Tag: Bowling Alone

  • Social Capital and Diversity

    I’ve written about Robert Putnam before in this space, but I’ve been holding off on commenting on his most recent ‘discovery’ that ethnic diversity leads to significant losses of public trust. Apparently the full Skytte lecture will be published sometime soon in Scandinavian Political Studies. Still no sign of it, though the Financial Times published…

  • Robert Putnam on Commuting

    Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can…