EdTechTalk

Other demographic transformations. A range of additional changes
have
transformed the American family since
the 1960s--fewer marriages, more divorces, fewer children, lower real
wages, and
so on. Each of these changes might
account for some of the slackening of civic engagement, since married,
middle-class parents are generally more
socially involved than other people. Moreover, the changes in scale that
have
swept over the American economy in
these years--illustrated by the replacement of the corner grocery by the
supermarket and now perhaps of the
supermarket by electronic shopping at home, or the replacement of
community-based
enterprises by outposts of distant
multinational firms--may perhaps have undermined the material and even
physical
basis for civic engagement.

The technological transformation of leisure. There is reason to
believe
that deep-seated technological
trends are radically "privatizing" or "individualizing" our use of leisure
time
and thus disrupting many
opportunities for social-capital formation. The most obvious and probably
the
most powerful instrument of this
revolution is television. Time-budget studies in the 1960s showed that the
growth
in time spent watching television
dwarfed all other changes in the way Americans passed their days and
nights.
Television has made our communities
(or, rather, what we experience as our communities) wider and shallower.
In the
language of economics, electronic
technology enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully, but at
the cost
of the positive social
externalities associated with more primitive forms of entertainment. The
same
logic applies to the replacement of
vaudeville by the movies and now of movies by the VCR. The new "virtual
reality"
helmets that we will soon don to be
entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this
trend. Is
technology thus driving a wedge
between our individual interests and our collective interests? It is a
question
that seems worth exploring more
systematically.

who stress that closely knit social, economic, and
political organizations are prone to
inefficient cartelization and to what political economists term "rent
seeking"
and ordinary men and women call
corruption.