Toward a Connected Society

The United States is living through a major demographic transition that will surely upend our earlier approaches to thinking about identity, community, and social relations.[1] The question of whether by, say, 2040, we will indeed live in an egalitarian majority-minority country, where no group is in the majority and where such inequalities as persist do not track ethnic or racial lines, depends on choices we make now.[2] If we make the wrong choices, we may find that a black/nonblack binary has reasserted itself and that racial privilege is as strong as ever. Yet the demographic opening of the present moment presents an opportunity to renew and even perhaps make good on this country’s egalitarian commitments.

As we have seen, the ideal of assimilation pursues social cohesion while sacrificing individuals’ particular need for connection to their communities of origin. The ideal of multiculturalism valorizes connections to those communities of origin at the expense of both a reasonable account of identity and social bonds. In place of these ideals, I propose an ideal of “social connectedness” that would characterize a “connected society.”[3]

Scholars of social capital distinguish among three kinds of social ties: bonding, bridging, and linking. Bonding ties are those (generally strong) connections that bind kin, close friends, and social similars to one another; bridging ties are those (generally weaker) ties that connect people across demographic cleavages (age, race, class, occupation, religion, and the like); and linking ties are the vertical connections between people at different levels of a status hierarchy, for instance, in the employment context.[4] Bridging ties are the hardest ones to come by. Bonding ties take care of themselves, really. They start with the family and radiate out. But bridging ties are a matter of social structure. Schools, the military, political bodies—these have typically been the institutions that bring people from different backgrounds together. A connected society is one that maximizes active—in the sense of alive and engaged—bridging ties. This generally takes the work of institutions.

Importantly, more connected societies—those that emphasize bridging ties—have been shown to be more egalitarian along multiple dimensions: health outcomes, educational outcomes, economic outcomes.[5] Consider the impact of connectedness on labor markets. Research shows, for instance, that the majority of people who get a new job through information passed through a social network have acquired that information not from a close connection but from a distant one.[6] In other words, bridging ties spread economic opportunity rather than letting it pool in insular subcommunities within a polity. This makes sense. One’s closest connections share too much of one’s world; they are a lot less likely to introduce new information. We all know this intuitively. Whenever we’re trying to help a friend who has been single too long, we scratch our brains to think of a further removed social connection who might connect our friend to a whole new pool of possibilities. Perhaps that seems like a trivial example. But the most important egalitarian impacts of social connectivity flow from bridging ties and their impact on the diffusion of knowledge. Scholars working in the domain of network theory routinely invoke the epistemic benefits of bridging ties to ex plain why so many economic, political, educational, and health benefits flow from them.[7] To the degree that a society achieves greater levels of connectedness, and more equally empowers its members in economic, educational, and health domains, it builds the foundation of political equality.

Perhaps one of the most profound examples of a failure at the level of associational life in a democracy is the case of racial segregation in the United States. I do not refer to a historical phenomenon, for instance, a relic of the mid-twentieth century. Racial segregation continues to have a significant impact on American life in the present and has been pretty conclusively shown to be at the root of racial inequality along all dimensions: educational inequalities in terms of achievement gaps between white and African American students; inequality in distribution of wealth; inequality in terms of employment mobility; inequality in terms of health.[8] Modern segregation is different from the mid-twentieth-century kind, as Thomas Sugrue details in this volume. Both suburbs and middle and upper-class urban areas are more ethnically mixed than they were thirty years ago. But socioeconomic segregation matters more now. And poor African Americans and Latino/as are now more likely to face hypersegregation—along dimensions of both class and race.

A study of segregation by a group of economists shows that social network effects have a great impact on the distribution of goods and resources, such that segregation can be a driver of group inequality, even in hypothetical quantitative models where groups begin with equivalent skill sets and opportunities.[9]

Why does segregation have such profound effects? Common sense points the way to an explanation, which research has confirmed. All you have to do is think about what flows through social networks. At the most basic level, a human social network is like a web of streams and rivulets through which language flows. As language flows it carries with it knowledge and skills. That knowledge can be of the sort we recognize in schools: knowledge about the world or history or politics or literature. Or it can be of a practical kind: which jobs are about to come open because someone is retiring; where a new factory is about to be built, bringing new opportunities to an area. This sort of information also flows with language along social networks.

Any individual has access to just as much knowledge, skill, and opportunity as his or her social network contains. And since knowledge, skill, and opportunity are power, isolation in itself reduces resources of fundamental importance to egalitarian empowerment.[10] Language itself is one of the easiest markers to use in assessing how relatively well connected or fragmented any political community is.[11]

Now I need to underscore that the point I am making here is not about race or ethnicity. It is about social experience for all people. Everyone is benefited by a rich social network and harmed by a relatively isolated or resource-impoverished social network.[12] The American case of racial segregation just happens to be an extreme example of a basic phenomenon that crosses all contexts, times, and places. More egalitarian societies, scholars have shown, are generally more connected societies, and connectivity is equalizing.[13]

Importantly, achieving a connected society does not require that individuals shed cultural specificity. Instead it requires that we scrutinize how institutions build social connections with a view to ensuring that there are multiple overlapping pathways connecting the full range of communities in a country to one another. The ideal of a connected society contrasts with an idea of integration-through-assimilation by orienting us toward becoming a community of communities. A connected society respects and protects bonding ties while also maximizing bridging ties.

A connected society is one in which people can enjoy the bonds of solidarity and community but are equally engaged in the “bridging” work of bringing diverse communities into positive relations while also individually forming personally valuable relationships across boundaries of difference. Importantly, in a connected society the boundaries among communities of solidarity are fluid, and the shape of those communities can be expected to change over time. By continuously maximizing bridging ties, a connected society ensures steadily shifting social boundaries; some bridging ties will, over time, become bonding ties. And as what were once bridging ties become bonding ties, the quest to build bridging ties must migrate to new lines of difference and division.

This post was excerpted and adapted from Danielle Allen’s essay “Toward a Connected Society” in Our Compelling Interests (Princeton University Press, 2016).

NOTES

1. Thomas Sugrue (chapter 1 in this volume) provides a good overview of those demographic transitions.

2. This point is underscored by Sugrue in chapter 1: "The color of America will certainly change by 2040, but the meaning of race and ethnicity in the future will depend to a great extent on policy decisions made today."

3. Danielle Allen, "A Connected Society," Soundings 53 (Spring 2013): 103–113.

4. Marc S. Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," Aerican Journal of Sociology 78 (1973): 1360º1380; S. Szreter and M. Woolcock, "Health by Association? Social Capital, Social Theory, and the Political Economy of Public Health," International Journal of Epidemiology 33, no. 4 (2004): 650–667.

5. For instance, J. Ober, Democracy and Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Szreter and Woolcock, "Health by Association?"

6. Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties."

7. For the economy, the benefits of a connected society include:

—Improvements in education because of a broaer diffusion of the linguistic, intellectual, and social resources that support learning in the first place as well as impacts on personal decisions about whether to invest in education (Matthew O. Jackson, "Social Structure, Segregation, and Economic Behavior" [presented as the Nancy Schwartz Memorial Lecture, April 2007; revised, February 5, 2009, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1530885]; A. Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2nd ed. [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011]; J. Ludwig, H. F. Ladd, and G. J. Duncan, "Urban Poverty and Educational Outcomes," Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs 200 [2001]: 147–201);
—Increases to social mobility because a better diffusion of information allows people to see oppportunities and fit themselves to them (Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties"; Jackson, "Social Structure, Segregation, and Economic Behavior");
—Increases to creativity because diverse solution approaches are more likely to be brought into conversation with one another (Scott E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007]);
—More efficient knowledge transmission because information travels faster across bridging connections (Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties"; Jackson, "Social Structure, Segregation, and Economic Behavior").

For democratic politics, the benefits of a connected society include:

—Improved social awareness and public discourse because citizens have more exposure to the impacts on others of different policy questions and, with improved information flows across social ties, citizens are less likely to consider the beliefs of others to be simply incorrect (Rajiv Sethi and Muhamet Yildiz, "Public Disagreement," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 4, no. 3 [2012]: 57–95);
—More efficient policy planning because policy makers can more easily draw on local knowledge to ensure alignment of policies with on-the-ground realities (Ober, Democracy and Knowledge); 
—The cretion of "latent publics" because social connections across communities help communities discover new kinds of alliances (John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, ed. Melvin Rogers [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012; originally published 1927]);
—A background cultural expectation of connectedness that sets into even sharper relief "disconnected," "out-of-touch" policy approaches, such as that used by the Tories when they developed National Health Service reform without consultation with the holders of local knowledge.

For personal well-being, the benefits of a connected society include:

—An increased sense of agency because of access to a larger opportunity network (Danielle Allen, Talking To Strangers [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004]);
—Increased opportunity to develop important relational skills, not merely those that support the intimacy of bonding relationships, but also the skills of the interpreter, mediator, and greeter, which serve to builde and use bridging relationships (Allen, Talking to Strangers); 
—The opportunity to protect and enjoy one's own culture without falling into isolation (J. Sidanius, S. Levin, C. van Laar, and D. O. Sears, The Diversity Challenge: Social Identity and Intergroup Relations on the College Campus [New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008]).

For the general benefits of egalitarianism, see Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Socieities Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011).

8. Glenn C. Loury, "A Dynamic Theory of Racial Income Differences," in Women, Minorities and Employment Discrimination, ed. Phyllis Wallace and Annette LaMond (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977); Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); R. Rothstein, "Racial Segregation and Black Student Achievement," in Education, Justice, and Democracy, ed. Danielle Allen and Rob Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 173–198.

9. Samuel Bowles, Glenn C. Loury, and Rajiv Sethi, "Group Inequality," Journal of the European Economic Association (forthcoming) (http://www.columbia.edu/~rs328/GroupInequality.pdf, accessed January 22, 2015).

10. Anderson, The Imperative of Integration.

11. Lareau, Unequal Childhoods.

12. Ibid.

13. Ober, Democracy and Knowledge; Szreter and Woolcock, "Health by Association?"