Tom Lowe
July 4, 2000
Robert Putnam of Harvard published a book Making Democracy Work in 1993, a study of Italy's experiment with devolving power and responsibility from the central government to 20 regions. Putnam concluded from his research that the regions with a traditionally high level of voluntary civic participation tended to prosper, both economically and politically, more than regions in which civic participation was traditionally lower. In Italy, the regions with the tradition of high participation are in the northern part of the country, whereas the ones with the lowest tradition are in the Mezzogiorno area and Sicily, to the south.
Putnam's conclusions, however, have became generally known with the publication of two articles, "Bowling Alone: American's Declining Social Capital" in the Journal of Democracy (January 1995) and "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America" in The American Prospect (Winter 1996), in which he documented the decline in civic participation among Americans from the end of WWII to the present. Pointing out that each successive generation after the war has been less engaged in the life of the communities around them than the previous one, Putnam isolated the influence of television as the chief suspect for the decline.
As might be imagined, Putnam's theory was the subject of much discussion, pro and con. Many critics argued that America's civic participation had changed in character and that measuring social capital, defined as "features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions," by civic club membership, for instance, was no longer valid, due to the advent of new types of organizations.
Putnam has now written another book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), which amplifies and refines the conclusions he arrived at in the previous book and articles. Bowling Alone will shortly be the subject of a review in the Jackson Progressive.
The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard has set up a web site, http://www.bowlingalone.org to advance the dialogue on civic engagement. Part of the plans for the web site is to make available the actual data upon which Dr. Putnam based his conclusions about the decline of social capital in America. At the moment the databases are not yet available*, but the web site owners have provided us with some tantalizing statistics on social capital.
This, my dear Mississippi reader, is where we need to look. The researchers have measured the social capital of the American people by state and ranked them. If you click on the link below and scroll to the bottom of the page, you will find that Mississippi, the hospitality state, the state of good manners and easy living, ranks 48th out of the 48 continental states plus the District of Columbia. Only Nevada ranks lower. Just above the table are the factors that make up the social capital measure. Click here and then scroll down to view the table. This will open a new window. In the process, notice what other states rank low in social capital. Is this surprising?
These stark statistics present us with a self-image that we don't like to see. It tells us that we don't trust each other and we don't do much for each other, especially our communities. We can excuse our low economic performance, at least to ourselves, with references to our history, but we really don't have much of an excuse for our low standing in the social capital rankings. That our state's miserable ranking is no accident is testified to by the company of our other southern neighbors.
Having read his book on Italy, I tend to agree with Dr. Putnam that prosperity often stems from an abundance of social capital, rather than the other way around. In other words, we are poverty-stricken because we are social capital-poor. We have attempted unsuccessfully to raise our living standards without making social changes that are very likely a precondition for economic growth. Unfortunately, the necessary social changes involve the class structure so evident in all areas of Mississippi life, as well as the relation between the white and African-American races.
To make beneficial changes in Mississippi we will need a high degree of social entrepreneurship, a skill which requires imagination and courage far beyond the skills of a financial entrepreneur. I've lived in Mississippi long enough to know that the talent is here -- it just needs to be encouraged. More on this later. Write us if you wish to share some ideas.
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* Shortly after this article was published, the databases became available on the same page. --Ed