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1 in 3 owned homes in the US belongs to someone 65 or older. Pointed out by Tony Fratto from a recent episode of Odd Lots.

This week Greece’s electric grid ran entirely on renewable energy. And it looks like per person CO2 emissions have probably peaked.

However at the same time, the Alaska snow crab population has collapsed (although fishing methods may also have played a role).

My mental model for the climate change story is that for the foreseeable future, there’s going to be significant progress on renewable energy, decarbonization, and the like. It’s actually going to be shockingly fast. Eventually carbon removal is going to be figured out and costs will fall pretty quickly. A critical mass of people have accepted that decarbonization is a problem that has to be solved and it is technically feasible to solve it (with some innovation required along the way).

Alongside this though, a fair amount of environmental cost going to be paid and people and communities are going to suffer because of it. To a large extent, these costs are no longer preventable - the time for that was 10 years ago.

I’m not advocating for this path, but think it’s the likeliest outcome and if you suffer from climate anxiety, it will be crucial to remember that both those things things are happening at the same time.

Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, is a classic book about trust and society. As a part of my obsession with trust, I felt like I had to read it. The book, which was published in 2000, is about the decline of social trust in the United States. I didn’t find it to be dated — if anything, I think the additional distance from the publish date helped the book. From the vantage point of 2022, I felt like the book previewed some of the challenges that lay ahead of American society when the book was written and was detailed enough to help me hypothesize about how trends since 2000 may or may not have continued since then. It’s a classic for a reason!

So what leads people to have trust in their community and society? The book isn’t as explicit here as I wish it would be, but far as I can tell, though, the critical factors are:

• Having relationships with people in the community; spending informal time together, having both close friends and friendly faces in the crowd; in everyday life, this looks like things like game nights, card games, social dinners, church attendance, and yes, bowling leagues

• Feeling agency over how the community is organized; in particular, joining in a group activity with other people to solve a community problem seems to be a particularly powerful contributor to trust; in everyday life, this looks like things like club membership, running for office, serving in a volunteer group 

Trust in the United States has been falling pretty steadily since the late 1960s.

Putnam makes a convincing case that this is not just people changing the way they answer a survey question, but a general decline in social capital. Across almost every dimension he studies — church membership, bowling leagues, running for office, formal involvement in volunteer groups (like the Lions club), sports leagues, volunteering at local charities, dinner parties, you name it — Americans are less involved and less trusting by the end of the 1990s than they were in 1960s.

Moreover, this pattern holds across different groups. People with more education are more likely to be involved and trusting than people with less education, but both cohorts are less involved and less trusting than they were 30 years ago. Same with race, gender, and income. It really is striking how many different cuts of data tell basically the same story — a decline in trust and participation starting in the late 1960s.

The one exception to this trend of declining participation are social activities that can be done alone. So as an example, people don’t join a local volunteer group, they write a check to an issue based organization; they don’t join a bible study, they are spiritual at home. Individual activities, however, don’t create trust.

So where is all this trust going? The book makes the case that there are four factors worth considering:

So where do we go from here?

First, from the vantage point of 2022, I have a hard time not seeing a lot of the trends outlined by Putnam getting worse. Based on what Putnam said about the impact of TV on participation, it’s hard to imagine that social media and online gaming have made the situation better. Add to this the pandemic, which broke the habits of engagement for many people, and it’s easy to see how people might start to feel like the world is spiraling out of control for them. I would predict this to continue in the near term!

The one silver lining I see is that I feel like the pandemic and shift to remote work has made it significantly easier to create social capital online. In an additional chapter from the 2020 version of the book, Putnam discusses the potential impact of the internet on social capital and posits that it will be good for organizing, but bad for creating relationships that lead to meaningful change. Based on my experience, I think that this was true before 2020, but sometime during the pandemic, it shifted. Since about mid-2020, I’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of professional relationships I have with people I’ve never met in person (even outside of my current company); a handful of these people have become legitimate friends. This feels like something I’ll have to learn how to cultivate through the rest of my career.

Second, reading this book has made me feel more strongly that we should be nudging young adults towards civic service and potentially even have mandatory/highly encouraged civic service programs. Based on the generational replacement chapter, it seems likely to me that one’s habits towards trust and civic participation are set somewhere between the ages of 18-28, so nudging people towards service during this time in their life should pay dividends for years to come.

Third, it became clear to me while reading this book that I needed to have a personal social capital plan in the same way that I have an exercise routine and other personal health habits. Finding both informal ways and formal ways to be a part of the community matter for individual happiness as well as community outcomes and I should be intentional in how I invest in it. Ideally civic leaders would latch onto this message and start to reinforce it within the communities they lead.

Finally… at some point while reading this book and looking at all of the charts where things go sideways starting between 1968 and 1974, I started to think of this chart of productivity in the United States.

Could there be a relationship between declining trust and declining productivity? At least at an intellectual level, this makes sense: if more trust allows two people or four people to be more productive together, why wouldn’t more trust allow a society to be more productive?

Interestingly, whilte Putnam does discuss the importance of trust to economic productivity and he shows a lot of charts, he never shows this one. Even more interesting, while I’ve seen a lot of musings about the causes of the Great Stagnation, I’ve never seen anyone put forward declining social trust as an explanation; it doesn’t mean it’s not out there, but I’m surprised that I haven’t run into it. I’d like to do more reading here!

1:  An alternate version of this book is the self help version – Bowling Alone: Why the key to health and happiness is cultivating friendships and community involvement
2: wonder if this means that some of the nostalgia for an earlier American age is in fact driven by a longing to return to a higher trust society? Another interesting question is whether more social conformity / segregation is needed to create higher levels of social capital; I’m not sure I agree but would love to see data.
3: This is where I hear a voice in the back of my head saying “after the defeat of Carthage, the Romans became complacent and decadent…”
4: It’s interesting to imagine how more flexible work arrangements could change this.

A great reminder that price is a function of demand and supply:

Another thing is that I don’t know what my inventories are worth. I know that ten years ago I bought floppy disks for eight to 12 cents apiece. If I was buying a container of a million disks, I could probably get them for eight cents, but what are they worth today? In the last ten years they’ve gone from ten cents to one dollar apiece, and now you can sell a 720KB double density disks for two dollars. I just don’t know what the market will do. It’s very hard to run a business when you don’t know what your product is worth.

That is from Eye on Design’s article about Tom Persky, the last man selling floppy disks.

The Alaskan Seaweed crop has expanded ~30x since 2017. That is from Macro Ocean’s grower survey in partnership with the McKinley Research Group.