Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm looking right now at an article about a much
larger survey.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The article is entitled.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Disconnected, the Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life, and
the subhead is Findings from the twenty twenty four American
Social Capital Survey. And one of the guys behind this
work is Dan Cox, who runs the Survey Center on
American Life at the fantastic American Enterprise Institute AEI dot org.
(00:31):
AEI has some of the best and most interesting thinkers
in America. Dan is a senior Fellow in Polling and
Public Opinion there as well. So Dan, welcome to Kaaway.
Thanks for making time for us. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Before we sort of dive more deeply into some of
these class divide issues, which I really want to get into.
Just tell us a little bit about what is the
American Social Capital Survey.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Yeah, so this is the new project for us, but
it builds on our other work in twenty twenty one.
You may have heard of the phrase the friendship recession,
and that is a term that we coined after doing
some work on the state of American friendship, a topic
that doesn't receive a lot of attention in public opinion
(01:20):
research and social science research, but one that is incredibly
important and a lot of people are interested in. And
we in that work discovered that there was a pronounced
decline in the number of close friends that Americans had,
And so this is building on that work and looking
at all the different ways that people connect or don't
with one another and what that means for their lives.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, I think I do remember that.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
I'm and I think I talked about it on the show,
and it's a fascinating and important thing. In fact, let's
stick with this for a second. You know a lot
of times in social sciences people are doing surveys and
people are doing polling, and it makes it feel a
little abstract. Could you just elaborate a little bit on
why you think this is so important.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Yeah, So we know.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
That people who live more connected, more engaged lives when
it comes to people in their community, their neighbors, having
a number of friends, being married, or being in a relationship,
that having a rich and large social network really matters
for a whole host of personal outcomes, whether it's health, physical,
(02:34):
or mental, feeling like you belong somewhere. There can be
financial benefits to having a large social network, and then
the people that are who surround us influence us in
really important ways. They influence our politics, They influence how
we think about the world, the things that we know
and the things that we may think we know. And
(02:55):
so in that way, I think a lot of the
way we tend to view people is kind of atomistically right.
We were thinking of you behave the way you do
because you're a white man or a black woman, or.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
You're wealthy, or you're.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
You know, you're protest and a Catholic, And we think
about individual characteristics, right, your your background, uh, And I
think we pay a lot less attention to the broader
social context within which people are making decisions and behaving.
And so for me, that has always been something I
wanted to focus on, and the social capital work that
(03:30):
we're doing, uh and continue to do kind of focuses
on on on those ideas.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
So the headline in this article that you and your
co author Sam wrote about parts of the survey is
disconnected the growing class divide in American civil life and
my my sense in the past, and you can tell
(03:57):
me if this is wrong about about the past, and
then we'll talk about current. My sense about the past,
was that the difference in the social lives, that the
style of social lives of upper middle class and rich
people versus lower middle class and poor people, it was
(04:20):
not wildly different, Like they didn't mix all that much.
You didn't have a lot of rich people hanging out
with a lot of poor people. But the rich people
had their friends and hung out and did stuff, and
the non rich people had friends and hung out and
did stuff, and it was kind of like similar worlds
operating in parallel. So is that reasonable as a description
(04:42):
of some years in the past, or is that idealized?
Speaker 2 (04:47):
No?
Speaker 3 (04:47):
I think that's a pretty accurate reflection.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Right.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
You may have wealthy people joining country clubs and playing
tennis or golf together, and you know, folks who are
less well off.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Maybe they're joining bowllying leagues or meeting at the union hall.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
But there were, I would say, robust institutions supporting both
people higher up the economic scale and lower down, and
there are some institutions that serve both. Right, So think
about churches and places of worship like those served everyone
and are continue to be a really important way that
(05:23):
we remain connected to each other and to our communities,
and so what's happened with Americans who don't have college
degrees is you've seen a steady erosion in the.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Institutions that are serving them.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
So you think of union halls, like the union membership
has declined rapidly, and there are a number of reasons
for why this happened, but you know, those spaces served
a really important social function for working class Americans. There
are things we've seen a rapid decline of religion in
this country, so people are less likely to attend religious
(06:03):
services regularly. But the people who are most likely to
have left or who do not attend regularly now are
those without a college degree. And so there's been a
separation in the institutions that are serving Americans, and so
now you have you know, the result of that is
that you have one segment of society who's doing okay.
(06:26):
They're working a lot harder at maintaining these social connections
without these institutions. So they're forming their book clubs or
they're going to orange theory classes.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Right.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
But those things who require time and money.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
And there's a real cost associate with them. And I
think for the non college folks who may not have
the same resources in many cases, they can't afford those
the more sort of privatized ways of building social capital,
and so they're kind of left without.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
So all right, so you've got ahead of me a
little bit there.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
So in the past there were these sort of parallel
worlds where richer people and poorer people each had groups
of friends.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
They would do stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
As you use the term institution, right, which could be
as you say, a church or a union hall or
bowling league. And what I found so interesting in your
study is is this finding that lower income people. And
I don't want to oversimplify too much, you can tell
(07:26):
me if I have here, but it kind of sounds
like lower income people these days, on average, are living
life with fewer friends and fewer social contacts, not only
then before, but also compared to higher income people. And
I think that sucks, right, I'm not I don't know
(07:47):
how to fix it, but you know, to me, like,
if you're a fairly well off person and you don't
have a friend around that day, or maybe you don't
even have very many friends, probably like to but at
least you got some money to go do something. Right,
if you're a lower, middle income or less person and
(08:09):
you don't have a lot of friends. You also don't
have a lot of money to go engage in some diversions.
And to me, this sounds just like a terrible development
for many Americans.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Yeah, and I think it's one reason why there was
this pronounced disconnect. And I think during the election about
these macroeconomic indicators which were showing a pretty healthy economy. Sure,
inflation was a problem, but the US seem to be
weathering things better than most developed countries.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
We saw the employment rate was low, and people were
starting saying, well, what are people complaining about?
Speaker 4 (08:46):
And I think one big part of the narrative was
that a lot of these folks were still you know,
they still had a lot of economic hardship, but they
were suffering in their social lives and being able to
sort of build a robust social connection with people in
their neighborhoods or people they work with. And you know,
(09:10):
that I think is and remains a big part of
why so many Americans remain so pessimistic about the state
of the country and the state of their communities is
they don't have these civic organizations and institutions that are
supporting them being connected to a broader community and the
broader society, and I think that's that's critical. We had
(09:32):
that in the past, and whether it's again churches or
union halls, the Quanties Club, you know, whenever these things
were that we used, they made us feel like we
were part of something, you know, more than ourselves.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
And now we have, you know, social media.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
And cell phones that are taking us kind of away
from making those connections. And I think that's sort of
another challenge that we're facing.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
One more one more question for you.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
So much of what you describe is based on disappearing
or ineffectual institutions, right, like you say, the union hall
and all this, And I do wonder, I do wonder
if there's a COVID factor there where some of the
institutions that would tend to help lower income folks didn't
have the financial wherewithal to get through COVID. They went
(10:24):
out of business and didn't open again. And now the
people with the lower incomes don't have the place to go.
Where you know, Cherry Hills Country Club here in the
Denver metro area, where I am not a member, by
the way, but it's full of rich people and it
didn't really matter all that much whether people were really
going to go play jin rummy or play golf or whatever.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
They were going to get through it. Fine. So I
wonder about that.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Do you want to comment on that quickly before I
get to my other thing. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:51):
So, I think one of the things that has been
a real shift in American culture. I mean, we've been
a pretty individuals country, but I think technology has forged
us the opportunity.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
To do this stuff that we might rely on our
neighbors for.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
So I need help, you know, cleaning out my gutters,
or I need help, you know, getting groceries delivered. And
then there's task Rabbit, and there's you know, Amazon delivery services,
and like there's all these things that that if you
have money, you can pay to have done and instead
of relying on your social network and people around you,
and that kind of builds really important social capital by
(11:25):
by asking for help. And we asked, we had this
question that was just really really important in the study.
I just want to talk about for a minute. We asked,
do you have someone in your life who can take
you to a doctor's appointment, who can give you a
ride to work if you need it, who could loan
you two hundred dollars, who offer you a place to say,
or help you move, and across all these different ways
that people might ask for help from people that they know.
(11:48):
It's the college educated Americans who had far more people
who could who could help them across all these things.
And that really makes a difference in your life when
you know there's someone who can help you, or you're
having a problem or a bad day or something happens
like a car accident, there's someone out there who can
help you through manage this, because it's really hard to
do this stuff on your own.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Okay, So I didn't quite get your point about the
Amazon and the task rabbit because that sounds like stuff
rich people can do. So rich people are doing that
instead of asking people for help. So it would seem
to me the fact that they have money and are
using those would actually tend to decrease their social interactions,
which so I didn't quite get the point you were
trying to make on that.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Well, it's just that.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
And this is this is something that's happened naturally to everybody,
is that we've allowed ourselves to.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Have convenience become.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
Outweigh the sort of inconvenience in engaging with others, right,
So another example of that is like your Starbucks drive through. Right,
So instead of going into a coffee shop and sitting
down and maybe taking a little bit longer and maybe
staying there for you know, fifteen twenty minutes, people are
all going through drive throughs and they're not connecting, they're
not spending time with each other.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
And this is happening to everyone.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
But what wealthy people do as they're you know, filling
in that sort of emptiness from the expectation that we
spend more time with each other with other activities, Right,
so they are members of sports leagues, or they're members
of a book club, right that they.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Are members of a pta.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
I mean the other thing too that we didn't talk
about is that the marriage gap is also a huge
part of the story that college educated people are just
more likely to be married, and married people have much
denser social networks than those who aren't, Right, And that's.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
That's a whole other conversation for another day. I'll just
I'll just note that for lower income young and fairly
young adult men, especially those without college degrees, it's much.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Harder than it used to be for them to find wives.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
And so a lot of these guys who don't make
a lot of money and don't have the cation are
struggling to find a partner and find a spouse, and
this stuff all plays in together. Daniel Cox is the
director of the Survey Center on American Life at the
American Enterprise Institute AI dot org. His latest piece, or
(14:17):
one of his latest pieces, is called Disconnected, the growing
class divide in American civil life. I think it's interesting,
I think it's important. I have more questions than answers,
but I'm really appreciative of your time and great work.
And when you finish that book, let me know and
we'll have you back.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Absolutely. Thanks so much, all right
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Thanks for being here, Dan, appreciate it.
I'm looking right now at an article about a much
larger survey.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The article is entitled.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Disconnected, the Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life, and
the subhead is Findings from the twenty twenty four American
Social Capital Survey. And one of the guys behind this
work is Dan Cox, who runs the Survey Center on
American Life at the fantastic American Enterprise Institute AEI dot org.
(00:31):
AEI has some of the best and most interesting thinkers
in America. Dan is a senior Fellow in Polling and
Public Opinion there as well. So Dan, welcome to Kaaway.
Thanks for making time for us. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Before we sort of dive more deeply into some of
these class divide issues, which I really want to get into.
Just tell us a little bit about what is the
American Social Capital Survey.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Yeah, so this is the new project for us, but
it builds on our other work in twenty twenty one.
You may have heard of the phrase the friendship recession,
and that is a term that we coined after doing
some work on the state of American friendship, a topic
that doesn't receive a lot of attention in public opinion
(01:20):
research and social science research, but one that is incredibly
important and a lot of people are interested in. And
we in that work discovered that there was a pronounced
decline in the number of close friends that Americans had,
And so this is building on that work and looking
at all the different ways that people connect or don't
with one another and what that means for their lives.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, I think I do remember that.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
I'm and I think I talked about it on the show,
and it's a fascinating and important thing. In fact, let's
stick with this for a second. You know a lot
of times in social sciences people are doing surveys and
people are doing polling, and it makes it feel a
little abstract. Could you just elaborate a little bit on
why you think this is so important.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Yeah, So we know.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
That people who live more connected, more engaged lives when
it comes to people in their community, their neighbors, having
a number of friends, being married, or being in a relationship,
that having a rich and large social network really matters
for a whole host of personal outcomes, whether it's health, physical,
(02:34):
or mental, feeling like you belong somewhere. There can be
financial benefits to having a large social network, and then
the people that are who surround us influence us in
really important ways. They influence our politics, They influence how
we think about the world, the things that we know
and the things that we may think we know. And
(02:55):
so in that way, I think a lot of the
way we tend to view people is kind of atomistically right.
We were thinking of you behave the way you do
because you're a white man or a black woman, or.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
You're wealthy, or you're.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
You know, you're protest and a Catholic, And we think
about individual characteristics, right, your your background, uh, And I
think we pay a lot less attention to the broader
social context within which people are making decisions and behaving.
And so for me, that has always been something I
wanted to focus on, and the social capital work that
(03:30):
we're doing, uh and continue to do kind of focuses
on on on those ideas.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
So the headline in this article that you and your
co author Sam wrote about parts of the survey is
disconnected the growing class divide in American civil life and
my my sense in the past, and you can tell
(03:57):
me if this is wrong about about the past, and
then we'll talk about current. My sense about the past,
was that the difference in the social lives, that the
style of social lives of upper middle class and rich
people versus lower middle class and poor people, it was
(04:20):
not wildly different, Like they didn't mix all that much.
You didn't have a lot of rich people hanging out
with a lot of poor people. But the rich people
had their friends and hung out and did stuff, and
the non rich people had friends and hung out and
did stuff, and it was kind of like similar worlds
operating in parallel. So is that reasonable as a description
(04:42):
of some years in the past, or is that idealized?
Speaker 2 (04:47):
No?
Speaker 3 (04:47):
I think that's a pretty accurate reflection.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Right.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
You may have wealthy people joining country clubs and playing
tennis or golf together, and you know, folks who are
less well off.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Maybe they're joining bowllying leagues or meeting at the union hall.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
But there were, I would say, robust institutions supporting both
people higher up the economic scale and lower down, and
there are some institutions that serve both. Right, So think
about churches and places of worship like those served everyone
and are continue to be a really important way that
(05:23):
we remain connected to each other and to our communities,
and so what's happened with Americans who don't have college
degrees is you've seen a steady erosion in the.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Institutions that are serving them.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
So you think of union halls, like the union membership
has declined rapidly, and there are a number of reasons
for why this happened, but you know, those spaces served
a really important social function for working class Americans. There
are things we've seen a rapid decline of religion in
this country, so people are less likely to attend religious
(06:03):
services regularly. But the people who are most likely to
have left or who do not attend regularly now are
those without a college degree. And so there's been a
separation in the institutions that are serving Americans, and so
now you have you know, the result of that is
that you have one segment of society who's doing okay.
(06:26):
They're working a lot harder at maintaining these social connections
without these institutions. So they're forming their book clubs or
they're going to orange theory classes.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Right.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
But those things who require time and money.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
And there's a real cost associate with them. And I
think for the non college folks who may not have
the same resources in many cases, they can't afford those
the more sort of privatized ways of building social capital,
and so they're kind of left without.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
So all right, so you've got ahead of me a
little bit there.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
So in the past there were these sort of parallel
worlds where richer people and poorer people each had groups
of friends.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
They would do stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
As you use the term institution, right, which could be
as you say, a church or a union hall or
bowling league. And what I found so interesting in your
study is is this finding that lower income people. And
I don't want to oversimplify too much, you can tell
(07:26):
me if I have here, but it kind of sounds
like lower income people these days, on average, are living
life with fewer friends and fewer social contacts, not only
then before, but also compared to higher income people. And
I think that sucks, right, I'm not I don't know
(07:47):
how to fix it, but you know, to me, like,
if you're a fairly well off person and you don't
have a friend around that day, or maybe you don't
even have very many friends, probably like to but at
least you got some money to go do something. Right,
if you're a lower, middle income or less person and
(08:09):
you don't have a lot of friends. You also don't
have a lot of money to go engage in some diversions.
And to me, this sounds just like a terrible development
for many Americans.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Yeah, and I think it's one reason why there was
this pronounced disconnect. And I think during the election about
these macroeconomic indicators which were showing a pretty healthy economy. Sure,
inflation was a problem, but the US seem to be
weathering things better than most developed countries.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
We saw the employment rate was low, and people were
starting saying, well, what are people complaining about?
Speaker 4 (08:46):
And I think one big part of the narrative was
that a lot of these folks were still you know,
they still had a lot of economic hardship, but they
were suffering in their social lives and being able to
sort of build a robust social connection with people in
their neighborhoods or people they work with. And you know,
(09:10):
that I think is and remains a big part of
why so many Americans remain so pessimistic about the state
of the country and the state of their communities is
they don't have these civic organizations and institutions that are
supporting them being connected to a broader community and the
broader society, and I think that's that's critical. We had
(09:32):
that in the past, and whether it's again churches or
union halls, the Quanties Club, you know, whenever these things
were that we used, they made us feel like we
were part of something, you know, more than ourselves.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
And now we have, you know, social media.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
And cell phones that are taking us kind of away
from making those connections. And I think that's sort of
another challenge that we're facing.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
One more one more question for you.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
So much of what you describe is based on disappearing
or ineffectual institutions, right, like you say, the union hall
and all this, And I do wonder, I do wonder
if there's a COVID factor there where some of the
institutions that would tend to help lower income folks didn't
have the financial wherewithal to get through COVID. They went
(10:24):
out of business and didn't open again. And now the
people with the lower incomes don't have the place to go.
Where you know, Cherry Hills Country Club here in the
Denver metro area, where I am not a member, by
the way, but it's full of rich people and it
didn't really matter all that much whether people were really
going to go play jin rummy or play golf or whatever.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
They were going to get through it. Fine. So I
wonder about that.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Do you want to comment on that quickly before I
get to my other thing. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:51):
So, I think one of the things that has been
a real shift in American culture. I mean, we've been
a pretty individuals country, but I think technology has forged
us the opportunity.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
To do this stuff that we might rely on our
neighbors for.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
So I need help, you know, cleaning out my gutters,
or I need help, you know, getting groceries delivered. And
then there's task Rabbit, and there's you know, Amazon delivery services,
and like there's all these things that that if you
have money, you can pay to have done and instead
of relying on your social network and people around you,
and that kind of builds really important social capital by
(11:25):
by asking for help. And we asked, we had this
question that was just really really important in the study.
I just want to talk about for a minute. We asked,
do you have someone in your life who can take
you to a doctor's appointment, who can give you a
ride to work if you need it, who could loan
you two hundred dollars, who offer you a place to say,
or help you move, and across all these different ways
that people might ask for help from people that they know.
(11:48):
It's the college educated Americans who had far more people
who could who could help them across all these things.
And that really makes a difference in your life when
you know there's someone who can help you, or you're
having a problem or a bad day or something happens
like a car accident, there's someone out there who can
help you through manage this, because it's really hard to
do this stuff on your own.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Okay, So I didn't quite get your point about the
Amazon and the task rabbit because that sounds like stuff
rich people can do. So rich people are doing that
instead of asking people for help. So it would seem
to me the fact that they have money and are
using those would actually tend to decrease their social interactions,
which so I didn't quite get the point you were
trying to make on that.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Well, it's just that.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
And this is this is something that's happened naturally to everybody,
is that we've allowed ourselves to.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Have convenience become.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
Outweigh the sort of inconvenience in engaging with others, right,
So another example of that is like your Starbucks drive through. Right,
So instead of going into a coffee shop and sitting
down and maybe taking a little bit longer and maybe
staying there for you know, fifteen twenty minutes, people are
all going through drive throughs and they're not connecting, they're
not spending time with each other.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
And this is happening to everyone.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
But what wealthy people do as they're you know, filling
in that sort of emptiness from the expectation that we
spend more time with each other with other activities, Right,
so they are members of sports leagues, or they're members
of a book club, right that they.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Are members of a pta.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
I mean the other thing too that we didn't talk
about is that the marriage gap is also a huge
part of the story that college educated people are just
more likely to be married, and married people have much
denser social networks than those who aren't, Right, And that's.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
That's a whole other conversation for another day. I'll just
I'll just note that for lower income young and fairly
young adult men, especially those without college degrees, it's much.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Harder than it used to be for them to find wives.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
And so a lot of these guys who don't make
a lot of money and don't have the cation are
struggling to find a partner and find a spouse, and
this stuff all plays in together. Daniel Cox is the
director of the Survey Center on American Life at the
American Enterprise Institute AI dot org. His latest piece, or
(14:17):
one of his latest pieces, is called Disconnected, the growing
class divide in American civil life. I think it's interesting,
I think it's important. I have more questions than answers,
but I'm really appreciative of your time and great work.
And when you finish that book, let me know and
we'll have you back.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Absolutely. Thanks so much, all right
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Thanks for being here, Dan, appreciate it.
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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