"Robert Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone,” the seminal work delineating the decline of civic engagement in America. At great professional peril he dared to jump off the bandwagon bias.
Putnam conducted a huge study of 30,000 people in America and found that “[T]he greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings.” The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings."
