
The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013) - metasean
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/strange-disappearance/
======
tardygrad
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."

~~~
Consultant32452
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.

~~~
abraae
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.

~~~
humanrebar
> ...life there can be very harsh indeed if you strike adversity and don't
> have family to care for you.

Life can be very harsh if you're unfortunate but don't qualify for government
benefits. Or maybe you've genuinely turned a corner in your life but
government rules don't have mercy like individuals can.

~~~
abraae
I guess I don't know what sort of scenarios you're alluding to. In the context
of healthcare, universal healthcare means by definition that its available to
everyone.

But yes, unfortunate you if you get something that's not covered under the
universal deal, e.g. some kind of leading edge cancer treatment. That's when
you hope your private insurance (if any) will pick up the tab.

~~~
humanrebar
> In the context of healthcare, universal healthcare means by definition that
> its available to everyone.

The government doesn't literally pay for anything you want or need. It picks
what things it will pay for and what things it won't. You can't always ask
government to make a special exception in extenuating circumstances like you
could with a parent or cousin.

I'm not saying family is _always_ better. I'm saying there are certainly
downsides to government-based charity.

~~~
SpikeDad
You think Universal Healthcare is charity? Thanks for demonstrating the
disconnect that many people have in the US and why lack of care about facts
and information has us in the place we are right now.

------
tomohawk
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.

~~~
tasty_freeze
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
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.

~~~
cmurf
I think that's generous. If only it were limited to greed is good. This is
about class, not merely greed. Class is the idea that some people are simply
better than other people, be it by bloodline, family name, meritocracy. The
preservation of the aristocracy is paramount, but right there along with it is
aristocrats first, others second. Sometimes a distant second. If you have more
money you get better education, health care, justice, and might even pay lower
taxes as a percentage of earned income.

This sort of nonsense is also where we get prosperity theology from. You'd
think these people would have read Job.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I honestly believe this is just people being people and wanting to maintain
their quality of life for their children and grandchildren.

Tell me that if ever become exceedingly wealthy you wouldn't do what you could
to protect your wealth. I know I'm doing _what I can_ with _what I have_.

Only the extremly wealthy can be philanthropic to an extreme extent.

~~~
eponeponepon
> Only the extremly wealthy can be philanthropic to an extreme extent.

So it follows that the normally wealthy can be philanthropic to a normal
extent, then?

Separately, I have to admit I'm unsure if you meant to conflate philanthropy
with monetary value.

------
schoen
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](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...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=avarice&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cavarice%3B%2Cc0)

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_...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=atomized&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Catomized%3B%2Cc0)

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

~~~
kafkaesq
_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
> 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.

~~~
kafkaesq
Fair point - it's very tricky to measure.

------
RealityNow
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.

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

~~~
didgeoridoo
Of course it does. Which part of Thatcher's quote do you see as promoting the
idea that we should "suppress our humanity"? Do you see that in there
anywhere? And can you imagine why the out-of-context "there is no such thing
as society" quote could be construed as a dishonest interpretation of her
philosophy?

~~~
croon
The rest of the quote just describes the same thing in a euphemism. The
quality of your life depends on your own responsibility (meaning you're SooL
if you have any disabilities or are born poor/with less opportunities). But
your quality of life also depends on someone else freely wanting to help you,
so government shouldn't bother with it, which is basically just reiterating
objectivism. Some people will help others to their own detriment out of the
goodness of their hearts. Most wont.

> "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"

I think this whole argument is mostly a problem because some people view
government as an adversary, instead of the product of populace cooperation.
Sure you get "oppression of the majority", but that's what policing has always
been. Being free to do whatever you want means being free to oppress others.
The only difference with government involvement is that it's using collective
knowledge/intellect over individual.

~~~
pdonis
_> I think this whole argument is mostly a problem because some people view
government as an adversary, instead of the product of populace cooperation._

That's because government _is_ an adversary to anyone who doesn't agree with
what it's doing. There is no such thing as "populace cooperation" unless all
of the populace agrees on what should be done. That is very rarely the case;
most cases of "populace cooperation" are a portion of the populace using the
coercive power of the government to force everyone else to do the things that
portion of the populace thinks are good ideas.

 _> that's what policing has always been. Being free to do whatever you want
means being free to oppress others._

But if all the government does is "policing" in this sense--preventing people
from oppressing others--then almost all of what governments do today would be
off the table.

~~~
croon
> That's because government is an adversary to anyone who doesn't agree with
> what it's doing. There is no such thing as "populace cooperation" unless all
> of the populace agrees on what should be done. That is very rarely the case;
> most cases of "populace cooperation" are a portion of the populace using the
> coercive power of the government to force everyone else to do the things
> that portion of the populace thinks are good ideas.

Cooperation doesn't mean that everyone gets their way. It's rare enough that
two people want the exact same thing, even less a group of people. Having a
country want the same thing is infeasible. Cooperating means compromising to
maximise total utility.

> But if all the government does is "policing" in this sense--preventing
> people from oppressing others--then almost all of what governments do today
> would be off the table.

I didn't say that it is all it does, or should do, merely that the alternative
to "government oppression" is oppression by individuals/corporations/groups,
and you don't get a vote. Personally I think there are a lot more good things
than just that aspect that our collective invention of government brings.

~~~
pdonis
_> Cooperating means compromising to maximise total utility._

I don't think this is a useful definition of cooperation, because "total
utility" is not measurable, and might not even be well-defined.

I would define cooperation as people working together towards a common goal.

 _> It's rare enough that two people want the exact same thing, even less a
group of people_

It's rare for multiple people to want _all of the same things_ , yes. This is
why collective action should be limited.

But it's quite common for multiple people to have _some_ common goal, in which
case they can cooperate to achieve that goal, without having to share all of
their other goals.

Your definition of cooperation appears to be all or nothing: either everybody
agrees on everything, or people have to compromise. But if people don't agree
on a particular goal, they can just choose not to pursue it together. They can
go off and pursue their own goals separately. Nothing requires everybody to
agree on a common set of goals and only pursue those.

 _> the alternative to "government oppression" is oppression by
individuals/corporations/groups_

No, the alternative to government oppression is _voluntary choice_. You can't
be oppressed by individuals or corporations or groups that don't have power.
And who gives them that power? Governments. Individuals or corporations and
groups get to oppress others because they have bought the privilege of doing
so from the government--which was supposed to protect people from oppression.

 _> you don't get a vote_

My vote doesn't make any difference anyway; neither major political party in
my country (the US) is willing to touch any policy proposals that I would
advocate. The best I can do with my vote is to choose the candidates that I
think will do the least damage. But I would be glad to trade the loss of that
dubious privilege for a much smaller government that didn't try to meddle in
so many things.

 _> I think there are a lot more good things than just that aspect that our
collective invention of government brings_

Governments do do good things. But that doesn't mean all good things get done
by governments, or that governments doing them are the best way to do even
those good things that governments do.

------
Animats
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
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.

~~~
PoachedSausage
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.

~~~
Animats
_" The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings."_ -Wilde

That's the problem with democracy. It's hard work.

~~~
adrianratnapala
One of the things that Tocqueville approved of in America is that everyone had
some experience of government via jury duty. Which is compulsory (at least in
principle, and in those days, probably in practice too).

I've often wondered if random juries should play a larger role in day-to-day
government. Forcing people to work like this is a huge tax and not to be taken
lightly, but taxing peoples attention rather than their wallets might actually
be what we need.

~~~
todd8
Being on a jury is not an elevating experience.

I was on a jury deciding a driving while intoxicated case. The first vote was
basically two of us against the rest of the jury. The reasons I heard
justifying the guilty verdict votes were things like "Well, I'm a mom and I
think drunk driving is terrible. That's why I think she is guilty".

Fortunately, there was one other educated person on the jury, and eventually,
after discussing the _actual_ facts of the case the rest of the jury
understood and we acquitted the accused.

It was scary, during the selection process, the candidates mostly fell into
two categories. Those looking forward to the $40 (as I remember it) allowance
they gave us for each day of the trial and those that valued their time at
more than $5/hour. The latter group all seemed to have some excuse for getting
out of the trial. If it wasn't for the two of us on the jury, I believe the
accused woman would have have been found guilty.

------
kafkaesq
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...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-
the-idea-that-changed-the-world)

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

~~~
RickS
Thanks for that link. Interesting rundown of the topic.

------
metasean
>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...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-inequality-
worse/index.html)

[1]:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-
income-inequality.html)

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

------
balance_factor
> 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.

~~~
maxerickson
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
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.

~~~
cmurf
Arguably Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant were too kind to southern aristocrats.
What they should have done, historic atrocities as a guide, is executed the
entire aristocracy down to the children and divided up the land to the slaves.
We'd certainly have been further along now had that happened.

But Grant threatened resignation if pardons were not granted to Lee and all
who surrendered at Appomattox. These men were absolutely over the war, and as
the papers of the day indicate, most people were too. There really was no
meaningful demand for treason trials for the lead generals.

And the sadly, as the Civil War determined slavery was absolutely wrong, it
began 100 years of institutionalized 2nd class citizenry based on skin color.
The Civil War was not a successful egalitarian enterprise by any stretch of
the imagination.

------
acslater00
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.

~~~
PoachedSausage
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.

~~~
acslater00
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.

~~~
PoachedSausage
To be fair, the dynamic range in incomes probably is isn't that great and it's
in a large multi-cultural city.

------
CamperBob2
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.

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

------
mythrwy
At one point the US military borrowed binoculars from citizens.

[https://clickamericana.com/media/newspapers/why-the-navy-
wan...](https://clickamericana.com/media/newspapers/why-the-navy-wanted-
binoculars-for-wwii-1942)

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.

------
netcan
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.

------
cameldrv
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.

------
PrimalDual
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.

------
Mary-Jane
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
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.

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RachelF
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...](https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726079-part-problem-lack-
competition-some-industries-mistrust-america-could-sink)

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

~~~
0x4f3759df
Probably has a lot to do with the rise of the suburbs.

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

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

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HillaryBriss
people respond to incentives.

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

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coop-throwaway
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.

~~~
RickS
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-throwaway
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.

~~~
lsc
I think it is worse (and better) than it seems when you assume that your
competition is other men.

It's not that you have to prove yourself better than other men; you have to
prove that being with you is better than being alone.

Harder than that, you don't only have to prove yourself, you have to continue
to remain better than being alone.

(I mean, I'm typing this from a male perspective, because that's what I know,
and because I think that men have always had more freedom to 'opt out' than
women, meaning that women having this power to 'opt out' is a relatively new
phenomena, but I imagine that this cuts both ways)

Emancipation, I think, is a social good... and yes, that means we all will
spend more time alone, but being alone is dramatically better, in my
experience, than being in a bad relationship, even if it's dramatically worse
than being in a good relationship. But maintaining a relationship is
difficult, and now that most people have the option of saying "I'd rather be
alone" many of them do, at least some of the time.

