Perspective

Robert D. Putnam is a professor of public policy at Harvard University. He has written six other books, including Making Democracy Work, The Beliefs of Politicians, and Hanging Together. This work came out of Putnam's work on democracy in Italy. In Making Democracy Work, he argued that democracy depends on social capital. He began to wonder how this would apply to American society and began looking at related statistics.

Putnam appears to believe that a decline has been occurring in social capital, even before beginning this project. However, he is not alone in this idea and the statistics appear to back up Putnam's hypothesis. He does not appear to have any other biases that overtly affect the work. Putnam draws extensively on the research of others to show that a decline has occurred and what may have caused it. It is possible that he disregarded studies that did...