One and Done
7th June 2015
Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard political scientist most famous for his 1995 article “Bowling Alone” about the decline of social capital, is the liberal Charles Murray.
Putnam has long benefited from being the slightly dull but ideologically respectable alternative to Murray. It helped Putnam’s career that his “Bowling Alone” article came out the year after The Bell Curve. Although less interesting or impressive than Herrnstein and Murray’s magnum opus, it was popular with Clintonian moderate liberals because it was a sort of Bell Curve Lite: a tiny bit politically incorrect, but careful not to push the envelope of acceptability too hard.
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Putnam is notoriously torn between his decent skills as a quantitative social scientist and his desire to avoid trouble with anti-science progressives who vehemently denounced Murray for co-authoring The Bell Curve. In a comic 2006 episode, Putnam admitted to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that he had socked away for a half decade the results of his huge survey of American communities while he tried to figure out how to spin its finding that ethnic diversity was disastrous.