The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)

http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/strange-disappearance/

by metasean • 9 years ago

167 176 9 years ago

metasean• 9 years ago

Almost 200 years ago that discerning observer of social life, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote about the exceptional ability of Americans to form voluntary associations and, more generally, to cooperate in solving problems that required concerted collective action. This capacity for cooperation apparently lasted into the post-World War II era, but several indicators suggest that during the last 3-4 decades it has been unraveling.
In these articles I argue that general well-being (and high levels of social cooperation) tends to move in the opposite direction from inequality. During the ‘disintegrative phases’ inequality is high while well-being and cooperation are low. During the ‘integrative phases’ inequality is low, while well-being and cooperation are high.

With economic inequality only getting worse [0, 1, 2] I can't help but wonder if there is also a decline in open source contributions? Or do our contributions increase because it provides visibility, and therefore increased economic opportunity, for those lower on the income scale?

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-inequality-w...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh...

[2] https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/890610260251033602

schoen2• 9 years ago

While I found this quite interesting, and I'm as concerned about some of these trends as the next person, I was eerily reminded of some of John Robbins's stuff graphing meat consumption against incidence of diseases and his kind of casual thinking about causation. We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from. And I remember that there's even a funny web site that tries to underscore the difficulty in reasoning from these associations.

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

In this case, the n-grams chart really exemplified this for me. There are so many influences on the frequency of a word, including lexical substitution of a word by its synonyms, changes in spelling, and increased or decreased interest in a topic regardless of whether that interest is positive or negative.

For example, check out the long-term decline in avarice in America! It's profound!

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=avarice&year_s...

Oh, wait, maybe we just stopped using the word "avarice" rather than the concept. :-)

Or, during this Second Gilded Age, our society actually started to become less atomized:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=atomized&year_...

... or maybe we just moved away from calling the phenomenon that.

blurbleblurble• 9 years ago

Why don't you hop into Sugihara's method and see for yourself?

My hunch is that the thing that most frequently trickles down in the trickle down economy is DEBT. I imagine distrust follows close behind.

kafkaesq3• 9 years ago

We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from.

Yeah, it's a fun website -- but you could say that about just about any claimed correlation.

Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'barometric' changes he's talking about -- the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound. Probably a lot more work needs to be done to find a solid statistical basis behind this observation (if this is at all possible).

But by and large (aside from the singe n-gram example, which I agree smells like cherry-picking), it's not like his arguments are simply frivolous.

baddox• 9 years ago

Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'barometric' changes he's talking about -- the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound. Probably a lot more work needs to be done to find a solid statistical basis behind this observation (if this is at all possible).

I need to see some very solid evidence before I change my assumption, which is that people have always felt this as they get older, because we romanticize our memories of youth and we are uncomfortable with the societal changes that younger generations inevitably introduce.

schoen2• 9 years ago

I should also have been more careful to more clearly distinguish spurious correlations from correlations where both things are related to a third factor (which I think is probably often the case in John Robbins's graphs and somewhat plausibly here).

closeparen4• 9 years ago

the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound

Depends on your value of "we."

There is certainly lower solidarity/interest in public life among the straight white landowning Christian men from good families who used to participate in things like freemasonry and Rotary.

On the other hand, both the left and right have been adding previously marginalized demographics to their constituencies and platforms.

I don't think there's any less solidarity going around. My intuition is that more people than ever have their voices heard and interests represented in public life. But rather than one line of solidarity across the center of the political spectrum, we now have two disjoint lines reaching from each party's center to what used to be its marginalized fringes. (Not just in ideology, but in identity).

We also just aren't in this together so much anymore. The rise of coastal cities means the country is increasingly split between (at least) two totally distinct patterns of geography, economics, culture, built environment, and lifestyle. The correlation between population density and vote share on the latest electoral map is staggering.

kafkaesq3• 9 years ago

Nothing 'strange' about this at all; to a first-order approximation, it's the inevitable byproduct of the transformative shift in the society's governing ideology over the same timespan:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-t...

That said, the various participation rates he's siting may presumed to be somewhat skewed by immigration.

RickS3• 9 years ago

Thanks for that link. Interesting rundown of the topic.

balance_factor• 9 years ago

polarization

What polarization is there in Washington? Or outside the beltway? What are the two poles? How people feel about transexuals? I don't see any polarization. The two parties are close together on almost everything. As the real differences fade, unimportant differences must be heightened. Trump is of that type - he makes a big show, but on what big issue in which he can get anywhere is he substantially far from the Democratic (or Republican) party? As real differences fade, the showmanship of there being a difference must increase, thus, Trump.

Even healthcare has no polarization. Both parties are agreed on what it should be. Any party acting as if it will do single player or scrap Obamacare is just showboating. Any changes that get through will be minor ones. It was a 60 Senator consensus vote of the middle-of-the-road consensus view of what healthcare would be. McCain's thumbs down to any major overhaul.

In the past two centuries the US went from a civil war to the intitial struggle of how to deal with the Great Depression. There hasn't been much polarization since that. Even the big squabble in the 1960s was over a non-issue - over a small, peasant country in Indochina. The cold war began cooling off in the early 1950s, and stayed cool, aside from occassional flare-ups in certain areas. By the 1970s, US conservatives were trying to figure out how to heat the cold war up again against the background of SALT and the Helsinki accords.

The political establishment is less polarized than ever nowadays. It's not like post-war France, where Joliot-Curie, Picasso, Sartre etc. were members of the largest political party in France - the PCF.

RickS3• 9 years ago

Your measure of polarization is talking about distance on a political spectrum. This is perhaps the correct way, since it's literally polar.

The vernacular "polarization" here would be better thought of as a measure not of conceptual distance, but of the intensity with which that distance is perceived.

The left and right are both very centrist (with some wacky outlier issues), but they perceive the other side as being very wrong, which allows for polarization regardless of actual political distance.

maxerickson• 9 years ago

I would argue that the big US squabble in the 1960s was civil rights.

Still not resolved (for example a couple of states have just recently been found to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act).

stevenwoo• 9 years ago

It's kind of like we never satisfactorily resolved the end of slavery, we had to amend the Constitution in the 1960's because of states scamming African Americans of their right to vote because the post Civil War amendments did not outright prevent weasels from making it hard to vote for people of the wrong skin tone. We might have been further along now if Woodrow Wilson hadn't helped resurrect the KKK and started bringing racial discrimination and segregation into the federal government, the latter development took close to 50 years to roll back.

javajosh• 9 years ago

What polarization is there in Washington? Or outside the beltway? What are the two poles?

The polarization is between those who prefer authoritarian leadership, and those who don't. The poles are defined primarily by personality.

closeparen4• 9 years ago

Bullshit. There's polarization between whether the authoritarian crackdown should primarily police business/capital, or people with the wrong identities, or more concerningly, both.

yequalsx• 9 years ago

If you watch/read/listen to pundits you'll see lots of polarization. Or go to Facebook and look at the comments on articles. Liberals are evil. Conservatives are dumb. You'll see all sorts of such comments.

Conservative media portrayed Obama as an extreme leftist when he was, in terms of policies, more in line with Eisenhower and Reagan. Look at the label of RINOs for Congressmen who vote the wrong way on a particular issue.

In the U.S. there is a lot of political polarization.

michaelbuckbee• 9 years ago

There's a fairly great Reddit post that I won't attempt so summarize here, but it walks through the party votes on major issues and highlights what I would consider a broader degree of difference.

https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6pc5qu/democrats...

Separately, something that really concerns me is gerrymandering - which has pushed for more extreme views on both sides as there are far fewer "mixed" districts.

mindways• 9 years ago

What polarization is there in Washington?

Lower frequency of compromise and bipartisan bills. I've seen it just from reading the papers and staying semi-aware of politics. My mother-in-law worked in DC for decades, and it was glaringly evident to her even when she retired a decade or so ago.

The two parties are close together on almost everything.

Along certain axes, sure. They're both broadly corporatist, for instance.

But overall? Not even close, particularly since the rise of the Tea Party. I read through my House Rep's notes on the legislation each side advances / endorses / votes for, which makes their actual legislative priorities pretty clear. Not to mention knowing people whose health, environment, and/or job are impacted by those ideological differences.

Most of the time I see "there's no difference between the two parties" asserted, it seems like it's either being used as a justification for apathy, or as a rallying cry for a third party.

Animats2• 9 years ago

Here's a question. Do you belong to any organization which chooses its leaders democratically? That is, you get to vote, there's more than one candidate, and the incumbents and their designated successors sometimes get kicked out?

Do you belong to any organization which has member meetings in which members can vote and make decisions binding on the organization?

kevinnk• 9 years ago

Lots of clubs/community orgs are like this. The community soccer org for the city I grew up in had lots of turnover in the management due to voting.

PoachedSausage3• 9 years ago

The best sports and social clubs I've been a member of generally try to avoid too many political games although they are nominally democratic.

Club politics is generally tiresome, few people join a tennis club or hackerspace to play politics, they want to play tennis or make things.

ams6110• 9 years ago

In my experience (have served in a few of these) it's hard enough to find one person willing serve in each organizational position. Contested elections are almost never seen.

jackmott• 9 years ago

usa cycling

cperciva• 9 years ago

Do you belong to any organization which chooses its leaders democratically?

Yes. I belong to a university, the academic governance of which rests in the Senate. True, it's not a completely elected body -- almost 1/4 of its members are administrators holding ex officio seats -- but over 3/4 of the Senate is elected by Faculty, Students, and Convocation.

Camillo• 9 years ago

No. The only organization I belong to is my employer.

TuringNYC• 9 years ago

Many IEEE sub-groups have democratic elections. Most of my college organizations had elections and large turnover. My condo has elections, though it is difficult to find individuals who even want to run (and commit the necessary time.) The congregation I belong to had elections.

efm• 9 years ago

My home owners association is democratic, though often there aren't many candidates.

pcmaffey• 9 years ago

The arena for 'cooperation' has shifted from socio-political realms to economic ones. Business now is the primary vehicle for cooperative efforts.

carapace• 9 years ago

Population density? I'd love to see a chart of these social indicators plotted against population density.

0x4f3759df• 9 years ago

Probably has a lot to do with the rise of the suburbs.

acslater002• 9 years ago

The proposed link between civic participation ("cooperation") and both inequality and political polarization is a strange one to me, since civic participation seems like it would be a local phenomenon, and both inequality and political polarization mostly show up as regional differences rather than differences within communities.

Sure, the political space between Allegany County, NY (low income and trump voting) and Westchester County, NY (high income and clinton voting) is huge. But if you go to an elk lodge in Allegany or a (i dunno) running club in Westchester, you're going to find that everybody there has basically the same politics and basically the same income.

Something else is going on here.

PoachedSausage3• 9 years ago

Maybe we're a bit more varied here in the UK and this is anecdata but I'm a member of a running club that has at one end of the spectrum members of the Conservative party through to anarcho-vegans.

acslater002• 9 years ago

Yeah - sure I'm not literally saying that all clubs are full of people with identical politics. I'm just pointing out that most communities in America are actually not that diverse or polarized.

coop-throwaway2• 9 years ago

The dating market for men has become extremely difficult over the last few years (lots of factors for that), more and more men are unable to find a mate. Men are less inviting of other men from my observation as they are in deep competition with each other -- why risk having another man around when he might take your girl or reduce your chances? Apps, dating sites, clubs, and events are filled with men looking for women, don't expect them to be cooperative with you, you are their compitition.

I believe this is a factor in men becoming less cooperative.

RickS3• 9 years ago

There's a lot to unpack in that comment, and I'm not going to take a swing at much of it, except to say that you should be careful of confusing visibility with reality. Both the haves and the have nots are equipped with increasingly large megaphones (instagram, et al). Most people are regular, and guys have been "taking" other guy's girls since we were beating each other with sticks. The idea that this phenomenon is new or unnatural aims to make it easier to paint as unfair, and for the plaintiff to claim victimhood. Watch out for that. Lots of lonely guys trying to deflect blame away from their own shortcomings. It's not intellectually honest.

Anyway, I think the issue is one level up from that: Economic uncertainty in general, rather than strictly social/reproductive uncertainty. The former invites the latter.

coop-throwaway2• 9 years ago

Never before could a woman open an app and literally have hundreds of men at her door within minutes (all while men struggle to get a single match). This has created such an imbalance that the women are able to reject roughly the bottom 80% of men leaving most men struggling to get the attention of the bottom 20% of women.

And yes, there are lots of men with shortcomings, physical ones, that have rendered them out of the modern dating pool whereas in the past they would have met an equivalent woman. That's no longer the case as that equivalent woman can demand a much higher quality man -- there's an unlimited supply of men to pick from.

tardygrad• 9 years ago

This was touched upon heavily in the book 'The Righteous Mind' by Jonathan Haidt, an amazing book if you're interested in this sort of thing and part of Bill Gate's reading list where I first found it.

This quote (by Bertrand Russell) stood out: "Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; and on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible."

pdwetz• 9 years ago

I'm not sure I follow his thought process on why "through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible." On a simple personal level, I'm for individualism and cooperation, so I'm not seeing the inherent conflict. Perhaps it's a matter of definitions?

ergothus5• 9 years ago

The American culture values individualism...and also has a strong "you can't tell me what to do!" reaction to social pressure. If those points are connected, I can easily see too much individualism interfering with cooperation even if the base ideas are not in conflict.

Evidence: who are the heroes in american TV and movies? The rebel against authority, the one that breaks the rules. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, House, I could go on and on. We celebrate the idea of something we actively argue against in daily life.

There's also some weird connection between extremes of claiming to value individualism and idolizing authoritarianism that I won't claim to understand, so I could be completely wrong on all of this. I'm not positive that extremes of individualism are a death knell for cooperation...but I don't find the idea unlikely either.

closeparen4• 9 years ago

When we celebrate rather than punish differences, we a get a population where people are more self-actualized and less oppressed, but have little in common with each other. If we are to have any semblance of community, we need to build it through voluntary associations.

Trust, empathy, bonding, etc. are going to be a lot harder when someone's identity, life experiences, and circumstances are completely foreign to your own. I don't think it makes cooperation impossible, but as a practical matter it means we're more likely to need huge, complex institutions like the federal government to mediate cooperation. People also seem less likely to want to cooperate or sacrifice their resources for others who are nothing like them.

One way societies have historically dealt with this is to close their borders, beat the shit out of internal nonconformists and, if they remain unrepentant, torture them to death in the public square by lighting them on fire. Subtler variants persist; for example, the official government's indifference to vigilante enforcement actions ranging from bullying (Japan) to beheading (Saudi Arabia).

It seems clear to me that our culture of welcoming and celebrating differences is more just and causes better outcomes for more people, but it does mean that we aren't all in the same boat.

ghthor• 9 years ago

The constant battle between rigidity and chaos.

Consultant324526• 9 years ago

I disagree. It seems to be that collectivism, ironically, has made cooperation impossible rather than individualism. The government has taken on the role of "taking care" of your neighbor, so everyone stopped. Government guarantees you healthcare and income in retirement, so there's no need to have a family big enough to take care of you. And as the kid, your parents are taken care of, so your role is diminished. When a hurricane comes through and damages your neighbor's rooftop there's no need to pick up your tool belt, FEMA is going to cut them a check. People feel like they don't need to get involved in charity work such as feeding the hungry because the government takes care of that for the most part. Each one of those items and countless others seem like a great idea individually, but collectively it's destroying the social fabric of our nation.

crispinb2• 9 years ago

Why then does the society with the flimsiest socialised provisions amongst rich nations (the US) also have on most measures by far the most precipitous collapse in social cohesion?

ergothus5• 9 years ago

Just throwing out a question here - What evidence do you have for the order of events? e.g. "The government has taken on the role of "taking care" of your neighbor, so everyone stopped" - how do you show that it wasn't the rise of urban centers, where you had too many neighbors to care for, that led to government stepping in where individuals were failing?

For each of the items you list, I can see it going the direction you describe, or instead going the other direction, with government stepping in only after individuals were clearly not taking care of the problems. How do you propose that we can tell which direction it went?

beachy2• 9 years ago

I live in a country with universal healthcare and it works pretty well much of the time, so perhaps I don't have the same perspective as you. But some of your examples ring a little extreme.

Do you really suggest "having a big family" as the way to survive health problems and retirement? Because that's how it works in some (e.g.) SE Asian countries, and life there can be very harsh indeed if you strike adversity and don't have family to care for you. Some people are infertile, or have lost their children.

Not to mention that simply populating the world with more and more people is kind of environmentally short-sighted. I'd rather have the government bulk buying my meds, and lighten my overall footprint on the planet, rather than harking back to ancient times when there was little or no government, and family was everything.

losteric4• 9 years ago

Socially advanced European nations do not have cooperation and social cohesion problems. What makes America unique?

srssays• 9 years ago

The US hardly lacks collectivism, it is merely on an incomprehensibly grand scale. Pay your taxes and the state will help you, evade them and the state will punish you.

Certain African countries are strongly individualistic. The state is too weak to help or punish anybody. Infrastructure crumbles, crime and slavery abounds.

You seriously don't want to visit let alone live in a country that lacks collectivism.

cakedoggie2• 9 years ago

So according to you, NO ONE takes care of their neighbours, NO ONE helps anyone in their family when they need it, and NO ONE does charity work, because the government know fulfills that roll.

But we can all plainly see that this is completely wrong, and people do do all that.

cat1992• 9 years ago

Isn't caring for your neighbor an inherently 'collectivist' act?

specialist2• 9 years ago

Bah. I've lived on a farm, in the city, in the burbs. People are people where ever you go. If you're not neighborly, that's your problem, not the government's.

coliveira2• 9 years ago

That's nonsense. If that was the case, European countries would have a lower level of social cohesion, which is just the opposite. American society is far more individualistic, and still there is very little in terms of social support for poor people and disaster relief, for example.

losteric4• 9 years ago

I blame the Cold War and decades of counter-collectivism propaganda.

An entire generation grew up in that atmosphere... they became the nation's teachers and leaders, influencing the opinions of subsequent generations. Game theory shows small changes in behaviors and opinions can have massive downstream impact, as demonstrated by this interactive demo: http://ncase.me/trust/ (HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864183).

I haven't had any luck finding studies or data on this topic. The key would be voter turn-out for each party bucketed by age for the past few decades of elections.

If my propaganda theory holds true, the Republicans would see a popularity boost that ages at roughly 1 year per year. That segment would be ~50-80 around now, which does match recent voting data (older voters consistently skew conservative) - but historical data is needed to track a bulge over time and disprove the "naive youngsters vote liberal" narrative.

summer_steven2• 9 years ago

[I blame the lack of] decades of counter-collectivism propaganda.

How do Eastern European countries fare then? How about China?

cmurf6• 9 years ago

This is fair. My dad grew up in the Great Depression in farmland, and the Federal government stepping in is what prevented widespread starvation. And during the dust bowl, again the Federal government came in and taugh everyone better soil management techniques. And from that, most people in that time and place were Democrats and expected that the government helped fund and organize the things that needed to be done on a grand scale that individuals couldn't do, nor did insurance.

Reagan did a lot of damage to the perception of what government should do and how citizens need to hold it accountable. Instead he described it in terms of being inherently bad, which is demonstrably b.s. but the country pretty much bought it as evidenced by his election, the ensuing cut in taxes, the near total stop in investments made to large scale private and and public infrastructure spending, and a shift to hoarding wealth rather than keeping it moving so that everyone benefits from it.

georgeoliver• 9 years ago

Did I miss it or did this article not mention online social networks even once?

CamperBob2• 9 years ago

A decline in cooperation is probably a natural consequence of prosperity. Groups with more prosperous, empowered individuals see a decline in mutual cooperation over time, simply because it's not as necessary for their members to stick together.

Meanwhile, groups with fewer prosperous members tend toward the opposite behavior. They realize that the only way to compete with the "in group" is to gang up on them... or at least, that's what they tell themselves.

It hardly seems necessary to point to US electoral politics as a case in point.

RealityNow2• 9 years ago

This is due to the entrenchment of neoliberalism since the 70s (famously Reagan in the 80s), the ideology that government's sole responsibility is to enforce free markets, any other function of government is bad, and that every aspect of life should be dictated by free markets. Margaret Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society, only individuals" sums it up. Rising wealth inequality is simply a byproduct of this.

When we're indoctrinated to suppress our humanity and see each other as self-interested profit-maximizing businesses rather than people, then it shouldn't come as any surprise that we're less cooperative.

didgeoridoo2• 9 years ago

Way to take that Thatcher quote out of context in order to reverse its meaning.

What she really said was:

"No government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first… There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate."

reactor4• 9 years ago

The full quote doesn't reverse the meaning at all.

coliveira2• 9 years ago

The full quote only shows in more vivid colors the same regretful idea.

brian-armstrong• 9 years ago

You're going to try to point at such a large, complex phenomenon through a single cause?

schiffern• 9 years ago

Not OP, but the entrenchment of neoliberalism is itself a large, complex phenomenon. https://chomsky.info/profit01/

cat1992• 9 years ago

While I don't doubt this contributed, it also presumes that government is the main driver of social interation, which itself implies a non-participatory philosophy of the person..

If you are correct, how then did this philosophy get into place to begin with?

I would argue that it is more likely the rise of corporatism in the post war era which brought massive disruption of 'organic' social networks and through the large-scale transformation of economic activity from small businesses into larger ones removed much of the need for societal participation.

mass media, the decline of religious life, and the entrance of women into the workplace also likely are major factors - we can entertain ourselves, don't hear moral/values in a community, and have fully 1/2 of the house dedicated to matters of societal rather than economic concern

RealityNow2• 9 years ago

I think all those are contributing factors, and you're right - it's not just the result of one thing.

It seems to be the result of a successful PR campaign on behalf of economists like Milton Friedman and the wealthy elites who stood to gain from it. The 1973 oil crisis was a tumultuous time, and so it was a ripe time for a new ideology.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-t...

tomohawk4• 9 years ago

Cooperation used to be by free association through civic organizations. As the government has grown in scope, it has eclipsed these, and it really isn't surprising that civic society has declined as a result.

When people freely participate in civic activities, they are being generous. There is no coercion. When government does the same thing, it is coercive. The activity does not occur unless taxes are collected. Choice goes out the window.

I've heard many people ask why they should volunteer or help out others, when they're already paying lots of money in taxes to "take care of those problems".

This is the final tragedy of the government intervention. It turns activities where people are helping people into programs that solve problems.

dsjoerg• 9 years ago

Why should I believe what you say? It sounds truthy and has plenty of logic to it, but I've come to ask for more before believing something.

observation7• 9 years ago

It could be kin selection. In the past people lived closer to and interacted more with people of similar genetic ancestry.

The real question is why wouldn't civic qualities decline.

You can look at this on an economic lens - people don't need to depend on familial relations as much because of money.

You can look at this with a racial/ethnic lens - more genetic variance reduces cooperative behaviours (see Charles Murray).

Then there's the libertarian version you've heard above.

Then there's the social lens - people have become atomized by individualism in their manners, social conditioning etc.

I like to think there's a non-relativistic way in which all of them are true, sometimes some of them more at certain times than others, but that they are models of the same phenomena.

Should we genetically manipulate ourselves to increase our pro-social behaviours? It seems clear that if society flies apart then all the critiques I've mentioned will be true simultaneously, I do not see how that can plausibly be positive. What about genetic intervention?

okaram• 9 years ago

The government hasn't recently grown in scope, in any meaningful way. Since the 1980's, the government as percent of GDP has stayed about the same 30-35% ... our taxes are lower and our 'welfare' is arguably lower than in the 80s, so if it was growth of government, you'd see it it correlated with that

I know it is cool to blame everything on the government, but ...

matt_wulfeck2• 9 years ago

a percentage of GDP is a fairly meaningless measurement.

We've entered into an era of unprecedented government surveillance and power. We have agencies such as the DEA, NSA, homeland security, etc that wield enormous power over the lives of Americans.

Also the welfare programs are significantly more pervasive now. You have subsidized farming, subsidized food, subsidized business, subsidized housing, a subsidized economy.

At this point, aren't we all just living off the hand of the federal government? Isn't that by design?

Bucephalus355• 9 years ago

Your point is well written but you seem to be referencing some past golden age of inter-person cooperation before "big government" got involved. I'm not saying your wrong but anytime our thoughts lead us to imagine the past as a place wth less problems, it's a good clue we're maybe thinking about the situation less well than we could.

In your mind, when you imagine the 1920's, or the 1960's, do you think that there were incredibly high levels of cooperation between people? I don't want to put a huge burden of evidence of you, but am curious.

Also if anyone gets a chance please look into the book "The Way We Never Were" by Stephanie Coontz. Good examination of American family trends and activities over time.

tcbawo• 9 years ago

I don't buy the golden age of giving scenario either, but it seems there was an era where people had more time (single income households), more disposable income, less pressure to save for education, retirement, medical expenses, etc.

My parents tell a story about how in the 1950's, my grandfather built his house himself. One day after work, he came to the site and his neighbors were at work helping out on it. Of course, he was an immigrant living in a relatively homogeneous ethnic community. So, maybe small communities took care of their own, but in the post-drug, post-industrial economy small communities aren't diverse enough to handle the load.

themacguffinman• 9 years ago

That must be why citizens of other countries like Australia and the UK are awfully uncooperative and uncharitable, right? /s

I also hate this idea that helping the poor should be left to personal whim. "Programs that solve problems" sounds more effective and egalitarian than "people helping people" if you ask me.

hueving4• 9 years ago

Presumably the '/s' implies that they are very charitable. Do you have numbers that show that they were more charitable than people in the US used to be?

tasty_freeze• 9 years ago

If there is a massive hail storm and my neighbor's roof is damaged and needs to be repaired, the reason all the neighbors don't pitch in and give him a new roof is insurance, not the government. You know, free market insurance. The part of your story about people pitching in has more to do with the skill sets of people back then vs now; even with all the desire in the world, I couldn't raise a barn.

And in the case of hurricanes, yes, the government does step in because even insurance companies can't afford that scale of loss. And if you look at the aftermath of things like Hurricane Katrina, yes, there was a lot of community involvement in coping with the losses.

There was more than enough misery to go around 100 years ago, and heaven help you if you weren't a member of the in-group. I'd much rather have the government help me out than having to pretend to be a member of the church, or whatever was required to be acceptable in such communities.

wavefunction• 9 years ago

I remember reading stories of folks in hospitals and nursing homes left to die during Katrina. Or how many Congress people from a certain political party voted against helping out folks devastated by Sandy.

In fact, the "greed is good, corporations are people, etc." mentality that promotes selfishness as a vice is a major plank of one of the main political parties of the US.

WillPostForFood2• 9 years ago

The question isn't why we didn't repair our neighbor's roof (I wouldn't know how either), but why we didn't invite them to sleep at our house while theirs was flooding.

tomohawk4• 9 years ago

Having insurance is prudent, but really beside the point. If you can safeguard your valuables by paying for a service, why wouldn't you? This really has nothing to do with civic society.

In the case of hurricanes, it's only because of government intervention and subsidies that people build in imperiled areas. Flood insurance mostly subsidizes more wealthy people to the tune of $3B/year. They would likely not choose to live in imperiled areas without the subsidies. Is it really a social good to promote the building of dwellings in places where it is likely the dwellings will be destroyed every 20 - 30 years or so?

Having seen the devastation of Katrina in MS first hand, this seems like a remarkably poor choice of things to subsidize and promote. In fact, when we were there about a year after the storm, the only people who were helping the people who were left were voluntary associations. The government had pretty much pulled out.

Tocqueville wrote extensively about associations and their beneficial impact on society. You should give his book, Democracy in America, a read. Here's an intro: http://www.learningtogive.org/resources/philanthropy-describ...

specialist2• 9 years ago

Rise of "hot" media (radio, TV, social), decline of civility. Utterly unoriginal observation (McLuhan, Postman, many others).

While it lacks the satisfying simplicity of your government has a monopoly on violence, err, banality worldview, it does have some basis in objective reality.

cmurf6• 9 years ago

I think the coercion argument is nonsense. There are all kinds of coercion including economic coercion that happens in free markets.

It also ignores vastly top end income tax rates for nearly 4 decades, which weren't less than 75%. And ignores the relatively higher taxes in other countries where people, where trust in government is much higher than in the U.S.

Taxes should be seen as fair, and increasingly Americans think that you can avoid taxes by having clever accoutants and attorneys. Leona Helmsley "We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes" is an example of how tax burden has changed.

tomohawk4• 9 years ago

Taxation is not voluntary. If you don't pay, there will be penalties. This is coercion. "Nice house you have there - too bad you didn't pay your taxes..."

If the collected money is then put to a purpose you don't like, or is incompetently managed, what can you do? Nothing in any realistic sense.

If you would have liked to have been generous with the money instead, too bad.

As an aside, tax rates are pretty meaningless. Revenues are at record levels.

george_ciobanu• 9 years ago

The weight shifts but the overall value stays relatively constant: Quebecers give less than most Americans to homeless people because there are lots more social programs in place. Overalk, those in need get roughly the same amount of support.

pnutjam• 9 years ago

I think your wrong, Quebec is one of the poorer Canadian provinces. You can't give what you don't have. I don't see Kansan's charity increasing as taxes went down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_provinces_and...

lend000• 9 years ago

Seems to me like it's rather tangential to the true source of political division in America, in which both sides now tie ideas/facts to one of two "teams" / political parties, and actively reject discussion about something that appears to hurt their team or benefit the other. See: Republicans and global warming, Democrats and national debt, either party and any bad decision by a President of their party.

Doesn't help that when one side is wrong, the other makes sure to kick some dirt in the face and rub it in as long as possible.

rmchugh• 9 years ago

So you are proposing that high cooperation is dependent on low government intervention. This seems incorrect. In Denmark for example there is a far more interventionist state than in the US, while membership of associations and clubs is also very high.

smokeyj2• 9 years ago

Part of it is game theory. If your community is your means of survival then being cooperative in your community increases the chance of reciprocation when needed. But I think the size of the community isn't something that can be institutionally grown to scale. A community without accountability devolves into anarchy very quickly. Instead of trying to get out what you put in, the game is to take as much and contribute as little as possible.

ako• 9 years ago

It's called leading by example: do you want a government that shows people it's important to care about others, or do you want a government that doesn't care about it's people? A government that sets the example by lying, ignoring people that can't pay healthcare, can't pay for education, and basically shows it's all a fight about who gets to keep most money?

What example would you have citizens rather follow?

Also, if you think it coercive you are basically admitting your democracy isn't working. Otherwise it wouldn't be coercion but executing on the whishes of the people voting.

hueving4• 9 years ago

It's coercion regardless of democracy unless everyone is voting 100% the same way.

If 60% of the people vote to tax everyone and use that money to bomb the moon, the remaining 40% are going to feel coerced into supporting it.

The government forcing people to support things is not leading by example at all, because any other organization would be breaking the law if it tried to force support. How would you feel if the local church just started taking 30% of your income?

tomohawk4• 9 years ago

It's coercive because you will be penalized unless you pay the taxes. The example the government is setting is that it is OK to take wealth from people and give it to others as long as whoever's in power has noble intent. There is certainly noble intent behind Head Start, but its an expensive program that doesn't work. There are many examples.

You can't say that we as a people are being generous when we're only doing what we're doing to avoid massive fines or imprisonment.

jayd16• 9 years ago

I've heard many people ask why they should volunteer or help out others, when they're already paying lots of money in taxes to "take care of those problems".

They'll say that no matter what the tax rate is.

xaldir• 9 years ago

I don't think the scope of the government action has anything to do with civic activities. Take a step back and look across the Atlantic: plenty of European countries have both large government action and very active civic societies.

chimprich• 9 years ago

This is the final tragedy of the government intervention. It turns activities where people are helping people into programs that solve problems.

It's interesting that you think this is a tragedy. The point of such programs is to solve significant human problems, such as feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless. This seems to me to be a superior goal to the alternative you propose, which seems to be to allow some altruistic people to feel good about themselves.

cameldrv• 9 years ago

In the specific measures of civic organizational membership, you have to put a lot down to women entering the workforce. People of my grandparent's generation (middle aged in the 50s and 60s) participated heavily in these activities, Elks and church in their case. A lot of the planning and organization of these groups was done by women who stayed home. Particularly after the kids had gone off to school, homemakers put a lot of effort into civic groups during the day. Now, of course, there were lots of women who worked, but there were enough women who didn't to keep these groups running. With women staying home now rare, especially after the kids are old enough for school, the people with free time to keep these organizations going don't exist. If you want to see a subculture where these organizations are still thriving, look at members of the LDS church.

HillaryBriss• 9 years ago

people respond to incentives.

how have the benefits of membership in the Elks lodge or the FreeMasons (or whatever) changed since the 1970s?

Mary-Jane• 9 years ago

They say nothing brings people together like a common enemy. I'm surprised no one has correlated the periods of 'good feelings' with incidence of war, at least of the ones that posed credible threats to the nation. The first polarization low immediately followed the war of 1812. From there polarization increased until WW1, at which point it abruptly halted, then plummeted through to the end of WW2.

galaxyLogic• 9 years ago

My view is that people shouldn't be putting too much of their resources into collaboration, charity and helping their neighbors (only). Rather if they want to "do good" they should spend time and effort making the government better, more transparent, more accountable, less corrupt. A better government can better help everybody.

mythrwy• 9 years ago

At one point the US military borrowed binoculars from citizens.

https://clickamericana.com/media/newspapers/why-the-navy-wan...

It's hard to even imagine now. But presumably people sent them. They were helping. It was their war. Now the military probably buys 20 times the binoculars they'll ever use. At 20 times the price a citizen pays for them. And it's all run by career service bureaucrats. The taxpayers foot the bill but the specific expenses are unknown. And the war isn't the peoples war now. It's usually some kind of undefined action cheered on by think tanks and special interests and pumped up by news stories of terrorists. The citizens are mostly removed from the process, as it goes right on regardless of who they vote for. Unless they enlist, then they are involved, but that is less for principal now and more for a free college education or because what else to do?

This is what has changed in society. Life has become a faceless bureaucracy running on it's own agenda. Corporate, government, you name it. The concept of community is a pale shadow of what it once was. I don't know if this is better or worse, it's probably not great if your military has to beg for binoculars but seems the new hazards may be even more dangerous.

RachelF• 9 years ago

The Economist had an article on this is Issue last week.

Mistrust in America could sink the economy

https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726079-part-proble...

freech• 9 years ago

Maybe we are just parts of other groups now, like this one, instead of trade associations and soccer clubs?

netcan• 9 years ago

This is one of those questions where people can reference their pet Big Theory: corporate dominion, government coercion, individualism vs collectivism, insurance, secularization, leaderlessness...

It's hard to pin cultural changes to anything definiteively. So, my 2c with the same grain of salt...

Personally, I think it's the regionalism vs globalism dynamic. At least, I think that's the force acting on me.

We think of our political & cultural identities as part of a much bigger whole. Solidarity and identitiy are closely related. Take HN, for example. If HN was regional and something happened in our region then we'd be far more inclined mobalize. If we regulalry met in person to discuss ideas, we'd have more solidarity. We'd probably be an impactful force.

As an online group, we draw from a much bigger pool. The intellectual aspects are richer. But, the community is weaker.

TLDR, solidarity of mass culture, maybe. Could be something else.

PrimalDual• 9 years ago

Perhaps this has to do with the increasing heterogeneity of American society. The US probably looked more like Sweden, Denmark and Japan in the past. People may feel more compelled to partake in civil engagement and similar things like helping your neighbors out if you have the same background. At the very least you must trust the members of your community to play fair. Homogeneity comes at a cost but it's definitely useful to be able to assume correctly that you are a reasonable model for other people in your community.

The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)

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