Putnam's book has always seemed hilarious to me -- all of the obvious blunders are evidenced in the title alone.

As if it's impossible to have "social intercourse" in a bowling alley without paying a league $20 and blocking out your Tuesday nights.

You can see the same fallacy at work when greek organizations bemoan the "death of socialization" on campuses where frat/sorority membership goes into decline. But of course, people somehow (got knows how! /s) manage to have social lives, volunteer and give back, etc. without paying Alpha Omega Inc. a few grand a year.

The same thing has happened writ large is society -- to the extent that you can find "decline" in the data, it's more than explained by a growth of new forms of involvement that 20 year old metrics don't properly capture (e.g., if you ignore hacker spaces, maker communities, online mentoring communities, and open source development, HN looks pretty desolate as far as "social intercourse" and volunteering go. But of course anyone who knows WTF they're talking about will roll their eyes if you use the lack of posts about Boy Scouts as an indicator of the social decline of HN's front page).

> and these studies were done by leftist to prove that value. They found exactly the opposite, and they've been replicated many times, again by leftists, hoping to find a different result but to no avail.

1. The studies discussed by Putnam doesn't demonstrate any of this, and these aren't even Putnam's core claims.

He demonizes VIDEO GAMES and women working more than multi-culturalism.

2. To the extent that Putnam does present evidence for his claims (which isn't nearly often enough), there's been no shortage of evidence-based refutation. The wikipedia article even has a "criticism" section, which outlines the main arguments.

Basically, if Putnam's data is to be believed, open source developers (and thousands of other people who are doing something other than volunteering with out-dated orgs) are politically disengaged and insular loners who give nothing back to society.

If your hypothesis was correct, shouldn't these lily-white small towns in Pennsylvania and West Virginia be paragons of social connectedness and happiness, instead of the epicenter of the opioid epidemic?

The problem with jumping to the conclusion that "multiculturalism is bad" is that it seeds the idea that people who don't lookalike can't peacefully co-exist. Personally, I feel a far greater sense of community here in Silicon Valley than I did in the homogenous suburb I grew up in.

You wouldn't classify community participation and happiness as benefits?