has to do with community service leadership development and civic engagement not just of the participants but of the citizens who serve with us either for the day week month government gets involved in this civic engagement because 49 of our funding comes from the americorps national service program the other half from corporations foundations individuals was hoping to get one response about the strength of this government involvement and one about the weakness keeping two things in mind one is that the government doesn't fully fund the program in sense they buy in to an investment that creates not financial but community wealth that the rest of the market agrees is good and the second thing is in my own life would have maybe had different profession and volunteered in my free time but now city and americorps have allowed me to work full-time and try to engage even more people in service who would like to try adam and bill which one are you going to go ahead think city here is great program and my concern about americorps is that sooner or later this may not have happened yet but sooner or later government funding in in program such as this where there's so many jobs or at stake is going to become patronage operation and i'm not sure want al d'amato and robert byrd to decide which organizations around the country should be should be getting that money i'd much rather have that come from social entrepreneurs from people such as brown and kazaa is that his michael brown allen casey allen casey to i'd much rather have the initiative come from from them and the private organizations they can support who will support them bill well this is this is the program that that worked on during during the transition you know after november of 1992 and on the one hand would be the first to concede that we didn't get the organizational and programmatic structure of the corporation for national community service entirely right and think that there is major opportunity now through discussion across partisan lines and also discussion that draws on the experience of community of community service at the community level to try to do better job in the next three years than we did in the in the previous previous three years in particular don't think we did very good job of thinking creatively about how public sector involvement could help to leverage community activity and because clearly in current circumstances you know the public sector is not going to be able to directly purchase or directly fund the kind of increment of this kind of activity that think probably everybody in the room believes ought would would be beneficial for the society as whole but think think we need to ask ourselves the question how can we take relatively modest public investment and create the best possible opportunity for thousand city years to spring up around the country in places where they haven't spontaneously spontaneously arisen i'm must say i'm encouraged the dialogue year ago across party lines was you know fight to the death and my friends on the other side of the ti of the political aisle were determined to kill the corporation and to kill federal government involvement in the promotion of community service altogether the dialogue is now changing and people are beginning to focus now on the question of how we can do it better in the next three years in the next five years but must say you know and i'm not saying this to flatter you when we were looking for models of the sort of thing that we wanted to encourage back in the fall and winter of 1992 city year was at the top of the list we actually came up here to visit city year and learn learn from that program how we might conceivably structure national effort yes i'm an undergraduate at the college who studied putnam's article in four different classes last semester studied studied at marshall dances community action class studied at the kennedy school in non-profit class studied it in the economics department at harvard in the social problems of the american economy class and also studied it in my social studies junior tutorial so you're really prepared i'd like to drag my question towards you but also towards theta and marshall because look at the number of people standing in line behind you pick one yeah relating to their arguments the critiques leveled against your articles were threefold basically in all these classes one one being that especially our kind of organizations didn't take into account the racially and ethnically and socio-economically diverse america that is today also just your example of that used to start of bridge couldn't see many latin american or african-american people even in the 1960s language the second being that it doesn't take into account the technologically advanced society that we have and how it's evolving and the third being that it doesn't take into account enough the growing and of the nonprofit sector and how that can change and so i'd like to ask you just to address this in 30 seconds thank you for the for the synthetic account of the problem it's it's true that there may very well be kinds of of groups that have been growing springing up that didn't get caught up in my dragnet looking for groups and although bowling it turns out actually is statistically speaking more popular in minority communities in america than the majority of communities in america than the white community in america but still the the basic point that you're making is is correct don't think it's true however that the trends have been the trends in connectedness have been up i'm sorry have been up in minority groups or in in other you know in the other diverse settings you described and only down and among white males the evidence actually is not consistent with that not consistent with the theory that you know that most groups of most folks have been organizing just fine and it's just the white males who've been out of it technology is almost certainly going to be part of the solution when we finally get to it but it would be wrong to think that the internet is simple solution don't believe that virtual community is the same thing as community so we have to think about how to way to leverage the opportunities that are in tech that are implicit in the technology to generate real connections and not just assume that because you see you see it you know there's lot glowing line on your cathode ray tube that you really are connected with that person in the same way that you are with someone that you you connect with every day the non-profit sector includes some good examples of social capital without doubt and some things that are just not social connectedness at all mean harvard university is site of social capital but it is also large bureaucracy and it gets counted or the you know there are you know many many forms of things that are not for profit that are nevertheless not really communities they're they're not any more communities than some profit-making organizations they're just big organizations so don't think that the growth of the non-profit sector which is concentrated primarily in those large organizations counts against the claim that people are not connecting with their communities as well as once they did think they're all important questions though thank you this is going to have to be the last question i'm jeff yarber i'm an undergraduate at the college and the question have to ask is regarding recent article written by robert samuelson about its critique of bullying alone and which he argues that participation in groups has not actually decreased over the past 20 years incites figures such as school groups and youth groups that have remained basically the same and sports clubs and service clubs that have actually increased participation over the past 20 years and was just wondering how you would respond to that critique of following along particularly enjoyed that critique because as you'll know robert samuelson himself has just written book in which he draws selectively creatively on statistics to show that that we've just been through one of the finest economic periods in our nation's history and then he goes on to explain that the reason none of us feel that way is because we had two high expectations that it was only us that was wrong not that the data all the data that he creatively pulls together all shows that this has been wonderful period we've been through the the more specific answer to your question is that have been quite careful in all of my work to draw on wide range of evidence each of which into taken individually has defects and weaknesses but collectively they they try to they they seem to form simple story single story not single story but general tendency the the data the particular data he cites draws on something called the general social survey and the numbers that he reports are in so far as within the four corners of the page they are accu they're accurate he doesn't see correct there's minor problem with the data mean with the numbers themselves but that's minor the problem with those data and they're very important date and use them for some purposes but the problems with it first of all that that he discounts the growth of education that has occurred over this period and says well let's not take that let's not worry about that when explicitly argued in all of my work that it's important to recognize that we've been through major transformation of the educational composition of the u.s population which ought other things being equal to have increased the degree of connectedness and it didn't and so he's one one of the things that his article does is simply in sentence to to discount the effects of education but the second is that for better or worse the gss data that the general social survey data that he relies on began only in 1974 when many of these changes were already well in process let me use single example to illustrate the problem the gss stated that he sites show that there has been decline of something like nine percent in membership in school service organizations that is parent-teacher organizations he he he reports this act accurately there's been really small decline in over the period that he's talking about and that's actually what you would get if you looked at the pta membership nationwide that also drawn what you don't learn if you start only in 1974 is that between 1960 and 1974 before the gss started there had been 40 decline in membership in pta ptas all of these controlling for the number of kids obviously you're going to have more parent teachers when you've got more kids but i'm all of these numbers that i'm talking about control for that so unfortunately one of the defects one of the defects isn't right one of the limitations of the general social survey data is that it just doesn't start early enough to catch some of these some of these declines so think that there is plenty of room for debate about whether this or that particular form of social connectedness has declined don't want the whole issue to rise or fall on just whether there are in the aggregate more group memberships or not because there are many forms of civic connectedness that don't turn on that don't show up in the in organizational memberships and there's some organizational membership like mine in the arp in the in the in the aarp that is not really social connectedness but is group membership and and so i'm delighted to have more debate about exactly what numbers we should be using here as long as that is debate that's you know basically following general rules of canons of of scientific evidence stephen will give you the last word just like to say that think it's more than debate about what numbers we should be using i'm no big fan of robert salmon center and think he's particularly outrageous when he says that bob putnam was an obscure academic before he has been really well-known academic for long time so there let me just give the example of education we can talk about education as something that predisposes individuals to join groups and that's the debate between putnam and samuelson but we should also think about education as something that sets elite people and increasingly women who weren't following careers in the workforce on certain kinds of career paths one way to think about the increase of education is that it should have led people to join more and more groups another way to think about it and would suggest that this is better way to think about it is that the explosion in educational attainment at the college and the postgraduate level has been accompanied by the restructuring of elite careers and above all the restructuring of the things that adult women do in ways that make it unrewarding for them to join the kinds of broad voluntary associations that they once belonged to that's more institutional and structural way of thinking about education and it would mean that increases in education might well be accompanied by an increase in professional group memberships which is what you see in the data that samuelson cites but decline in membership of things like the pta and the elks and fraternal and veterans groups think what our panel has demonstrated is the debate will continue it's something i'm sure we'll all want to come back year from now and hear how they're coming along but for now let's thank them for an excellent meeting thank you