Interesting Sociology

From a Joint Economic Committee Report.

In the early 1970s, nearly seven in ten adults in America were still members of a church or synagogue. While fewer Americans attended religious service regularly, 50 to 57 percent did so at least once per month. Today, just 55 percent of adults are members of a church or synagogue, while just 42 to 44 percent attend religious service at least monthly.

…Between 1970 and the early 2010s, the share of families in large metropolitan areas who lived in middle-income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent to 40 percent. Over that same time period the share of families living in poor neighborhoods rose from 19 percent to 30 percent, and those living in affluent neighborhoods rose from 17 percent to 30 percent.

…Between 1974 and 2015, the share of adults that did any volunteering who reported volunteering for at least 100 hours increased from 28 percent to 34 percent.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor.

Interesting throughout. Some, but not all, of the findings relate to what I have called Narrower, Deeper, Older. That is, people are drifting away from the sort of lowest-common-denominator activities that require a modest commitment of time. Instead, people prefer narrower niche activities in which they become more deeply involved.

If you look at associational life in terms of the broader, shallower associations of 1960, our social capital is going down. But looking at it in terms of the narrower, deeper associations of today, the analysis is more complex.

10 thoughts on “Interesting Sociology

  1. This is the exact opposite trend that I’ve noticed in competitive distance running. I started running marathons in 1999 and most of my racemates were people who devoted a significant portion of their life to training and running. I usually finished in the top 10% of runners. Today, huge swaths of society complete a marathon with little/no training at very slow times. Despite being in my 40s and slightly slower than I was at my peak around 2003, I’m now usually in the top 3% because of the vast increase in the number of casual runners competing.

    • That’s a good point. There are several hobbies which are much more mainstream than they used to be.

      Another example might be science-fiction and fantasy. Those used to be fairly niche, but they’re a lot more mainstream these days. Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, etc.

      Maybe board games. Definitely video games. I’ve been playing Overwatch lately, and it is a shock to hear female voices in chat in a shooter game. That’s something which would have been unheard of 10 years ago.

    • Right. And consider the ‘color runs’ and Disney half-marathons and all the 5ks-for-something-of-the-week. Usually there are just a few very serious, competitive athletes with the rest being there for SWPL class-assortative socialization, signalling, and showing off ones assets in an effort to connect with potential mates. There is always a demand for something like that, and eventually birds of a feather will find a Schelling point activity to coordinate around that fits that bill.

      It’s a good question to what extent ‘social capital’ is affected by the adoption rates of particular group activities. The members of a deep group mostly capture all the gains from their activity, and probably without producing many positive externalities in terms of spillover social effects of inspiring and maintaining a ‘cooperate-cooperate’ equilibrium and a general willingness to interact freely and trust stranger neighbors.

  2. Several things to unpack here:

    1) Judging by the stats here we way underestimate how class segregated society was in the Post War Years.
    2) In a lot ways, I bet the family division of labor assisted a lot of this local social capital. Like your comment about a modest commitment of time here about church. I bet a lot of the movement to two income families in the 1970s/1980s starting dropping the modest commitments because they had no modest commitments to give.
    3) I still believe the massive moving of Baby Boomers moving in the 1970s and 1980s broke a lot of these social commitments. (And this also effected Generation X local of interest in local community.) Living in California 1980s (when lots of emigration was growing), I knew a number of families that used to go to church for awhile back in their original state home.
    3a) The one big difference of Baby Boomers and Generation X is many of Boomers thought their High School friends would continue to have weekend barbecues and go to the same church. Graduating High School in 1988, I don’t remember anybody really thinking this reality for our future. We all knew we going separate directions.
    4) In terms of local community, I still think the growth global and endless creative destruction economy is the disruption of these local contacts.

    5) This does not mean these trends continue. We are seeing a lot less movement of people and over the next 20 years, our economy is going to require less work. It might be best long term that the family returns to single incomes. (I suspect some of this helicopter parenting is stressed out middle class families avoiding the latch key 1980 reality.) A home parent makes it easier for kids to have more flexible schedules and probably allows parents to have time for ‘modest commitments.’

    • of the findings relate to what I have called Narrower, Deeper, Older.

      Aren’t families becoming a lot older in nature today? So people don’t take family roots until they are past thirty when they tend to have narrower interests.

      Now most people in their twenties are living a long version of Friends than even Gen X did.

  3. Arnold – if you want to find broader, shallow commitments, look at families’ engagement with youth activities. I volunteer a cub scout troop, and we have dozens of parents that show up on meeting night, stick around while the leaders run the events, and then take their kids home. They don’t want to dive into being a full leader (infact, we are having a hard time getting any of the show-up-and-stand-around parents into show-up-and-help-out-a-bit parents), but they don’t want scouts to be babbysitting time, either. This is generally the way sports and other youth activities are running these days, from my observation.

    Your observation about narrower, deeper, older seems very true to me, but it seems to apply to adult-targeted activities (church is not designed for kids – it is in fact horrible for engaging kids).

  4. In other words, people used to go to church because there was nothing else to do.

  5. Arnold, for an example of “narrower, deeper” associations and an explanation of why people don’t go to Chruch anymore, see the episode of King of the Hill called “Church Hopping.”

    You used to be able to be fully participating members of a church by going once or twice a week. Now to be full insiders you must go all the time. It’s exhausting for anyone that does not want to spend all their time at a church.

  6. …Between 1970 and the early 2010s, the share of families in large metropolitan areas who lived in middle-income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent to 40 percent. Over that same time period the share of families living in poor neighborhoods rose from 19 percent to 30 percent, and those living in affluent neighborhoods rose from 17 percent to 30 percent.

    I’m reminded of this animated GIF from Daniel Hertz:

    https://danielhertz.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/incseggif.gif?w=1000

  7. @Slocum, thanks for great GIF, with “middle” being 75-125% of mean income, showing the decrease and shifts to both higher and lower brackets. (It’s probably highly correlated with the more important wealth.)

    ” It does feel as if we are, along a number of dimensions, living in a lower-trust time.”
    << Timothy
    Yes, and as gov't does more, more is done based on force.

    Those who favor larger gov't are in favor of more force — and less trust.

    "But whether or how to address these changes is beyond my remit." << Timothy

    Timothy doesn't know what to do??? Because he refuses the above more gov't means less trust truth.

    Volunteering is mostly great — except for the huge amount of volunteering to elect Democratic Party authoritarians who want to use force against any non-PC associations, like against white folk who want to operate a burrito restaurant.

    The PC-mob is an unhealthy form of social association. Sort of like the perverted change of "community organizer", who in the good form would organize locally to solve problems locally with local resources. Such orgs have morphed by SJWs into becoming effective lobbyists for gov't cash, and higher taxes, and less trust.

    Barack Obama utterly failed to organize any Chicago community to become more self-reliant — and few local orgs seem to be doing that.

    Mormons are likely to leave the Boy Scouts (they're maybe 20% now) because of the LGBT normalization.

    Rod Dreher's "The Benedict Option" is part of a movement to encourage Christians to focus on … narrower, deeper Christianity. Perhaps he and the Mormons will begin a pushback against promiscuous fornication, the biggest reason poor folk are poor; but I'm a bit pessimistic about the success of any such pushback.

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