I set myself a calendar reminder for after the new year, will check in then :)
Aloekine
Karma: 13
I’d be happy to swap my 1.5k to Lightcone for your 1.5k to Givewell All Grants.
Practical note: For my own tax reasons, I’d be looking to do this at the start of 2026 (but within Lightcone’s fundraising window of course). This doesn’t feel too hard to coordinate around even if you need to give in 2025 for your tax reasons, but might be relevant for comparison of offers.
This unfortunately is also from more of a pre-social media period than I would hope for, but Putnam’s other book (really a collection of essays by people more knowledgable on specific countries) Democracies in Flux from 2002 (https://academic.oup.com/book/8126) looks at similar trends across 8 countries: Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. To be clear, this is most focused on the aspects of social capital one would expect to be related to the functioning of democracy like trust and institutional memberships.
Their overall findings are that the declines seen in the US are less uniformly reflected elsewhere than I predicted prior to reading it, and that it’s also less clear than I predicted what relationship this has to functioning of democracy (again, this is most focused on measures of social capital most plausibly related to democracy). Overall, I recall coming away thinking imputing trends from the US onto other countries might paint an overly bleak picture of social capital trends, and that the causal link from declining social capital to effects on democracy was less certain than I previously thought.
That isn’t to say things are going wonderfully everywhere else, just that anchoring to the US may paint an overly bleak picture.
I don’t want to wholesale endorse this discussion of the book since it’s been a year or two since I read the original, but this seems like a reasonable summary I found for folks who are curious: https://www.beyondintractability.org/bksum/putnam-democracies.
I’d be curious to see any research folks have that take a comparative lens that are more recent, or that more specially focus on the social/emotional impacts more!
Happy New Year! Still down for this swap?