Bowling Alone

Putnam's article is one of my favorite articles that we've read so far this semester. I felt that he used historical evidence and studies in a way that was clearly communicated to his audience. One question of the article was basically the question of, "Why is America now bowling alone?" Putnam attempts to tackle this question in the latter half of his essay where he uses statistics to prove a point. Certainly, as Putnam has said, I believe that women's rise in the workforce has contributed to part of the decline in social involvement. Although Putnam uses this information to show that women's rise in the workforce is just a small contribution to the underlying problem of the lack of civic involvement, I think that it has contributed more significantly.

I remember watching a video in my Sociology class during my senior year about the impacts of women joining the workforce. Women joining the workforce had such a dramatic effect on the economy and the social roles of both men and women. Because women began to work, their wages started significantly lower than men's wages because there was not enough money to distribute- on the other hand, men's wages lowered to meet women's. Slowly, over time, both sexes have had less of a salary gap between them. The negative aspect of this is that the "real salary" in "real money" of men 50 years ago is around the same amount of both men AND women's combined salaries today. This means that both sexes have had to devote many, many more hours to their jobs. I believe that this strong devotion and focus of money in the United States has greatly affected the average American's priorities. Americans are overall more concerned with debt and money and don't seem to really have time anymore for civic organizations.

I think that the average American cares about who gets elected in their politics and is constantly seeing information about candidates via television, news or internet... But, Americans devote less time to civic responsibilities because they simply don't see them as their first priority. Americans may not realize it now, but as Putnam said, their is a positive correlation between civic organizations and political involvement in the United States. Hopefully the economy will be able to support the rise of minorities in the workforce without having our political involvement suffer.