8 ms·

The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)

167 points by metasean 9y ago

metasean 9y ago
>Almost 200 years ago that discerning observer of social life, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote about the exceptional ability of Americans to form voluntary associations and, more generally, to cooperate in solving problems that required concerted collective action. This capacity for cooperation apparently lasted into the post-World War II era, but several indicators suggest that during the last 3-4 decades it has been unraveling. >In these articles I argue that general well-being (and high levels of social cooperation) tends to move in the opposite direction from inequality. During the ‘disintegrative phases’ inequality is high while well-being and cooperation are low. During the ‘integrative phases’ inequality is low, while well-being and cooperation are high. With economic inequality only getting worse [0, 1, 2] I can't help but wonder if there is also a decline in open source contributions? Or do our contributions increase because it provides visibility, and therefore increased economic opportunity, for those lower on the income scale? [0]: http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-inequality-worse/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-inequality-w... [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh... [2]: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/890610260251033602 https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/890610260251033602
- smith_winston 9y ago
  There is also Robert Putnam's work on the deleterious effects of "diversity" on civic life and engagement. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.... DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x
schoen 9y ago
While I found this quite interesting, and I'm as concerned about some of these trends as the next person, I was eerily reminded of some of John Robbins's stuff graphing meat consumption against incidence of diseases and his kind of casual thinking about causation. We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from. And I remember that there's even a funny web site that tries to underscore the difficulty in reasoning from these associations. http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations In this case, the n-grams chart really exemplified this for me. There are so many influences on the frequency of a word, including lexical substitution of a word by its synonyms, changes in spelling, and increased or decreased interest in a topic regardless of whether that interest is positive or negative. For example, check out the long-term decline in avarice in America! It's profound! https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=avarice&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cavarice%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=avarice&year_s... Oh, wait, maybe we just stopped using the word "avarice" rather than the concept. :-) Or, during this Second Gilded Age, our society actually started to become less atomized: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=atomized&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Catomized%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=atomized&year_... ... or maybe we just moved away from calling the phenomenon that.
- macawfish 9y ago
  Why don't you hop into Sugihara's method and see for yourself? My hunch is that the thing that most frequently trickles down in the trickle down economy is DEBT. I imagine distrust follows close behind.
- kafkaesq 9y ago
  We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from. Yeah, it's a fun website -- but you could say that about just about any claimed correlation. Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'barometric' changes he's talking about -- the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound. Probably a lot more work needs to be done to find a solid statistical basis behind this observation (if this is at all possible). But by and large (aside from the singe n-gram example, which I agree smells like cherry-picking), it's not like his arguments are simply frivolous.
  - baddox 9y ago
    > Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'barometric' changes he's talking about -- the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound. Probably a lot more work needs to be done to find a solid statistical basis behind this observation (if this is at all possible). I need to see some very solid evidence before I change my assumption, which is that people have always felt this as they get older, because we romanticize our memories of youth and we are uncomfortable with the societal changes that younger generations inevitably introduce.
    - kafkaesq 9y ago
      Fair point - it's very tricky to measure.
  - schoen 9y ago
kafkaesq 9y ago
Nothing 'strange' about this at all; to a first-order approximation, it's the inevitable byproduct of the transformative shift in the society's governing ideology over the same timespan: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-t... That said, the various participation rates he's siting may presumed to be somewhat skewed by immigration.
- RickS 9y ago
  Thanks for that link. Interesting rundown of the topic.
balance_factor 9y ago
> polarization What polarization is there in Washington? Or outside the beltway? What are the two poles? How people feel about transexuals? I don't see any polarization. The two parties are close together on almost everything. As the real differences fade, unimportant differences must be heightened. Trump is of that type - he makes a big show, but on what big issue in which he can get anywhere is he substantially far from the Democratic (or Republican) party? As real differences fade, the showmanship of there being a difference must increase, thus, Trump. Even healthcare has no polarization. Both parties are agreed on what it should be. Any party acting as if it will do single player or scrap Obamacare is just showboating. Any changes that get through will be minor ones. It was a 60 Senator consensus vote of the middle-of-the-road consensus view of what healthcare would be. McCain's thumbs down to any major overhaul. In the past two centuries the US went from a civil war to the intitial struggle of how to deal with the Great Depression. There hasn't been much polarization since that. Even the big squabble in the 1960s was over a non-issue - over a small, peasant country in Indochina. The cold war began cooling off in the early 1950s, and stayed cool, aside from occassional flare-ups in certain areas. By the 1970s, US conservatives were trying to figure out how to heat the cold war up again against the background of SALT and the Helsinki accords. The political establishment is less polarized than ever nowadays. It's not like post-war France, where Joliot-Curie, Picasso, Sartre etc. were members of the largest political party in France - the PCF.
- RickS 9y ago
  Your measure of polarization is talking about distance on a political spectrum. This is perhaps the correct way, since it's literally polar. The vernacular "polarization" here would be better thought of as a measure not of conceptual distance, but of the intensity with which that distance is perceived. The left and right are both very centrist (with some wacky outlier issues), but they perceive the other side as being very wrong, which allows for polarization regardless of actual political distance.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  I would argue that the big US squabble in the 1960s was civil rights. Still not resolved (for example a couple of states have just recently been found to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act).
Animats 9y ago
Here's a question. Do you belong to any organization which chooses its leaders democratically? That is, you get to vote, there's more than one candidate, and the incumbents and their designated successors sometimes get kicked out? Do you belong to any organization which has member meetings in which members can vote and make decisions binding on the organization?
- kevinnk 9y ago
  Lots of clubs/community orgs are like this. The community soccer org for the city I grew up in had lots of turnover in the management due to voting.
  - PoachedSausage 9y ago
    The best sports and social clubs I've been a member of generally try to avoid too many political games although they are nominally democratic. Club politics is generally tiresome, few people join a tennis club or hackerspace to play politics, they want to play tennis or make things.
    - Animats 9y ago
      "The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings." -Wilde That's the problem with democracy. It's hard work.
      - CaptainSwing 9y ago
        Important to remember that, despite jokes like these, Oscar Wilde remained a committed (if ideosyncratic) libertarian socialist.
      - adrianratnapala 9y ago
        One of the things that Tocqueville approved of in America is that everyone had some experience of government via jury duty. Which is compulsory (at least in principle, and in those days, probably in practice too). I've often wondered if random juries should play a larger role in day-to-day government. Forcing people to work like this is a huge tax and not to be taken lightly, but taxing peoples attention rather than their wallets might actually be what we need.
pcmaffey 9y ago
The arena for 'cooperation' has shifted from socio-political realms to economic ones. Business now is the primary vehicle for cooperative efforts.
carapace 9y ago
Population density? I'd love to see a chart of these social indicators plotted against population density.
- 0x4f3759df 9y ago
  Probably has a lot to do with the rise of the suburbs.
acslater00 9y ago
The proposed link between civic participation ("cooperation") and both inequality and political polarization is a strange one to me, since civic participation seems like it would be a local phenomenon, and both inequality and political polarization mostly show up as regional differences rather than differences within communities. Sure, the political space between Allegany County, NY (low income and trump voting) and Westchester County, NY (high income and clinton voting) is huge. But if you go to an elk lodge in Allegany or a (i dunno) running club in Westchester, you're going to find that everybody there has basically the same politics and basically the same income. Something else is going on here.
- PoachedSausage 9y ago
  Maybe we're a bit more varied here in the UK and this is anecdata but I'm a member of a running club that has at one end of the spectrum members of the Conservative party through to anarcho-vegans.
  - acslater00 9y ago
    Yeah - sure I'm not literally saying that all clubs are full of people with identical politics. I'm just pointing out that most communities in America are actually not that diverse or polarized.
    - PoachedSausage 9y ago
      To be fair, the dynamic range in incomes probably is isn't that great and it's in a large multi-cultural city.
coop-throwaway 9y ago
The dating market for men has become extremely difficult over the last few years (lots of factors for that), more and more men are unable to find a mate. Men are less inviting of other men from my observation as they are in deep competition with each other -- why risk having another man around when he might take your girl or reduce your chances? Apps, dating sites, clubs, and events are filled with men looking for women, don't expect them to be cooperative with you, you are their compitition. I believe this is a factor in men becoming less cooperative.
- RickS 9y ago
  There's a lot to unpack in that comment, and I'm not going to take a swing at much of it, except to say that you should be careful of confusing visibility with reality. Both the haves and the have nots are equipped with increasingly large megaphones (instagram, et al). Most people are regular, and guys have been "taking" other guy's girls since we were beating each other with sticks. The idea that this phenomenon is new or unnatural aims to make it easier to paint as unfair, and for the plaintiff to claim victimhood. Watch out for that. Lots of lonely guys trying to deflect blame away from their own shortcomings. It's not intellectually honest. Anyway, I think the issue is one level up from that: Economic uncertainty in general, rather than strictly social/reproductive uncertainty. The former invites the latter.
  - coop-throwaway 9y ago
    Never before could a woman open an app and literally have hundreds of men at her door within minutes (all while men struggle to get a single match). This has created such an imbalance that the women are able to reject roughly the bottom 80% of men leaving most men struggling to get the attention of the bottom 20% of women. And yes, there are lots of men with shortcomings, physical ones, that have rendered them out of the modern dating pool whereas in the past they would have met an equivalent woman. That's no longer the case as that equivalent woman can demand a much higher quality man -- there's an unlimited supply of men to pick from.
    - RickS 9y ago
tardygrad 9y ago
This was touched upon heavily in the book 'The Righteous Mind' by Jonathan Haidt, an amazing book if you're interested in this sort of thing and part of Bill Gate's reading list where I first found it. This quote (by Bertrand Russell) stood out: "Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; and on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible."
- pdwetz 9y ago
  I'm not sure I follow his thought process on why "through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible." On a simple personal level, I'm for individualism and cooperation, so I'm not seeing the inherent conflict. Perhaps it's a matter of definitions?
  - ergothus 9y ago
    The American culture values individualism...and also has a strong "you can't tell me what to do!" reaction to social pressure. If those points are connected, I can easily see too much individualism interfering with cooperation even if the base ideas are not in conflict. Evidence: who are the heroes in american TV and movies? The rebel against authority, the one that breaks the rules. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, House, I could go on and on. We celebrate the idea of something we actively argue against in daily life. There's also some weird connection between extremes of claiming to value individualism and idolizing authoritarianism that I won't claim to understand, so I could be completely wrong on all of this. I'm not positive that extremes of individualism are a death knell for cooperation...but I don't find the idea unlikely either.
    - pdonis 9y ago
      > who are the heroes in american TV and movies? The rebel against authority, the one that breaks the rules. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, House All of these heroes cooperated with close friends, colleagues, and other people in order to solve problems and achieve goals. The difference is not individualism vs. cooperation. The difference is cooperation based on the voluntary choices of individuals, as needed to accomplish goals, vs. cooperation dictated from the top by someone's ideology.
georgeoliver 9y ago
Did I miss it or did this article not mention online social networks even once?
CamperBob2 9y ago
A decline in cooperation is probably a natural consequence of prosperity. Groups with more prosperous, empowered individuals see a decline in mutual cooperation over time, simply because it's not as necessary for their members to stick together. Meanwhile, groups with fewer prosperous members tend toward the opposite behavior. They realize that the only way to compete with the "in group" is to gang up on them... or at least, that's what they tell themselves. It hardly seems necessary to point to US electoral politics as a case in point.
cameldrv 9y ago
In the specific measures of civic organizational membership, you have to put a lot down to women entering the workforce. People of my grandparent's generation (middle aged in the 50s and 60s) participated heavily in these activities, Elks and church in their case. A lot of the planning and organization of these groups was done by women who stayed home. Particularly after the kids had gone off to school, homemakers put a lot of effort into civic groups during the day. Now, of course, there were lots of women who worked, but there were enough women who didn't to keep these groups running. With women staying home now rare, especially after the kids are old enough for school, the people with free time to keep these organizations going don't exist. If you want to see a subculture where these organizations are still thriving, look at members of the LDS church.
RealityNow 9y ago
This is due to the entrenchment of neoliberalism since the 70s (famously Reagan in the 80s), the ideology that government's sole responsibility is to enforce free markets, any other function of government is bad, and that every aspect of life should be dictated by free markets. Margaret Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society, only individuals" sums it up. Rising wealth inequality is simply a byproduct of this. When we're indoctrinated to suppress our humanity and see each other as self-interested profit-maximizing businesses rather than people, then it shouldn't come as any surprise that we're less cooperative.
- didgeoridoo 9y ago
  Way to take that Thatcher quote out of context in order to reverse its meaning. What she really said was: "No government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first… There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate."
  - reactor4 9y ago
    The full quote doesn't reverse the meaning at all.
    - didgeoridoo 9y ago
      Of course it does. Which part of Thatcher's quote do you see as promoting the idea that we should "suppress our humanity"? Do you see that in there anywhere? And can you imagine why the out-of-context "there is no such thing as society" quote could be construed as a dishonest interpretation of her philosophy?
      - mattmanser 9y ago
        No, have to agree with the others here, it doesn't say what you think it does at all.
tomohawk 9y ago
Cooperation used to be by free association through civic organizations. As the government has grown in scope, it has eclipsed these, and it really isn't surprising that civic society has declined as a result. When people freely participate in civic activities, they are being generous. There is no coercion. When government does the same thing, it is coercive. The activity does not occur unless taxes are collected. Choice goes out the window. I've heard many people ask why they should volunteer or help out others, when they're already paying lots of money in taxes to "take care of those problems". This is the final tragedy of the government intervention. It turns activities where people are helping people into programs that solve problems.
- dsjoerg 9y ago
  Why should I believe what you say? It sounds truthy and has plenty of logic to it, but I've come to ask for more before believing something.
  - observation 9y ago
    It could be kin selection. In the past people lived closer to and interacted more with people of similar genetic ancestry. The real question is why wouldn't civic qualities decline. You can look at this on an economic lens - people don't need to depend on familial relations as much because of money. You can look at this with a racial/ethnic lens - more genetic variance reduces cooperative behaviours (see Charles Murray). Then there's the libertarian version you've heard above. Then there's the social lens - people have become atomized by individualism in their manners, social conditioning etc. I like to think there's a non-relativistic way in which all of them are true, sometimes some of them more at certain times than others, but that they are models of the same phenomena. Should we genetically manipulate ourselves to increase our pro-social behaviours? It seems clear that if society flies apart then all the critiques I've mentioned will be true simultaneously, I do not see how that can plausibly be positive. What about genetic intervention?
    - tisdy 9y ago
      > Should we genetically manipulate ourselves to increase our pro-social behaviours? It seems clear that if society flies apart then all the critiques I've mentioned will be true simultaneously, I do not see how that can plausibly be positive. What about genetic intervention? You had me and then you lost me.
HillaryBriss 9y ago
people respond to incentives. how have the benefits of membership in the Elks lodge or the FreeMasons (or whatever) changed since the 1970s?
Mary-Jane 9y ago
They say nothing brings people together like a common enemy. I'm surprised no one has correlated the periods of 'good feelings' with incidence of war, at least of the ones that posed credible threats to the nation. The first polarization low immediately followed the war of 1812. From there polarization increased until WW1, at which point it abruptly halted, then plummeted through to the end of WW2.
galaxyLogic 9y ago
My view is that people shouldn't be putting too much of their resources into collaboration, charity and helping their neighbors (only). Rather if they want to "do good" they should spend time and effort making the government better, more transparent, more accountable, less corrupt. A better government can better help everybody.
mythrwy 9y ago
At one point the US military borrowed binoculars from citizens. https://clickamericana.com/media/newspapers/why-the-navy-wanted-binoculars-for-wwii-1942 https://clickamericana.com/media/newspapers/why-the-navy-wan... It's hard to even imagine now. But presumably people sent them. They were helping. It was their war. Now the military probably buys 20 times the binoculars they'll ever use. At 20 times the price a citizen pays for them. And it's all run by career service bureaucrats. The taxpayers foot the bill but the specific expenses are unknown. And the war isn't the peoples war now. It's usually some kind of undefined action cheered on by think tanks and special interests and pumped up by news stories of terrorists. The citizens are mostly removed from the process, as it goes right on regardless of who they vote for. Unless they enlist, then they are involved, but that is less for principal now and more for a free college education or because what else to do? This is what has changed in society. Life has become a faceless bureaucracy running on it's own agenda. Corporate, government, you name it. The concept of community is a pale shadow of what it once was. I don't know if this is better or worse, it's probably not great if your military has to beg for binoculars but seems the new hazards may be even more dangerous.
RachelF 9y ago
The Economist had an article on this is Issue last week. Mistrust in America could sink the economy https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726079-part-problem-lack-competition-some-industries-mistrust-america-could-sink https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726079-part-proble...
freech 9y ago
Maybe we are just parts of other groups now, like this one, instead of trade associations and soccer clubs?
netcan 9y ago
This is one of those questions where people can reference their pet Big Theory: corporate dominion, government coercion, individualism vs collectivism, insurance, secularization, leaderlessness... It's hard to pin cultural changes to anything definiteively. So, my 2c with the same grain of salt... Personally, I think it's the regionalism vs globalism dynamic. At least, I think that's the force acting on me. We think of our political & cultural identities as part of a much bigger whole. Solidarity and identitiy are closely related. Take HN, for example. If HN was regional and something happened in our region then we'd be far more inclined mobalize. If we regulalry met in person to discuss ideas, we'd have more solidarity. We'd probably be an impactful force. As an online group, we draw from a much bigger pool. The intellectual aspects are richer. But, the community is weaker. TLDR, solidarity of mass culture, maybe. Could be something else.
PrimalDual 9y ago
Perhaps this has to do with the increasing heterogeneity of American society. The US probably looked more like Sweden, Denmark and Japan in the past. People may feel more compelled to partake in civil engagement and similar things like helping your neighbors out if you have the same background. At the very least you must trust the members of your community to play fair. Homogeneity comes at a cost but it's definitely useful to be able to assume correctly that you are a reasonable model for other people in your community.

167 points by metasean 9y ago

>Almost 200 years ago that discerning observer of social life, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote about the exceptional ability of Americans to form voluntary associations and, more generally, to cooperate in solving problems that required concerted collective action. This capacity for cooperation apparently lasted into the post-World War II era, but several indicators suggest that during the last 3-4 decades it has been unraveling. >In these articles I argue that general well-being (and high levels of social cooperation) tends to move in the opposite direction from inequality. During the ‘disintegrative phases’ inequality is high while well-being and cooperation are low. During the ‘integrative phases’ inequality is low, while well-being and cooperation are high. With economic inequality only getting worse [0, 1, 2] I can't help but wonder if there is also a decline in open source contributions? Or do our contributions increase because it provides visibility, and therefore increased economic opportunity, for those lower on the income scale? [0]: http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-inequality-worse/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-inequality-w... [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh... [2]: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/890610260251033602 https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/890610260251033602

smith_winston 9y ago
There is also Robert Putnam's work on the deleterious effects of "diversity" on civic life and engagement. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.... DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x

schoen 9y ago

While I found this quite interesting, and I'm as concerned about some of these trends as the next person, I was eerily reminded of some of John Robbins's stuff graphing meat consumption against incidence of diseases and his kind of casual thinking about causation. We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from. And I remember that there's even a funny web site that tries to underscore the difficulty in reasoning from these associations. http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations In this case, the n-grams chart really exemplified this for me. There are so many influences on the frequency of a word, including lexical substitution of a word by its synonyms, changes in spelling, and increased or decreased interest in a topic regardless of whether that interest is positive or negative. For example, check out the long-term decline in avarice in America! It's profound! https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=avarice&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cavarice%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=avarice&year_s... Oh, wait, maybe we just stopped using the word "avarice" rather than the concept. :-) Or, during this Second Gilded Age, our society actually started to become less atomized: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=atomized&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Catomized%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=atomized&year_... ... or maybe we just moved away from calling the phenomenon that.

macawfish 9y ago
Why don't you hop into Sugihara's method and see for yourself? My hunch is that the thing that most frequently trickles down in the trickle down economy is DEBT. I imagine distrust follows close behind.
kafkaesq 9y ago
We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from. Yeah, it's a fun website -- but you could say that about just about any claimed correlation. Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'barometric' changes he's talking about -- the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound. Probably a lot more work needs to be done to find a solid statistical basis behind this observation (if this is at all possible). But by and large (aside from the singe n-gram example, which I agree smells like cherry-picking), it's not like his arguments are simply frivolous.
- baddox 9y ago
  > Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'barometric' changes he's talking about -- the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound. Probably a lot more work needs to be done to find a solid statistical basis behind this observation (if this is at all possible). I need to see some very solid evidence before I change my assumption, which is that people have always felt this as they get older, because we romanticize our memories of youth and we are uncomfortable with the societal changes that younger generations inevitably introduce.
  - kafkaesq 9y ago
    Fair point - it's very tricky to measure.
- schoen 9y ago

kafkaesq 9y ago

Nothing 'strange' about this at all; to a first-order approximation, it's the inevitable byproduct of the transformative shift in the society's governing ideology over the same timespan: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-t... That said, the various participation rates he's siting may presumed to be somewhat skewed by immigration.

RickS 9y ago
Thanks for that link. Interesting rundown of the topic.

balance_factor 9y ago

> polarization What polarization is there in Washington? Or outside the beltway? What are the two poles? How people feel about transexuals? I don't see any polarization. The two parties are close together on almost everything. As the real differences fade, unimportant differences must be heightened. Trump is of that type - he makes a big show, but on what big issue in which he can get anywhere is he substantially far from the Democratic (or Republican) party? As real differences fade, the showmanship of there being a difference must increase, thus, Trump. Even healthcare has no polarization. Both parties are agreed on what it should be. Any party acting as if it will do single player or scrap Obamacare is just showboating. Any changes that get through will be minor ones. It was a 60 Senator consensus vote of the middle-of-the-road consensus view of what healthcare would be. McCain's thumbs down to any major overhaul. In the past two centuries the US went from a civil war to the intitial struggle of how to deal with the Great Depression. There hasn't been much polarization since that. Even the big squabble in the 1960s was over a non-issue - over a small, peasant country in Indochina. The cold war began cooling off in the early 1950s, and stayed cool, aside from occassional flare-ups in certain areas. By the 1970s, US conservatives were trying to figure out how to heat the cold war up again against the background of SALT and the Helsinki accords. The political establishment is less polarized than ever nowadays. It's not like post-war France, where Joliot-Curie, Picasso, Sartre etc. were members of the largest political party in France - the PCF.

RickS 9y ago
Your measure of polarization is talking about distance on a political spectrum. This is perhaps the correct way, since it's literally polar. The vernacular "polarization" here would be better thought of as a measure not of conceptual distance, but of the intensity with which that distance is perceived. The left and right are both very centrist (with some wacky outlier issues), but they perceive the other side as being very wrong, which allows for polarization regardless of actual political distance.
maxerickson 9y ago
I would argue that the big US squabble in the 1960s was civil rights. Still not resolved (for example a couple of states have just recently been found to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act).

Animats 9y ago

Here's a question. Do you belong to any organization which chooses its leaders democratically? That is, you get to vote, there's more than one candidate, and the incumbents and their designated successors sometimes get kicked out? Do you belong to any organization which has member meetings in which members can vote and make decisions binding on the organization?

kevinnk 9y ago
Lots of clubs/community orgs are like this. The community soccer org for the city I grew up in had lots of turnover in the management due to voting.
- PoachedSausage 9y ago
  The best sports and social clubs I've been a member of generally try to avoid too many political games although they are nominally democratic. Club politics is generally tiresome, few people join a tennis club or hackerspace to play politics, they want to play tennis or make things.
  - Animats 9y ago
    "The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings." -Wilde That's the problem with democracy. It's hard work.
    - CaptainSwing 9y ago
      Important to remember that, despite jokes like these, Oscar Wilde remained a committed (if ideosyncratic) libertarian socialist.
    - adrianratnapala 9y ago
      One of the things that Tocqueville approved of in America is that everyone had some experience of government via jury duty. Which is compulsory (at least in principle, and in those days, probably in practice too). I've often wondered if random juries should play a larger role in day-to-day government. Forcing people to work like this is a huge tax and not to be taken lightly, but taxing peoples attention rather than their wallets might actually be what we need.

pcmaffey 9y ago

The arena for 'cooperation' has shifted from socio-political realms to economic ones. Business now is the primary vehicle for cooperative efforts.

carapace 9y ago

Population density? I'd love to see a chart of these social indicators plotted against population density.

0x4f3759df 9y ago
Probably has a lot to do with the rise of the suburbs.

acslater00 9y ago

The proposed link between civic participation ("cooperation") and both inequality and political polarization is a strange one to me, since civic participation seems like it would be a local phenomenon, and both inequality and political polarization mostly show up as regional differences rather than differences within communities. Sure, the political space between Allegany County, NY (low income and trump voting) and Westchester County, NY (high income and clinton voting) is huge. But if you go to an elk lodge in Allegany or a (i dunno) running club in Westchester, you're going to find that everybody there has basically the same politics and basically the same income. Something else is going on here.

PoachedSausage 9y ago
Maybe we're a bit more varied here in the UK and this is anecdata but I'm a member of a running club that has at one end of the spectrum members of the Conservative party through to anarcho-vegans.
- acslater00 9y ago
  Yeah - sure I'm not literally saying that all clubs are full of people with identical politics. I'm just pointing out that most communities in America are actually not that diverse or polarized.
  - PoachedSausage 9y ago
    To be fair, the dynamic range in incomes probably is isn't that great and it's in a large multi-cultural city.

coop-throwaway 9y ago

The dating market for men has become extremely difficult over the last few years (lots of factors for that), more and more men are unable to find a mate. Men are less inviting of other men from my observation as they are in deep competition with each other -- why risk having another man around when he might take your girl or reduce your chances? Apps, dating sites, clubs, and events are filled with men looking for women, don't expect them to be cooperative with you, you are their compitition. I believe this is a factor in men becoming less cooperative.

RickS 9y ago
There's a lot to unpack in that comment, and I'm not going to take a swing at much of it, except to say that you should be careful of confusing visibility with reality. Both the haves and the have nots are equipped with increasingly large megaphones (instagram, et al). Most people are regular, and guys have been "taking" other guy's girls since we were beating each other with sticks. The idea that this phenomenon is new or unnatural aims to make it easier to paint as unfair, and for the plaintiff to claim victimhood. Watch out for that. Lots of lonely guys trying to deflect blame away from their own shortcomings. It's not intellectually honest. Anyway, I think the issue is one level up from that: Economic uncertainty in general, rather than strictly social/reproductive uncertainty. The former invites the latter.
- coop-throwaway 9y ago
  Never before could a woman open an app and literally have hundreds of men at her door within minutes (all while men struggle to get a single match). This has created such an imbalance that the women are able to reject roughly the bottom 80% of men leaving most men struggling to get the attention of the bottom 20% of women. And yes, there are lots of men with shortcomings, physical ones, that have rendered them out of the modern dating pool whereas in the past they would have met an equivalent woman. That's no longer the case as that equivalent woman can demand a much higher quality man -- there's an unlimited supply of men to pick from.
  - RickS 9y ago

tardygrad 9y ago

This was touched upon heavily in the book 'The Righteous Mind' by Jonathan Haidt, an amazing book if you're interested in this sort of thing and part of Bill Gate's reading list where I first found it. This quote (by Bertrand Russell) stood out: "Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; and on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible."

pdwetz 9y ago
I'm not sure I follow his thought process on why "through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible." On a simple personal level, I'm for individualism and cooperation, so I'm not seeing the inherent conflict. Perhaps it's a matter of definitions?
- ergothus 9y ago
  The American culture values individualism...and also has a strong "you can't tell me what to do!" reaction to social pressure. If those points are connected, I can easily see too much individualism interfering with cooperation even if the base ideas are not in conflict. Evidence: who are the heroes in american TV and movies? The rebel against authority, the one that breaks the rules. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, House, I could go on and on. We celebrate the idea of something we actively argue against in daily life. There's also some weird connection between extremes of claiming to value individualism and idolizing authoritarianism that I won't claim to understand, so I could be completely wrong on all of this. I'm not positive that extremes of individualism are a death knell for cooperation...but I don't find the idea unlikely either.
  - pdonis 9y ago
    > who are the heroes in american TV and movies? The rebel against authority, the one that breaks the rules. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, House All of these heroes cooperated with close friends, colleagues, and other people in order to solve problems and achieve goals. The difference is not individualism vs. cooperation. The difference is cooperation based on the voluntary choices of individuals, as needed to accomplish goals, vs. cooperation dictated from the top by someone's ideology.

georgeoliver 9y ago

Did I miss it or did this article not mention online social networks even once?

CamperBob2 9y ago

A decline in cooperation is probably a natural consequence of prosperity. Groups with more prosperous, empowered individuals see a decline in mutual cooperation over time, simply because it's not as necessary for their members to stick together. Meanwhile, groups with fewer prosperous members tend toward the opposite behavior. They realize that the only way to compete with the "in group" is to gang up on them... or at least, that's what they tell themselves. It hardly seems necessary to point to US electoral politics as a case in point.

cameldrv 9y ago

In the specific measures of civic organizational membership, you have to put a lot down to women entering the workforce. People of my grandparent's generation (middle aged in the 50s and 60s) participated heavily in these activities, Elks and church in their case. A lot of the planning and organization of these groups was done by women who stayed home. Particularly after the kids had gone off to school, homemakers put a lot of effort into civic groups during the day. Now, of course, there were lots of women who worked, but there were enough women who didn't to keep these groups running. With women staying home now rare, especially after the kids are old enough for school, the people with free time to keep these organizations going don't exist. If you want to see a subculture where these organizations are still thriving, look at members of the LDS church.

RealityNow 9y ago

This is due to the entrenchment of neoliberalism since the 70s (famously Reagan in the 80s), the ideology that government's sole responsibility is to enforce free markets, any other function of government is bad, and that every aspect of life should be dictated by free markets. Margaret Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society, only individuals" sums it up. Rising wealth inequality is simply a byproduct of this. When we're indoctrinated to suppress our humanity and see each other as self-interested profit-maximizing businesses rather than people, then it shouldn't come as any surprise that we're less cooperative.

didgeoridoo 9y ago
Way to take that Thatcher quote out of context in order to reverse its meaning. What she really said was: "No government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first… There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate."
- reactor4 9y ago
  The full quote doesn't reverse the meaning at all.
  - didgeoridoo 9y ago
    Of course it does. Which part of Thatcher's quote do you see as promoting the idea that we should "suppress our humanity"? Do you see that in there anywhere? And can you imagine why the out-of-context "there is no such thing as society" quote could be construed as a dishonest interpretation of her philosophy?
    - mattmanser 9y ago
      No, have to agree with the others here, it doesn't say what you think it does at all.

tomohawk 9y ago

Cooperation used to be by free association through civic organizations. As the government has grown in scope, it has eclipsed these, and it really isn't surprising that civic society has declined as a result. When people freely participate in civic activities, they are being generous. There is no coercion. When government does the same thing, it is coercive. The activity does not occur unless taxes are collected. Choice goes out the window. I've heard many people ask why they should volunteer or help out others, when they're already paying lots of money in taxes to "take care of those problems". This is the final tragedy of the government intervention. It turns activities where people are helping people into programs that solve problems.

dsjoerg 9y ago
Why should I believe what you say? It sounds truthy and has plenty of logic to it, but I've come to ask for more before believing something.
- observation 9y ago
  It could be kin selection. In the past people lived closer to and interacted more with people of similar genetic ancestry. The real question is why wouldn't civic qualities decline. You can look at this on an economic lens - people don't need to depend on familial relations as much because of money. You can look at this with a racial/ethnic lens - more genetic variance reduces cooperative behaviours (see Charles Murray). Then there's the libertarian version you've heard above. Then there's the social lens - people have become atomized by individualism in their manners, social conditioning etc. I like to think there's a non-relativistic way in which all of them are true, sometimes some of them more at certain times than others, but that they are models of the same phenomena. Should we genetically manipulate ourselves to increase our pro-social behaviours? It seems clear that if society flies apart then all the critiques I've mentioned will be true simultaneously, I do not see how that can plausibly be positive. What about genetic intervention?
  - tisdy 9y ago
    > Should we genetically manipulate ourselves to increase our pro-social behaviours? It seems clear that if society flies apart then all the critiques I've mentioned will be true simultaneously, I do not see how that can plausibly be positive. What about genetic intervention? You had me and then you lost me.

HillaryBriss 9y ago

people respond to incentives. how have the benefits of membership in the Elks lodge or the FreeMasons (or whatever) changed since the 1970s?

Mary-Jane 9y ago

They say nothing brings people together like a common enemy. I'm surprised no one has correlated the periods of 'good feelings' with incidence of war, at least of the ones that posed credible threats to the nation. The first polarization low immediately followed the war of 1812. From there polarization increased until WW1, at which point it abruptly halted, then plummeted through to the end of WW2.

galaxyLogic 9y ago

My view is that people shouldn't be putting too much of their resources into collaboration, charity and helping their neighbors (only). Rather if they want to "do good" they should spend time and effort making the government better, more transparent, more accountable, less corrupt. A better government can better help everybody.

mythrwy 9y ago

At one point the US military borrowed binoculars from citizens. https://clickamericana.com/media/newspapers/why-the-navy-wanted-binoculars-for-wwii-1942 https://clickamericana.com/media/newspapers/why-the-navy-wan... It's hard to even imagine now. But presumably people sent them. They were helping. It was their war. Now the military probably buys 20 times the binoculars they'll ever use. At 20 times the price a citizen pays for them. And it's all run by career service bureaucrats. The taxpayers foot the bill but the specific expenses are unknown. And the war isn't the peoples war now. It's usually some kind of undefined action cheered on by think tanks and special interests and pumped up by news stories of terrorists. The citizens are mostly removed from the process, as it goes right on regardless of who they vote for. Unless they enlist, then they are involved, but that is less for principal now and more for a free college education or because what else to do? This is what has changed in society. Life has become a faceless bureaucracy running on it's own agenda. Corporate, government, you name it. The concept of community is a pale shadow of what it once was. I don't know if this is better or worse, it's probably not great if your military has to beg for binoculars but seems the new hazards may be even more dangerous.

RachelF 9y ago

The Economist had an article on this is Issue last week. Mistrust in America could sink the economy https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726079-part-problem-lack-competition-some-industries-mistrust-america-could-sink https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726079-part-proble...

freech 9y ago

Maybe we are just parts of other groups now, like this one, instead of trade associations and soccer clubs?

netcan 9y ago

This is one of those questions where people can reference their pet Big Theory: corporate dominion, government coercion, individualism vs collectivism, insurance, secularization, leaderlessness... It's hard to pin cultural changes to anything definiteively. So, my 2c with the same grain of salt... Personally, I think it's the regionalism vs globalism dynamic. At least, I think that's the force acting on me. We think of our political & cultural identities as part of a much bigger whole. Solidarity and identitiy are closely related. Take HN, for example. If HN was regional and something happened in our region then we'd be far more inclined mobalize. If we regulalry met in person to discuss ideas, we'd have more solidarity. We'd probably be an impactful force. As an online group, we draw from a much bigger pool. The intellectual aspects are richer. But, the community is weaker. TLDR, solidarity of mass culture, maybe. Could be something else.

PrimalDual 9y ago

Perhaps this has to do with the increasing heterogeneity of American society. The US probably looked more like Sweden, Denmark and Japan in the past. People may feel more compelled to partake in civil engagement and similar things like helping your neighbors out if you have the same background. At the very least you must trust the members of your community to play fair. Homogeneity comes at a cost but it's definitely useful to be able to assume correctly that you are a reasonable model for other people in your community.