More Americans are bowling than ever. Almost none of them are in a league.
A number about beer and pizza turned out to be one of the sharpest measurements of how community actually collapses.
Between 1980 and 1993, the total number of Americans who went bowling rose by ten percent. In the same stretch, participation in organized bowling leagues fell by forty percent. People kept showing up at the lanes. They just stopped showing up together, on a schedule, as a team, week after week.
Robert Putnam picked this up almost as a joke in Bowling Alone — a deliberately unglamorous data point — and then noticed it wasn't a joke at all. League bowlers, it turns out, spend roughly three times as much on beer and pizza per visit as solo bowlers, because a league is really a standing excuse to sit around with the same dozen people on a recurring basis. Solo bowling is a sport. League bowling was, almost incidentally, a social infrastructure — one of hundreds that quietly thinned out across late-20th-century America, from the PTA to the Elks to the volunteer fire department.
Putnam's broader argument, built from data like this, is that the connective tissue of American civic life eroded for decades, mostly without anyone noticing the moment it happened.
Nobody voted to end the leagues. People just stopped re-upping, one season at a time, until the seats were empty and the tissue was gone.