Creating social capital in 2024
Why and how you should reorient your life around social capital
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“Social capital” is the academic term for having homies. For “knowing a guy.” It’s being connected, in whatever shape or form, to other people.
Everyone knows that having social capital is useful. What I didn’t know until recently is that, when it comes to social research, it’s the most useful possible thing to have. Like we should reframe the success = money thing to success = knowing people. It’s that helpful.
Here’s what makes me say this. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 2000. I finally read it, and while it’s a long and dry book, his 3 main points caused a reckoning for me. They are:
Americans are becoming less connected to each other, by almost every metric worth tracking, since the 1960s.
The effect of this is detrimental to health, happiness, education levels, childhood development, and our physical safety.
The drivers behind this loss of social capital are watching TV, changes in cultural values, urban sprawl (people living farther away from each other), and people working longer hours.
This post is going to dive into these 3 points to convince you to reorient your entire life around building social capital.
Social capital is going down
There are a lot of ways to measure social capital, and Putnam goes through 148 pages of them. Here are the highlights, which cover changes from the 1960s (when social capital peaked) until the book was published in 2000:
Time spent doing any kind of socializing at all is down by ⅓, despite leisure time being roughly the same.
Active participation in just about every kind of civic organization declined starting in 1969. This includes voluntary associations like the PTA, veterans associations, fraternal organizations like the Masons or the Lions Club, church groups, and labor unions. I say “active” because membership to organizations where you just pay dues and don’t need to show up (e.g. AARP, the NRA, Sierra Club) has held steady. It’s the showing up and volunteering that’s dropped.
Voting in America is down 25%, interest in public affairs is down 20%, and Americans are 50% as likely to attend a political function
Time spent on religious activities like church attendance and social gatherings is down 1/3rd.
It’s sad. Point #1 alone is enough for me to believe we’re losing at whatever game we’re trying to play.
The benefits of social capital are everything we love and treasure
Putnam limits himself to 63 pages here, but this is where I started drinking his Cool-Aid. Having more social capital improves the following outcomes:
Better childhood development. This includes being born healthy, graduating high school, test scores, not going to jail, and not dying. When it comes to running the sociology numbers, social capital is second only to poverty regarding its effects on childhood outcomes. And when it comes to educational attainment, social capital is an even better predictor than poverty - specifically parents having friends.
Safer streets. In states where social capital is higher, violent crime is lower and people are even less likely to agree to the question: “I’d do better than average in a fist fight.”
More money. Getting a higher paid job is still primarily about who you know. 85% of young men found a job through someone they know. He cites one Atlanta study that found that each employed person in one’s social network increases one’s annual income by $1,400.
Health and happiness. Social connectedness is the most powerful determinant of our well-being, full stop. Being more integrated in a community leads to less colds, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, depression, and premature death. These improvements rival in effect size the negative effect of things like smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure. And the most common finding from research on life satisfaction both in the US and globally, is that happiness is best predicted by the number and depth of one’s social connections.
This is…kind of everything that matters?
Like how much more evidence do we need to start worshiping at the altar of social capital?
What is driving social capital down
It’s 3 major things, from larger to smaller effect size.
Generational changes. Those who were born in the first two decades of the 20th century were simply the most civically minded people ever. Given war and whatnot.
TV. TV sucks social capital out of society because people spend time looking at screens instead of connecting with one another. People (like me) complain about social media’s influence on young folks today. What’s interesting is that the exact same effects started to show in the 1970s as TV spread. If this book were updated today, I’m sure social media and mobile phones would be the #1 driver of decreased social capital by a long shot.
Space and time. Urban sprawl and working longer hours lead to increased commutes and more diffuse communities. These factors get a lot of airplay, but they’re lesser ones compared to TV and not being a part of the WWII generation.
And I’m not sure if a rising sense of materialism is the cause or effect of social capital going down, but it’s certainly a part of this. Pollsters surveyed Americans on what the “Good life” meant to them in 1975 and again in 1996. In 1975, 38% of adults chose “a lot of money.” By 1996 that rose to 63%. It certainly feels logical that the more time we spend consuming things, including media, the more we value money.
What to do?
The answer is pretty simple: join groups and make friends. Here’s how I see people actually doing this today.
Join an ol’ fashioned club. Today there seems to be a rise in running clubs, golf, members only clubs, and book clubs. The digital version of this online paid communities (I belong to 3 of them), where somebody assembles content and chat rooms around a niche interest. Digital communities are nowhere near as strong as in-person communities, but they’re great for being lightly connected to like-minded folks.
Living near friends. More recently, a number of groups and services are starting to make this easier and publicly advocate for this. These groups include Radish in Oakland, Fractal in NYC, and Cabin for nomads. Month long pop-up cities from groups like Edge City serve as a hypercharged version of this, as they bring industry-specific folks (largely crypto, AI, and associated tech fields) together, in a small place, with daily events for collaboration.
Limit social media and streaming. So much of social capital creation is simply connecting with folks instead of looking at screens (with the glaring exception of content creators, where that’s their job). Putnam even hypothesizes that the reason children develop healthier in states with higher social capital, is because they’re simply watching less TV. By limiting screen time, we automatically become more social. For tips on on how to do this, check out this interview with modern addiction guru Alex Olshonsky.
Text people. Some people are naturally great at keeping in touch with folks. These people are rare. The most effective way to do this that I’ve found for myself is a method taught by Jesse Itzler, an entrepreneur known for his vast rolodex. He takes 3 minutes a day to text 3 people. That’s 100 people a month and 1,000 people a year that he now has a stronger connection to. He tends to focus on 3 things in these messages: compliment, congratulate, and console (depending on whatever is appropriate). It’s a delightful way to start the day, and has already started benefiting me in material ways I didn’t anticipate like job opportunities, creative brainstorming sessions, and receiving gratitude from old friends.
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Very insightful. Men are victims of a friendship recession, as Richard.V Reeves explains:
"Men have fewer friends than women, and are at greater risk of isolation. The gap has widened in recent years. A 2021 report from the Survey Centre on American Life identified a male friendship recession, with 15% of men saying they have no close friends, up from 3% in 1990. Unsurprisingly, these are also the men who are most likely to report feeling lonely." - Of Boys and Men.