Thread by @lymanstoneky

Folks I am SO EXCITED for a report that I wrote for @AEI to be published TODAY! This has been a labor of love for over a year, and it is finally AVAILABLE FOR YOUR READING. aei.org/research-produ…

Why has American civic life become so divisive and impoverished in quality? Why is associational life in decline? Why are our intermediating institutions failing?

Using data from 1750-today, I argue the answer is BREAD AND CIRCUSES. aei.org/research-produ…

Basically, I argue that 19th century American life was NOT one of "dense associational life." The "nation of joiners" epithet WRONGLY attributed to de Tocqueville is also just wrong: the associations of "Democracy and America" are not Putnamesque at all!

Many of them are obviously government functions or for-profit firms. And the point being made is emphatically NOT that Americans had MORE associations (they did not: Americans probably had FEWER associations than Europeans) but that the *legitimating force* varied.

In England your theater company was backed and legitimated by a nobleman or a monarch. In America it was a private association or a firm.

Democracy in America is concerned with *democracy*, and so the concern is using associations to show a difference in *values*.

And indeed, early American politics were VOCIFEROUSLY anti-association: political parties were viewed with suspicion, veterans organizations were treated as *threats to the republic*, and the first third party was.... the Anti-Masonic Party!

Across the board, what we actually can see in early America is deep suspicion of association, and correspondingly LOW participation. Americans did NOT have a "thick" society.

RATHER (and this is not in the report!) I would argue that American society (at least among white males, a VERY important caveat!) from the 1780s to the 1860s was radically THIN.

Legislative districts were extremely small, parties were weak, new states were being added.... it was almost trivially easy to enter politics, sway policymakers, and be a substantive participant. (again, IF you were a white male citizen; huge caveat!)

One key part of this I don't discuss in the report but which is SUPER RELEVANT IN A CENSUS YEAR is LEGISLATIVE DISTRICT SIZE.

I suspect a big part of the rise in associational life in the latter 19th and early 20th century was driven by rising societal scale and complexity.

The direct access to political power enjoyed by white citizen males was slowly (AND TOTALLY JUSTIFIABLY) eroded: property requirements faded, immigration rose, slavery was ended, women got the vote, etc, etc.

Meanwhile, urbanization, rising ethnic diversity, industrialization, the growth of population in far-flung western states, all made informal, small-scale coordination less politically effective.

The cherry on top is 1913 apportionment, locking in the size of the House; but House district size (and Senate too!) had been rising for a long time, necessitating more coordination AMONG voters to get the attention of policymakers.

The rising complexity and scale of society overcomes the initial American *resistance* to formal associational life, and creates space for social entrepreneurs to create massive organizations that do a lot of really swell stuff.

Putnam talks a lot about the crucial period here from like 1870-1930, and I do too, but for this thread we'll skip it.

Since WWII (and especially the 1960s), things have changed.

The scale and complexity of our society has continued to rise. It is ever-harder to access political power, and the challenges confronting society are ever more complex and multi-faceted as our society becomes more stratified and specialized.

AND YET.... associational life is also in decline. Intermediating institutions are keeling over dead left and right, and new institutions that arise are mostly not aimed at large-scale public participation.

What's happening now is a big problem. At a time when we need intermediating institutions the MOST, they are in speedy decline.

WHY?

My main argument (which will fit nicely I think with @swinshi 's take on a lot of this I think) is that declining associational life is a product of affluence, technological change, and good government.

Unionization rates have fallen in virtually every developed country on earth because *there was a sectoral shift in work* towards jobs that are less dangerous and miserable, and so motivate less need for cooperation and protection.

Likewise, the victories of unions in achieving *statutory protection for all workers* also undermined the viability of unionization. In countries with weaker statutory protection and more dependence on sector-level bargaining, unionization rates are much higher.

Of course, right-to-work and similar anti-union laws had a role to play too, but if you think low unionization rates are simply a result of giving workers the secret ballot and not letting unions beat up non-union workers, the international evidence is a huge problem.

Or take veterans organizations. Among veterans, participation in these groups hasn't actually changed much over time!

The reason American Legion posts are closing is because warmaking has gotten rarer, smaller, and more professionalized.

It's not that "veterans got disconnected" it's that "there are fewer veterans because THANK GOD we haven't had to fight lots of big conventional wars."

Or consider social fraternities. Many of them existed FOR THE PURPOSE OF providing class, sex, and race-segregated social spaces. The decline in social demand for and tolerance of such open discrimination is a good thing!

More positively, many of these societies existed to help members keep abreast of news and current events; their main function was basically as "communities of communication."

But the rise of radio, TV, and of course the internet all vitiated the demand for this. You can get the news, and tons of commentary ABOUT the news, from other sources.

I could go on.

The death of Putnamesque associational life is broadly a product of affluence, technology, and the SUCCESS of those institutions.

But I depart from Putnam in a very important place. I actually strenuously DISAGREE that associational life has "declined." People have NOT withdrawn from "participation in society" or "national life together," or what have you.

Rather, HOW people engage with society has changed. They do it differently now. Mass media is a huge part of this story.

But I want to skip over mass media for now and talk about my actual FLAMING HOT TAKE which is sports are destroying America.

So first off, let's get some basic facts.

America's infatuation with sports is very recent.

There is no deep, ancient root of American sporting culture. Early American commentators generally looked down on adults playing organized sports for anything other than occasional leisure, and even then usually suggested hunting or horsemanship as better hobbies.

This was connected to wider critiques of idleness and sloth, and also to pretty widespread classical literacy among early American elites who had Juvenal's "bread and circuses" on their mind.

There's also a legacy of ancient Christian critiques of "the games" that occasionally crops up.

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville mentions sports and games occasionally.

He says they are hallmarks of slave societies.

I'm not joking folks. Comparing Ohio and Kentucky, Tocqueville says the difference is Ohioans are industrious and entrepreneurial and (white) Kentuckians are slothful, violent, and waste time on sports because the slaves are doing the hard work for them.

Obviously, this is primarily a critique *of slavery* (rightly!), but it is also incidentally a critique *of sports culture*.

(Sports and games come up a few other times, mostly in cases where Tocqueville is mentioning how state and local laws discriminated against sports and games)

So let's look at data!

Here's words about sports in American publications over time:

Note that in the 19th century "game" often referred to "meat" and "sport" often meant "make fun of someone," so these rises may even be *overestimated*.

Sorry, the rises may *underestimated*.

Here's attendance at major league sporting events and NCAA football games compared to population.

But this metric could just reflect rising commercialization and formalization rather than rising popularity, so maybe you don't buy it as showing rising sports popularity!

So here's the best estimate I can cobble together of *high school sports participation*. This is a good indicator because even today a vanishingly small share of such participation is national or commercially relevant.

Now, this is high schoolers participating in *formal leagues*.

OBVIOUSLY informal play existed earlier, or "formal" leagues which left too little historical record for me to identify them.

But this is part of my point: we're seeing sports capture more and more of peoples' *engagement with institutional life*. Formalization is itself a meaningful trend!

And that's not all!

Here's spending on sports and employment in sports over time!

That the trend over time matches STRONGLY suggests my other indicators are not spurious. There's a real trend here!

But still, this might just reflect formalization! Maybe there was no change in how much time people devoted to sports, but it just changed to more formal leagues!

For that we have time use data:

Now look, international time use data (and the surveys before the 2000s) are kind of a crap shoot. I'm not wildly confident in all the exact numbers here.

But it's very hard to come up with a story where time used on sports and exercise has *not* risen to historically and internationally at-least-somewhat-unusually-high levels for American men.

WHY have sports risen?

I have basically three answers:
1) Telegenicity
2) Conformist lowest-common-denominator educational norms
3) War and nationalism

Sports make good TV. Hence why sports have steadily claimed up the TV ratings to displace everything else. TV is our culture to a meaningful extent, so whatever is on TV is emulated and seen as ideal.

Sports are value-free. In schools that claim an ever-growing share of life in an ever-more-diverse society with ever-stricter-rules limiting "sectarian" statements, SPORTS are the only communal, solidaristic activity that many schools have.

Kids who do FFA or academic team wear FFA jackets or whatever nerds wear.

Athletes wear the school logo, name, and colors.

Folks I am arguing for the discursive construction of reality. Ideas exist and have consequences. Writhe in your ontological pain, nominalists!

In layman's terms, when kids lives are dominated by school and school culture communicates value and prestige largely via sports, kids learn that sports are valuable and prestigious.

AND WE HAVE A DIRECT TEST OF THIS!

Here's the share of school-age kids participating in each of these kinds of extracurriculars:

Sports are eating clubs.

It's impossible to argue this is "formalization," and the leisure time and affluence of kids has not meaningfully changed.

This is a CULTURAL SHIFT.

And here it is in the long run:

Finally, nationalism. I'll leave these graphs here and also gesture wildly at the entire history of the Olympics and also the fact that we call our baseball tournament the World Series.

But look, *as a form of entertainment*, I have no beef with sports. Sports are fine. And tbh, probably a MORE socially beneficial outlet than many alternative forms of entertainment and recreation!

To the extent that throwing around a ball replaces some other way of having fun, fine. We're good there. I'm from Kentucky and so, being from the greatest basketball culture on the planet, I can appreciate enjoyment of sports! I get it! It's a lot of fun!

But *as a form of associational life*, the rise of sports is bad. I won't bore you with a lit review, but I do provide a big lit review in the paper.

Suffice to say, the academic literature on "social capital" effects of sports as mixed AT BEST.

Whereas we have mountains of rock solid evidence showing that e.g. church attendance, union membership, or other forms of associational life have BIG positive social effects, for sports it's like "Maybe some kinds of sports sometimes help some people... kinda."

It's not that sports are BAD it's just that they're displacing things which are *really good*.

Those "good things" turn out to be very important, by the way. The decline of intermediating institutions (which is mostly not due to sports, but it is PARTLY) has consequences.

The list of possible consequences is too vast to count. So I decided to focus on ONE SPECIFIC CONSEQUENCE:

Epidemic disease.

To understand my argument here I STRONGLY advise ACTUALLY READING THE PAPER.

But so that they can opportunistically and grossly misunderstand my point, here are some contextless graphs showing more associational life is related to less death during pandemics!

Basically, my argument is that dense networks of associational life accelerate the pace at which people acquire accurate information and develop useful responses.

Anyways.

Read the report. It represents way more hours of work than I care to admit, and I hope a meaningfully *different* argument about social capital vs. what's out there.

Also, to my twitter followers who participated in this survey, thank you for giving me exactly the anecdotes I was hoping to get!

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1294474497811243008?s=20

Also, if you read my report, that's DEFINITELY building social capital.

Two last notes:
1) I am not *intentionally* trying to make each of my AEI reports longer than the previous report.

2) If you want an op-ed version on this for your publication, let me know! I've got some text primed and ready.