The Public Vanishes - 0 views
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The public world has since become less urgent, more remote, and more tainted.
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face-to-face civic activity has dropped as groups with local chapters have given way to groups that count as members everyone who sends in a check in response to a direct-mail appeal.
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The important question is the share of income that Americans devote to charity; and by that measure, charitable giving has dropped sharply
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This difference in causal lineage between civic activity and other social activity seems critical to me, though Putnam seems to forget it when he summarizes his causal analysis a chapter later. There he bundles civic engagement together with sociability, and concludes that half of the decline in "social capital" is due to generational turnover, another quarter of it is due to television, and the remainder is the consequence of time pressures and money pressures and suburbanization.
