Bowling alone updated

Nationhood Lab - In 1995, Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam wrote an research article called "Bowling Alone," which demonstrated that American's stock of social capital -- the fabric of a community's trust and cooperation - had declined dramatically since the 1950s. Social scientists and civic activists have been focused on the problem -- which has contributed to everything from deaths of despair to the rise of Trumpist ethnonationalism -- ever since. We've long suspected there are substantial differences in social capital across the U.S. regions, and this spring we confirmed that it is indeed the case.

Using a county-level social capital index, we calculated the scores for each of the American Nations model's regional cultures and found dramatic gaps between the "communitarian regions" of the Northeast and West Coast and the two regions founded by the Spanish Empire. (Southern regions generally lay in between.) ... People in some places may be bowling alone, but in others they may still have some people joining them.