Now that we live in a wonderful world of ubiquitous statistics,

where virtually everything is tracked from the real-time biometrics of NFL players

to the precise amount of time you spent listening to Spotify while you were on the toilet last year,

it's easy to fall into the trap of worshipping data and raw information.

At no point in American history have we been able to quantify so many different aspects of day-to-day life,

which is probably not a healthy thing.

Prediction markets, draft kings, AI assistance, they all contribute to the quantification of everything.

And one inevitable side effect of this development is that we've all developed a real blind spot

for massive signs of civilizational decay that are very difficult, if not impossible, to measure in a scientific way.

I'm talking about ways in which our life is clearly getting worse, and everybody knows it,

even though there's no widely recognized,

peer-reviewed metric to prove it exactly.

And we've talked in the past about various manifestations of this decline, including the

quality of restaurant food and the quality of children's entertainment, all going down.

But maybe the best example of what I'm talking about is the death of neighborliness and

fun neighborhoods. It's a very real issue that's almost never talked about.

When did neighborhoods, even suburban neighborhoods in nice areas, become such cold,

un-inviting, antisocial places?

Why is it that if you're a typical American living in a suburb,

you probably don't have a great place to take your kids to hang out? You don't have good friends on the block. You don't spend a lot of time at local events. You might not even know your, you might have never even spoken to your neighbors. Now it's more than 25 years ago that a political scientist named Robert Putnam wrote the book Bowling Alone about the decline of social capital and meaningful relationships in America.

And to this day, that's still the book that's always brought up and people try to have this

conversation. University professors are still citing Putnam's findings about how Americans aren't

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