Robert D. Putnam

A groundbreaking examination of the growing inequality gap from the bestselling author of Bowling Alone: why fewer Americans today have the opportunity for upward mobility.It’s the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in—a …

Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy is a 1993 book written by Robert D. Putnam. Published by Princeton University Press, the book's central thesis is that social capital is key to high institutional performance and the maintenance of democracy. The authors studied the performance of twenty regional …

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Putnam surveys the decline of "social capital" in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in …