effectively, we're delighted to have you give the last question. [laughter] >> this thank you. real quickly, wanted to follow up on someone's questions about what the troops would do for jobs. i would say the green jobs are definitely the biggest initiative for the next 15-20 years in this country. there's billions of dollars to be made. it's a little slow, but hope any in the next five years we can speed up the process. my question to you is mostly about the u.n. i personally feel that the u.n. is a great stuff, but it's the most uneffective way to combine nations together and fight against a certain cause. .. [applause] speedy reminder once more that our final session of the semester will --. >> tom engelhardt is a consulting editor at metropolitan books and a fellow at the nation institute. to find out more visit tom dispatch.com. >> during his encore booknotes program which originally aired in december of 2073 spoke about his book, "bowling alone" the collapse and revival of american community. it examines the ways in which americans gather in social groups and suggests that social interaction is less prevalent than ever before. c-span: robert d. putnam, author of "bowling alone," what's the theory of your book? >> guest: well, my theory is that connecting with other people has great value for us personally and for our communities. i use the term social capital in the book to refer to the fact that social networks have value. they have value for the people who are in them. most people in america, for example, get their jobs through them. you know, i did--i did and most people do. i don't mean that in a nepotistic sense. i just mean we--we learn about jobs through--through social connections. and there are many other values to us personally from our social connections. there are positive effects on health from connecting with other people. but social connections also have value for people who are not directly in the networks. if you live in a neighborhood where people know one another, for example, as i do, that holds down the crime rate in the neighborhood, even for people who don't themselves go to the barbecues in the neighborhood; that is, the general effects of social capital, of social connections spread across the community. they lower crime rates, they improve performance in schools, they have many positive effects. and so the theory of the book is that social capital, social connections, community connections have value for people. america has historically been blessed with very high levels of social capital compared to most other countries. we do connect with one another and that's been an important part of our advantage historically as a country. and for most of the last century or so that was more and more true of americans. we were year by year connecting more with one another. we were going to meetings more, belonging to pta, belong to civic groups, having friends over to the house, giving more. our generosity was rising year by year in terms of the fraction of our income that we gave to other people. and then somehow mysteriously about, oh, 25 or 30 years ago all of those trends turned downward and be--we began doing all of those things less, connecting less with other people, and so this book is about, first of all, the fact, demonstrating that that's a quite pervasive trend across american society and then trying to explore why it happened and--and what difference it makes and--and what we might do about it. c-span: "bowling alone." where did you get the title? >> guest: well, i was doing some work on the question of membership in various organizations, the fact that people were no longer belonging to the, you know, elks club or the rotary club or the league of women voters. and i happened to run into a friend who owned a bowling alley. and he said, 'gosh, bob, you don't know it but you've stumbled on to the major economic problems facing my industry, because although more americans are bowling than ever before--bowling is up in america--bowling leagues, bowling in teams is off by about 60 percent.' and the money it turns out, in bowling, is in the beer and pretzels. because when you buy--when you dr--when you--when you bowl in a league, you drink four times as mer--much beer and you eat four times as many pretzels. and the money in bowling is in the beer and pretzels, not in the balls and shoes, so they were in this funny situation in which he was aware of the fact that people were bowling more but not bowling in leagues. and so i thought that captured the fact that we were--we were not connecting with our friends and neighbors as much as we--as we once did. and i wanted to get across the idea that it wasn't just in kind of do-gooding ways that we were not connecting. it wasn't that we were just no longer voting, although voting is down, as everybody knows. it wasn't just that we were, you know, no longer belonging to some kind of organization that does good. but it--it was also that we were not even connecting in informal ways with our friends and neighbors. that's why i used the title. c-span: there was a time where you panicked... >> guest: yeah. c-span: ...because you had a data problem. what was that? >> guest: yeah. well, as--in writing this book, as--as in writing other books that i've done, i followed a plan of writing an article in which you sort of lay out where you think you're going and trying to listen to what people have to say about it. usually in the past, since i'm an academic, most of the books that i've written i got responses from two or three people in response to that initial article. this time the--the article bowling alone happened to get a lot more attention and so i got letters and comments and so on from thousands of people and... c-span: what year was that? the article? >> guest: 1995. 1995. c-span: in what magazine? >> guest: a little journal called the journal of democracy, which i think had a total paid circulation of about five people. it was really very obscure. but the--but the journal--but the article happened to catch people's attention. i don't know quite why. i have some suspicions about that, but at any rate it--it caught a lot of attention and got a lot of positive attention. and--and a lot of people said, 'gee, but, wait a minute, if you just took a broader view, maybe things wouldn't look so bleak. maybe--maybe the things you looked at are declining but other things are not declining.' and so i spent some time trying to figure out whether that was true, whether there actually--whether maybe i overstated the case in that initial article. and early in that process, i discovered that one of the data sets that i had been using had a flaw--a technical flaw in it, not actually one that i had put in it, but it meant that there had been an undercounting of group memberships. and so al--when you made a correction for that, although the trends were still down, they weren't down nearly as much. and so that was a point at which i thought, 'well, maybe, i really did get carried away with this original argument in--and maybe the trends really aren't down as much as i thought.' c-span: so how was that d--how did you correct it? >> guest: well, we were--easy to correct that particular data. but the main--the larger--just by--by, you know, doing the--doing the numbers in the--in the proper way, they had forgotten to count pta memberships or something in their--in their total count. what--the more important thing that happened was that we discovered after the original article--and remember, it--it was--it was intended to be a kind of preliminary thing--we discovered two massive new archives of survey evidence whose existence i hadn't even known of before. indeed, nobody had known of the--these two massive archives based on surveys with large numbers of americans every month in one case, every year in the other case, since 1975; year after year asking people about how often they went to meetings and how often they went to club meetings and how often they volunteered and how often they had friends over to the house and went on picnics and so on. and until that point we had no idea that anybody was even gathering data on picnics. who knew whether picnics were up or down. but--but once we had this really amazingly rich evidence, it provides a deep, kind of like a moving picture of how americans' social habits have changed over the course of the--of the last quarter century. and i was shocked when i discovered that evidence, because what it turned out was when you took into account--people had said, you know, 'if you--if you take into account a broader range of things, it'll turn out things are not so bleak.' and i took into account a--a broader range of things which not--turned out things were even bleaker. then i thought it was not just that we were stopping going to meetings. we still claimed to be members of groups, but we stopped going to meetings. so we were--we were not showing up. we were not--and we weren't going to--we weren't involved in other sorts of community activities. we weren't signing petitions as much as we used to. but also we weren't having friends over to the house, we weren't going on picnics, we weren't having dinner parties, we weren't going to bar--going to bars was down by about 35 to 40 percent. we were not even having dinner with our own families, this fuller evidence suggested. so it turned out once we had the full range of evidence--and that's what's reported in this book--that the original article was mistaken only in that it understated the full range in depth and dread--and--and breadth of these--these kinds of declines in our connectedness. c-span: where is your neighborhood? >> guest: i live--well, actually, i'm fortunate. i--we live in two places. i live in lexington, massachusetts. i teach at harvard and i live in lexington, massachusetts, a suburb of boston. it's a--it's a nice little neighborhood where people do actually have barbecues and so on. and then we have a--a h--little house up in new hampshire where i go when i want to write, and so i--we have friends and--and local connections there, too. c-span: so what's the difference between frost pond, new hampshire, and lexington? >> guest: well, that's a very, very good question, brian. in--in the boston metropolitan area, there are--generally speaking, people are less connected with one another, with their neighbors, than they are in a small town. that's true and--specifically of--of jaffrey, new hampshire, where frost pond is located. people in--in jaffrey all the time know each other by going in to, you know, the grocery store to get potato salad. they know what kind of potato salad i want. if i--if i go into the grocery store in--in lexington, you know, no one would ever remember who i am. so there are big differences in the level of social connection. people are more likely to vote in--in the small town in new hampshire than they are in--in--in the boston area. they're--they're more likely to volunteer. they're more likely to shovel one another's sn--you know, walks or whatever. so there are differences that mirror, in fact, differences nationwide between smaller places and--and--and bigger urban areas. but the striking thing is if you compare jaffrey, new hampshire, 2000--well, if you compare jaffrey, new hampshire, in the year 2000 with boston in the year 2000, jaffrey has a lot more social connections. but if you compare jaffrey, new hampshire, 2000 of jaffrey 1960, which i can do--which you can do just by talking to old-timers or--or looking at the newspapers or whatever, there's been a big decline there, too. in other words, what i'm trying to say is these--these trends downward in social connections, whether we're talking about clubs or just having friends over, are true everywhere across america. this is really an equal opportunity affliction that's--that's struck our society. c-span: harvard, you teach what? >> guest: i teach public policy at the kennedy school of government. c-span: how long have you done that? >> guest: i've been about 20 years. before that i was at the university of michigan for a little more than 10 years. and--and there, too, i've got--i've taught international relations and--and now american politics. c-span: where did you grow up? >> guest: i grew up in a little town in ohio--a little town called port clinton, ohio. population then and now 5,000. c-span: what was the family like? >> guest: my family? c-span: mm-hmm. >> guest: my dad was a-- a building contractor. my mom was a schoolteacher. we'd come there after the war. my dad had been injured during the war and he was recovering. and i had a--a younger sister--still do. and it was a--it was a pleasant place to grow up and a pleasant time to grow up. and, i mean, i--it was a much less, you know, cosmopolitan place than harvard or--or the east coast in general. but i was really blessed in growing up in a place that had a lot of social capital. and, frankly, i've--i've spent some time learning in writing this book about the degree to which what i'm indulging in here is simple nostalgia for kind of a--of a--of a past that one wouldn't necessarily today want to re-create. i haven't been back to port clinton for a long time--until i--until just recently i went back there. and it turns out it still is, in fact, unusually civic. people do--do connect with one another. c-span: you do mention that, in spite of the fact that you find that people are bowling alone in your own environment, you've got a tremendous amount of support for this book. >> guest: yeah. sure did. c-span: and your own daughters worked with you for 10 years. >> guest: yeah. c-span: tell us about laura and what--what role she played in this. >> guest: well, it's interesting that you ask that question. laura is a professional woman. she'd just gotten her phd at the university of michigan in latin american history. she's married to a costa rican and now lives in costa rica and she's got three kids. i'm extremely proud of her 'cause she's, you know, one of these kind of super moms who's raising a family and taking care of her mother-in-law there in costa rica and also writing. and we are very close, personally; have been for a long time. she's been the person who's been my most severe critic, 'cause we know each other well enough that she feels free to say things that people might not say, about, 'gee, that's a dumb way of phrasing that idea or--or i think i would toss out that chapter entirely.' and we--at the time i was writing this book, she was also doing her dissertation and we both happen to be night people. we work--write late at night, so lots of the time we'd--we'd spend, in the middle of the night, me at frost pond and she in--in costa rica and exchanging e-mails about how--how we were making--how well we were making out that evening. c-span: does she feel the same way you do about the--the bowling alone concept? >> guest: yeah. she does, actually. absolutely. she's been very helpful, very helpful, in fact, in getting me to see the trend as well through the eyes of someone of a different generation. because there are such big generational differences in the degree to which americans are connected with their communities, and in the ways that--that they connect with their communities, there's a risk that someone in, you know, late middle age, my age, may just be blind to new forms of social connection that were--that are emerging among younger folks. and i don't want to hold her responsible for any remaining blind spots, but we did talk a lot, actually as i was writing it, about, 'well, how would this problem look if it--if it were--if the book were being written--being written by a--a 20-something or a 30-something rather than 50-something?' c-span: you spent a lot of time on--not a lot of time, you spent a chapter on television... >> guest: right. c-span: ...and media and the water cooler effect. what's that? >> guest: well, the water cooler effect. people say that if--you know, we all watched "survivor," we can get together around the water cooler and that's--that's almost as good connections as--as if we, you know, were--were connecting over the back fence. but i don't find any evidence that that's true, actually. i think that enter-- entertainment television, especially commercial entertainment television, is really lethal for civic connection. i always have to phrase the point carefully when i'm talking about television to say commercial entertainment television, because i know from news statistics, the watchers of c-span and--and--and some of the other news programs are among the--the most civic people in the america. they're also on average older than the rest of americans. and there--that's--there--they represent really civic america. but, unfortunately, that's not the--most people in america don't watch those sorts of programs. most of them watch, you know, "survivor" or "friends" or--or any one of a number of other television shows. and those--watching those shows is very negatively correlated with all forms of social connection, not just the--you know, going to meetings but even just spending time with your family. c-span: there's one statistic--i may not be perfectly accurate on this, but sixth graders with television sets in their bedroom went from something like 6 percent in 1977 up to 70 percent in 1997 or whatever. >> guest: correct. yup. c-span: what does that say? >> guest: well, i--i thi--what it says is absolutely that we're watching television, especially our kids, are watching more television alone. i actually had not any idea that that trend had occurred because our--my kids are a little--a little older than that and so we--that--that happened after we had young kids. and--and i don't--don't know that we would have been immune to it if our kids had been that young. i don't want to claim status here as somehow a saint with respect to television watching. but what it--what the trend means is that more and more of the time of our kids is spent alone watching television without anybody else present or certainly without any adult present. i--i think that--that study that--that--that i cite in the book comes from the--a kaiser family foundation study which also, i think, shows that 95 percent of the time that kids are watching television, their not--their parents are not present. and that ki--and, by the way, it's just not ki--it's not just kids. it's adults, too, who are mostly watching television alone. but with respect to our kids, that can't be a good--that can't be good actually. and there's another interesting finding recently actually. just this spring, the ymca released a survey in which they had asked kids, ad--adolescents, 'would you like to spend more time with your parents or the same amount of time you do spend with your parents or less time with your parents?' adolescents, remember. these are kids, brian, who don't--you know, adolescents in general are not wanting to spend a lot of time hanging out with--with mom and dad. but, in fact, two-thirds of american adolescents say they'd like to spend more time with their parents. what that says to me is that, for a variety of reasons, we've disengaged from our kids. we're using televisions as--increasingly a kind of cheap day care. and--and that's, i'm afraid, laying the groundwork for yet more civic disengagement down the road. c-span: how much did vietnam and/or watergate have to do with this change over the last 25 years? >> guest: that's--that's a good question. it's--it's not an easy question to answer because it certainly is clear that the generation of people who--who were exposed to that and only to that--that is, who came of age during the midst of vietnam and watergate and so on--are less civically engaged. and i can believe that people, say, have stopped voting because they're upset about, you know, watergate or vietnam or monic