Politics And America's Loneliness Epidemic

The NPR Politics Podcast

NPR

Politics, Daily News, News

4.5 • 24.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Even before the pandemic, three in five Americans reported feeling like they are left out, poorly understood and lacking companionship.

Communities with low social connectedness have higher rates of crime, lower educational achievement, and poorer physical health than more connected communities. As Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone documented more than 20 years ago, a frayed social fabric also makes governing much harder.

NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben talks to the author about how much worse things have gotten in the two decades since his book came out and what makes things him optimistic about the future.

Putnam's latest work is The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast.
0:06.7	I'm Danielle Kurtz-Lavin, I cover demographics and culture.
0:10.3	And speaking of demographics, we are talking today about Robert Putnam's bowling alone.
0:15.4	It is a classic, it is a towering example of a demographic's book first published in
0:20.0	2000.
0:21.0	And it's about how American social lives became fragmented, how we lost social capital,
0:26.9	and what that has done to our society.
0:29.1	Bob is a political scientist with a long list of accolades to his name and an array of books,
0:34.3	including 2015's Our Kids, and 2020's The Upswing.
0:38.4	And he is here now.
0:40.0	Bob, thank you so much for joining us.
0:42.0	Danielle, it's great to be with you again.
0:44.1	Well, let's start with the basics for people who are just getting introduced to this book.
0:48.8	You talk about the decline of social capital as you terminated the book and how that had
0:53.2	all sorts of detrimental effects to people's happiness to their health.
0:58.1	But this being the NPR politics podcast, I'm curious if you could talk a bit about the
1:01.9	particular links to democracy you found.
1:04.4	So what is social capital and how does it affect our democracy?
1:09.7	Social capital is a high-falutin term for what some people might call community.
1:15.0	That is the connections that lead us to other people.
1:19.4	Your connections are my connections with our family to begin with, but then also with
1:23.6	our friends and with our community organizations, with our neighbors, and extending out.
	...

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