The Joe Walker Podcast - A Labor Intellectual's Plan To Rebraid Our Frayed Social Fabric - Andrew Leigh

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

Dr Andrew Leigh MP is an economist and Federal Labor parliamentarian.Show notesSelected links •Follow Andrew: Website | Twitter •Reconnected, by Andrew Leigh and Nick Terrell •Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville •Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam •Disconnected, by Andrew LeighTopics discussed •What has Andrew's experience of the pandemic been like? 7:54 •Andrew's vision for Australian society. 9:40 •What was it like to work under Robert Putnam? 12:27 •What are some of the big lessons Andrew learned from Putnam? 15:00 •What is Andrew's research system? 17:43 •What is 'social capital'? 18:12 •What is the story of the decline of social capital in Australia? 19:24 •Pushing back on the idea of social capital. 21:17 •Andrew's favourite examples of social entrepreneurship in Australia. 29:00 •Has the net effect of the digital world been to connect or disconnect us? 31:38 •Why are some organisations better at building social capital than others? 35:07 •How does Andrew think about religion? 36:40 •How can we increase social capital by using systems or design thinking? 41:37 •What impactful community organisation is no one building? 44:05See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Swagmen and Swagettes, welcome to the show. This is an episode about social capital. Social capital is the idea that the bonds and norms of trust and reciprocity that link the members of a society together have inherent value. And so there's no better sponsor for this episode than Goodwill Wine. CEO and founder Dave is a listener of the podcast and he shared his story with me. Just over 10 years ago, Dave lost everything he owned in the Black Saturday bushfires. But thanks to donations from around Australia, he was able to rebuild and with $15,000 he built Goodwill Wine. Goodwill Wine produce incredible Australian wines and in the process they give 50% of their profits back to charity. The charities are dictated by their consumers, so you're able to choose where the profits from your purchase go. So far, Goodwill Wine has given $350,000 and counting. On top of that, half of their team are long-term unemployed or living with a disability.

And to top it all off, the wine is great. I've tried it. The Pinot Noir is particularly excellent. So if you are an Australian red wine drinker who also wants to do some good on the side, head to goodwillwine.com.au and select the mixed red case. If you enter my exclusive voucher code SWAGMAN, you'll get free shipping and an upgrade on the Pinot Noir. So, head to goodwillwine.com.au, enter the voucher code SWAGMAN to get free shipping and an upgrade on the Pinot Noir when you buy the mixed red case. Enjoy responsibly.

You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the show. It is great to be back with you. If you are a new listener to the podcast, welcome especially. Do make sure you subscribe to or follow the show, depending on which podcast app you use, to receive updates whenever we release new episodes. We put out episodes on a weekly basis on Mondays in Australia. That is Sunday afternoons

for the Yanks and Sunday evenings for the Brits. In 1831, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville was given a grant by the French government to investigate prisons and penitentiaries in the United States. The American project was barely 50 years old at the time, and it was altogether unclear whether such a system could long endure. Arriving in New York in May, Tocqueville embarked on a nine-month journey that became about much more than the prison system. He recorded his observations in one of the greatest works of political philosophy, Democracy in America, published in 1835. Several passages are worth quoting. The inhabitant of the United States, Tocqueville wrote, has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority,

and he appeals to it only when he cannot do without it. Unlike Frenchmen, Tocqueville continued, who instinctively turned to the state to provide for their needs, Americans relied on their own efforts. In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human world despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals.

Above all, Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans were able to form voluntary associations. Americans of all ages, conditions, and all dispositions constantly unite together. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations to which all belong, but a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, very general, and very specialized, large and small. Americans group together to hold fates, found seminaries, build inns, construct churches, distribute books, dispatch missionaries to the Antipodes. Tocqueville goes on to cite the example of the temperance movement, which was becoming increasingly popular in the United States in the 1830s. Quoting him again,

The first time I heard that 100,000 men in the United States had committed themselves publicly to give up strong drink, I thought this was more of a joke than a serious proposition. And, at first, I did not see why these overly sober citizens did not content themselves merely with drinking water in the privacy of their own homes. Tocqueville then mocks the French system. It is probably true that if these 100,000 men had lived in France, each one of them would have made individual representations to the government, asking it to keep a close eye on all the taverns throughout the realm. With American society growing increasingly fractured, individualistic, and unequal since the 1960s, many American intellectuals pine for a return to the voluntarism of Tocqueville, and the strong sense of fraternity, egalitarianism, and trust that characterized American society in the early 18th century, and indeed once again between the Gilded Age and the 1960s. Perhaps the most famous of

these intellectuals is the social scientist and author of Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam, who outlines the case for a return to precisely this vision of voluntary association in his new book, The Upswing. Putnam has a protege in Australia, a politician who has become, in his own right, the most articulate voice for the need to strengthen social capital down under. Andrew Lee is, in my opinion, the leading intellectual in the Federal Labor Party. And to translate that for the Americans in the audience, this means that Andrew is a very smart Democratic congressman. Andrew had a life before politics. Before entering Parliament in 2010, he was a corporate lawyer and an associate for then High Court Justice Michael Kirby. Andrew then went to Harvard University, where he received an

MPA and a PhD in public policy from the Kennedy School. He was then an economics professor at the Australian National University. Andrew is currently Labor's Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury and Charities, and he represents the seat of FENNA, which is located in Northside Canberra. Andrew and I caught up in his electorate on the 16th of October. And full disclosure, I used to work for Andrew back in 2015, and I regard my time in his office as one of the formative experiences of my life. Andrew has a new book co-authored with Nick Terrell called Reconnected, which is making a case for building stronger social capital in Australia

and returning to being a we society from the doldrums of the I society in which we currently exist. Building more social capital is an imperative that can be embraced by progressives and conservatives alike. And it's for that reason that I was thrilled to have Andrew back on the show to talk about this most important of topics. Without much further ado, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Andrew Lee. Andrew Lee, welcome back to the show. Great to be with you, Joe. It's great to see you again. It's been about a year since we last caught up in person and so much has occurred in that 12 months that it's almost impossible to imagine. What has the experience of the pandemic been like for you as a politician or a politician in Canberra?

Well, my eldest son, Sebastian, has just got a t-shirt which says 2020 one star, very bad, would not recommend. And that feels to me like the experience for so many of us. I feel very fortunate to have kept my job, to be in a city which has been relatively less affected by the pandemic. But nonetheless, there's been massive job losses and people's mental health has been frayed. There's a real sense of uncertainty and fear still about what might happen. That anticipation that this would be a

three-month shutdown has been proven entirely wrong. Now I think we're looking at something like 2022, 2023 before the world returns to anything approaching normality. Was your day-to-day job affected much? We shut down the office and still we don't take many face-to-face meetings. Spent a lot of time reaching out to constituents who might be vulnerable, trying to help connect up some of the mutual aid groups. We set up a website in order to coordinate a lot of that social volunteering activity and so people who are able to volunteer could help out. And so more importantly, people who needed help knew where to find it. And there was that upsurge in solidarity. Surveys reported that people felt more fearful, more anxious, more stressed,

but also a greater sense of social solidarity. And I hope we can keep some of that going. The reason you're back on the show, well, there are many reasons. Obviously, I love speaking with you. But the pretext is you have a new book co-authored with Nick Terrell called Reconnected, and it's an important book, a book that I really enjoyed reading, as I told you before we started recording. And what I wanted to begin with was your vision for Australian society. I think it's probably fair to describe you as a centrist. That's a

very crude descriptor because I actually think your political philosophy is far more sort of nuanced and interesting than that. But the thing about centrism, I think one of the justified criticisms of it is that it sort of lacks vision. You might have heard like the old joke, the political mantra for centrism is, what do we want? Evidence-based policy. When do we want it? After peer review. And I wanted to begin by asking you to lay out your vision for Australian society. I'd love an Australia which was more a country of collectivist we than individualist me. A nation where we were more equal but also more socially connected. A country in which people had more friends, more likely to know their neighbours and more willing

to pitch in and help for community groups. I'd love to see us with workplaces where there was greater flexibility and where employers did more to elicit productivity-boosting ideas from the workforce rather than just assuming that all the managerial wisdom comes from the top down. I'd love to be in a society in which people had more choices of sports to play and had more time in which to play them, more space to engage with friends and neighbours, more space to do those things, Joe, that we always talk about in funeral eulogies. You know, funeral eulogies are not devoted to the awards and promotions that people got. They're devoted to the moments in which people talk about how they lived well. And expanding that space for good living is enormously important

and something I think we can get to. Ultimately, I think we're going to have a conversation about leisure time in Australia. It's been a generation now since the union movement pushed hard for more leisure time. And at some point, I think we may well start looking to the German model of six weeks annual leave. Certainly, the pandemic is going to leave us with a world in which more

people are teleworking. One study I saw out of the States suggests that working from home hours might go from 5% to 20%. I think having jobs that are flexible by design will be good for productivity, but also good for well-being. The intellectual edifice that the book sits on top of is the notion of social capital, which originates with Robert Putnam, who was your mentor at Harvard. You were one of his many research assistants. Can you tell me what it was like working for Putnam? Someone once described working for Putnam as being like being part of the Ford motor factory. He has an ability to use teams of research assistants that I've never seen before in academia. It's an approach which is, if I was a hard scientist, I would have likened to a

lab. But Putnam was one of the first to move to the kind of lab model for social scientists. So in particular he would get research assistants to do memos on particular topics. He'd go through a couple of iterations of them then you'd present your memo to the other research assistants and Putnam and his full-time staff. You'd get comments on them and then you'd produce a final memo. That memo would then go into a file and at some point Bob would pull it out at 1am when he began writing the relevant section of the next book or lecture and he'd draw on that memo in the associated literature. So his ability to produce high quality, deeply researched books on important topics is like nothing I've ever seen.

I went to the conference a few years ago to celebrate his career. And most of these things are a bit scrappy, you know, people giving papers here and there vaguely related to the scholar's work. Putnam's was like, we're going to begin with one session in the morning on two level games. We're going to have diplomats who talk about how this completely transformed their approach and then someone else who talked about how they created a new subfield. And now let's move on to talk about Bob's work in Italy and how that revamped people's understanding of European politics. Now let's have a section on bowling alone and how the entire field of social capital emerged. All right, now let's go on to his religion book and talk about how American grace

recast a whole lot of understanding of religion. Now on to our kids and what it means for inequality. And then Bob finished off by talking about The Upswing, which is his final book, which brings together the work on social capital and on inequality in a unified thesis of we to me to we. So he's an extraordinary scholar and amazingly productive. I don't think there's any public intellectual or scholar like him in the social sciences. What are some of the big lessons you've learned from him? The adherence to data. So he was very concerned in bowling alone, not to report anything unless he could find it in two different sources, and to go out and pull together what he described as a pastiche of evidence. We do aim to do this in the second chapter of Reconnected, which is pulling together the trends in civic life.

There's no one measure of social capital, as you know, Joe. So you want to pull together the evidence you can find on volunteering. We went out and surveyed large organisations and asked them about their membership. We managed to get a trove of new data from Roy Morgan about Australian sporting participation. We went back into the field with surveys of friends and neighbours to ask questions in 2018 that had been asked previously in 1985. So pulling together data

from a range of different sources was important, but also that willingness to write on a bigger canvas, which I was pretty bad at early in my career, and I think I'm getting a little better at as I work on. In what specific ways were you bad at writing on a bigger canvas, and what specific ways have you got better? Economics rewards focusing on a narrow question and getting your answer exactly right. Building up with the notion that the best social science is built on very strong, solid bricks, even if those bricks are very, very small. But ultimately, you'll be able to build a worthwhile edifice. Now, the problem is if everyone's focusing on their little brick, you don't necessarily have anyone thinking about what kind of a higgledy-piggledy house you're building.

And so occasionally, it's better to step back a little and think about larger structures and bigger theories and the unification of social capital and inequality I found quite attractive, and that's something that drew us in Reconnected. The other thing we try and do in Reconnected, which I haven't done as well in previous books, is to not just tell stories, but to look at what are the unifying

themes. So we have the notion of cyber connecting, using technology to build social connection rather than to destroy it. The idea of Sutton's law of social capital, that social capital is best built in disadvantaged communities because that's where the need is greatest. It's called Sutton's law of social capital after the bank robber Willie Sutton, who once said that he robbed banks because that's where the money was, and a few other theories like this, but trying to get a few golden threads running through the book. You are a great synthesizer of ideas and facts. Do you have like a system for storing all the interesting bits of information that you find before you kind of weave them together into a book? I have a very bad system, which is I store things in email. Every good time management person says don't put your to-do lists in email because when

you go into your inbox you get distracted by the incoming email. But I've never figured out a better way of doing it so that's how I manage. So what is social capital? Social capital is an ugly term for a beautiful concept. It builds off the idea of physical capital which is the notion that stuff you can stub your toe on has an inherent value, tools, bridges, roads, houses. Then Human Capital, which is the idea that knowledge has value, that education and skills may have value. That wasn't always accepted. People take it for granted these days, but there was a big debate between the two Cambridges, the one in America and the

one in the UK in the 1960s, over whether the notion of human capital really existed. And then social capital says that the ties between people have inherent value. The networks of trust and reciprocity are valuable. Economists have shown that societies with thicker networks of trust tend to be more affluent, tend to have lower levels of crime, tend to have better functioning political systems. All of that stands to reason. If I think I'm going to be ripped off by the first person I meet in the street, chances are I won't form a political movement with them,

but I'll also be more reluctant to go into business with them if I think that they're going to rip me off every chance they get. So Putnam told the story of social capital declining in the United States in his classic book, Bowling Alone, which was first published in 2000. And then you created the Australian version of Bowling Alone 10 years later with Disconnected. And now you've sort of updated a lot of the data in Reconnected, which has just been published. So what's the story of social capital in Australia? Sadly, Joe, it's been going down in recent years. We had a period in the immediate post-World War II decades in which we did generate a lot of big organisations, in which you saw a range of metrics of social capital strengthening.

But then since the 1970s approximately, we've seen a decline. Australians have half as many friends as we had in the mid-1980s. We know half as many of our neighbours as we did when the television show Neighbours first aired in 1985. Compared to the 1950s, Australians are only about a third as likely to attend church. Compared to the early 1980s, we're only about a third as likely to be members of a union. There's fewer Australian associations, about a quarter of the number of associations per person as in the 1970s, and we're less likely to be part of those associations. Volunteering is down. Donating is down.

Membership of political parties is down. More people on the Melbourne Cricket Club waiting list than in all the Australian political parties combined. Wow. And Australians are less likely to turn up to the ballot box, and conditional on turning up, less likely to cast a valid vote. There's an increased share of people who would rather scrawl obscenities across the ballot paper than participate in the democratic process, which I find pretty sad as a politician. I want to push back on the concept of social capital in three ways. Great.

Firstly, in the book you identify a lot of new innovative forms of joining, and that would seem to suggest that there are lots of new ways of joining that aren't perhaps captured in the traditional metrics that we use to measure social capital. So do you see that as like a potential contradiction and maybe a suggestion that social capital hasn't declined by as much as we might think? There's always a temptation to say, well, the stuff we're measuring is getting worse, but there's this immeasurable stuff out there that's getting better. I don't find that intellectually appealing. If I can't measure it, then I don't want to naturally assume that it's getting better.

But we do try and make sure that we're not just simply picking up results that are driven by particular organisations. So for example, you'd be worried if all we had was membership figures for the RSL and Rotary and Scouts and Guides and Lions. What we have instead is questions which ask, are you an active member of any organisation? And those figures show a decline alongside the membership-based estimates. So I don't think social capital is morphing. I think it's actually declining. Take the Friends estimate.

It's not clear to me that the halving of the number of close friendships people have is made up for by the fact that people have Facebook friends now when before they had none. So assuming that there's no measurement issue, my next critique would be that there's probably always been some level of under joining relative to the optimum and while joining has declined it's less clear to me that the magnitude of under joining or the magnitude of of joining has declined relative to the optimal level of joining. I'll put that another way. So, society has grown so much richer over the decades while social capital has been declining. And sure, you know, whereas when compulsory voting was introduced in 1924 and 19 out of 20 people

enrolled rocked up to the ballot box and that sort of continued through the 20th century, whereas now it's like 18 out of 20. But the class war isn't what it used to be. Maybe political outcomes matter slightly less than they used to at the beginning of the 20th century. We'll take another example. Since 1985, we know like far fewer of our neighbours, but we now have all these amazing sharing economy apps,

which mean that we can easily find a stranger to look after our dog when we go on holidays. Or to take another example, weekly religious attendance has plummeted, but we've now got a really strong social safety net, which means that if we hit hard times, we don't need to rely on our parish as much. So in many ways, society has become so much richer. And that suggests to me that while there are many gross benefits to joining, the net benefits are less. So the underjoining isn't actually as bad as the decline in joining would suggest. A, does that critique make sense to you?

And B, what would your response be? Yeah, so I guess to put it in economic terms, you're saying that community membership is an inferior good, something that as societies get richer, they want less of. Yeah. But it doesn't seem to me that that's consistent with what we see in Australians' surveys about the trends. So when people are asked about what's happened with groups, 74% say people just aren't interested in joining things anymore. 60% say there's fewer people available to be part of local groups.

But 84% say the decline in membership of organisations is not a positive development. So 84% of Australians disagree with the thesis that you've put forward that it's okay that associational membership has declined. People want to be part of a society of joiners. Anecdotally, I don't meet many people who say that they would like to have fewer friends. Most people feel as though they want a strong group of people around them. And particularly when it gets down to zero, it's hard to see how that can be optimal, how people can benefit from having no friends whatsoever, no one

to turn to. That seems to introduce a high level of fragility into the system and people then not having a social safety net to fall onto. We know that loneliness is a serious issue. We don't have great long-term data on it, but certainly it stands out as being an issue which is raised frequently and where surveys of loneliness are problematic. And I guess the other thing I'd say to that, Joe, is when we look at the suicide rate in Australia, we see an increase in the suicide rate over the course of the last 15 years or so. So you go back to 2005, the Australian suicide rate is about 10 deaths per 100,000 people. And it's risen to 13 deaths per 100,000

people. So that to me is a pretty clear metric that we would want to be improving, but seems to be getting worse. But I think it's, as an economist, I'm very open to the idea that there is some optimal level of joining and it probably doesn't involve you being out at a group meeting every night of the week. Third pushback, like the analogous concepts of human capital and physical capital, social capital is an input, but those things aren't ends in and of themselves and the outputs are what really matter. So what's been happening for the outputs we care about like happiness and human flourishing and creative flourishing? So we again have fairly fragmentary data on well. Justin Morfers and I tried to pull some of this together in a piece for

the Australian Economic Review about a decade ago. And to the extent that we could find trends, it looked as though Australia ranked fairly high, but the trend data was, the questions kept on changing and so it wasn't possible to really pull together strong trends. When I've glanced at it more recently, wellbeing seems to be roughly stable, but wellbeing is driven both by income as well as the strength of community and inequality and other issues. So the fact that Australians are richer now than a generation ago, you'd expect would push up wellbeing, even if a lack of community connection was pushing it back the other way. So, you know, the disconnection in Australia isn't the only thing that's going on.

So part of the... Well, the main purpose of the book, really, is to try and turn around these trends to try and reconnect Australia. And in the process of forming a view on how to do that, you and Nick, your co-author, hosted maybe over a dozen community forums, met with hundreds if not thousands of community leaders. And obviously you read widely as well in addition to those face-to-face meetings. So what are some like favourite examples of yours of how Australians are connecting with each other? There's so many good ones. And this was the best bit of the project where, sure, you've got all the social science and the data and so on. But when you go out and meet these social entrepreneurs, they're just phenomenal people. Juliet Wright, who founded GiveIt, created an organisation which helped people give in-kind donations, particularly in the face of disasters like the Queensland floods.

That allows someone to give a used laptop directly to a family who's in need. And they've now brokered 2 million donations. Bec Scott, who founded Street, a social purpose cafe in Melbourne, is really thoughtful about how she wants to create a space which is both providing jobs to people who are long-term homeless, but also creating a cafe where someone who is long-term homeless can drop in without feeling judged. And also to be a place where people can create their own social entrepreneurship projects, completely outside of what Street does,

but being auspiced or brokered by what Street does. Not even auspice, just being a place where you can create social entrepreneurship innovations. And then Nick Mazey created Befriend, an organisation in Perth which helps people find friends. Kind of strange in some sense. You need an organisation to help people find friends. But Nick did it after he got an email from a bloke saying, I've just moved here and I don't know how to make friends. And he realised that it's something that we all need

help doing. So they put on movie nights and barbecues and informal get togettogethers and just create those opportunities for people to build friendships. There's a whole host of other Juliettes and Becks and Nicks across the country, and telling their stories was a real pleasure and reconnected. So examples like BeFriend are examples of people using the internet to facilitate connection. Do you think the net effect of the digital world has been to make us more connected or less connected or about the same? I should push back a bit on that. Befriend is largely in-person. There's a bit of technology

getting going, but it's one of the less technological innovations that we talk about. But to the bigger question, I think think on net probably a disconnecting effect uh the question was always when the the internet was launched now is this a new telephone or a new television uh and i think it's it's pretty clear now that it's having an effect on society much more akin to the television than to the telephone uh it's a telephone. Looking at social media on your smartphone has been likened to having a delicious soup poured over your head. There's just a bottomless pit of new, potentially addictive technologies, and the platforms are designed by people who are attempting to hook you.

Facebook plays with the colour of the like button in order to get it just right, and so users are more inclined to use it. The notifications that pop up are working on the same principle that poker machines are designed around, variable interval reinforcement schedules, trying to give you little dopamine hits on an unexpected time frame, and so you'll stay using. And there's no way we should expect the typical 11-year-old kid plugged into these devices, built by people that understand the psychology of addiction, to be able to use them optimally. And we need to be quite thoughtful as parents in how we introduce kids to this.

Now, if you want one clue as to why that matters, look at what senior Silicon Valley people do with their kids. They're not giving unlimited access. In many cases, they're providing quite spartan access to technology to their own kids. How do you limit or monitor how your kids use social media? We're an iPad household, which means you can use screen time to lock things down. The kids are limited on what sites they're able to go to.

They have an hour a day with time taken off for bad behaviour. I would love it if I could parent entirely with positive incentives, but my kids have asymmetric utility functions like everyone else, and so they seem to respond more to avoidance of bad shocks than to receipt of good shocks. And we try and just talk through what they're using. The one thing I don't do very well, and Gwyneth and I both struggle with this,

is our own use of technology. So we have all of these rules for the kids, but then work intrudes into after hours time. And so often now that work is technologically based, whether it's taking a Zoom call or answering an email or doing text messages. So we find as though we're not great models for the kids on how to do mindful use of technology.

That's one of the things I want to get better at as a parent. Should we put this light back on? Can't be like, I'm happy with the darkness. So without being too harsh, I assume that not all community organisations are created equal from the perspective of social capital and that some might be more effective at building social capital than others.

So what are some of the factors that go into that? One of the things we noticed in effective community organisations is that often they're as professional as a really well-run business. We admire the way in which Zoos South Australia thought about their volunteers in the same way as large firms think about human resources. They created volunteer codes of conduct and they thought through what they would have to do to exit a volunteer, fire them, if you like. And they recognised that if you just say yes to everyone, Joe,

then you'll get volunteers in who aren't necessarily aligned with your mission and who may have a corrosive or a negative effect on the organisation. We're also struck by, in our religion chapter, Nick Terrell and I talk about the way in which some of the fast-growing churches are thinking about the new member experience, much in the same way as a business

would think about what it's like for a new customer to walk in the store. So these churches are thinking about what's the parking like? What does it smell like? Who's going to greet you at the door? What's the follow-up going to be like in the coming days? And that focus on attracting and retaining new members has been one of the key sources of their growth. As an atheist, how do you think about religion? It's enormously important for building social capital. The best predictor of whether or not somebody volunteers is whether someone asks them to volunteer. And churches are very good at asking people to help out in the community.

Church members are more likely to volunteer even when you take away their religious volunteering. They're more likely to donate even when you take away their religious donations. Churchgoers are, for example, more likely to give blood. And that's true not just across Christian religions, but across all religions as well. Robert Putnam in American Grace has a line where he says, attending religious services just makes you a nicer person, by which he means it brings out a better version of yourself. So the decline in religious attendance, the two-thirds dropped since the 1950s, has then had spillover effects

into other community groups. As a member of parliament, I get to spend a lot of time in local synagogues and mosques and churches, and through that see how embedded those people are in other community groups and how much more connected Australians would be if we had more people attending those religious services or even some of the atheist movements such as the Sunday Assembly who get together on Sundays to sing songs because it brings a sense of togetherness and to talk about philosophy because it's important to have a conversation about how to live well. I wonder why religion specifically is so good at fostering pro-social behavior. I often drift back to this neat quote by the anthropologist Roy Rapoport, which is,

I'll paraphrase it, but it's something like, sanctity dresses arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity. Do you think that's the best explanation? I haven't thought through hard enough why these organisations are effective, but by gosh, they are. They build a sense of community for themselves and a sense that a life of helping others is a life well lived. I go down to the local church that's 800 metres from my house and they have a lodge there for people with intellectual disabilities and members of the church are

overseeing that residential facility. And then they have a food bank which is open on Saturday afternoons for people who need free or low-cost food. They operate a toy library and so people can drop in on the weekend and get toys at no cost. And so many of these services are provided to people entirely outside the church community. So they're just constantly engaged in the community and reaching out in a whole lot of ways. We talk about some of the entrepreneurs, particularly in Melbourne, some of the Muslim women's conversation groups and even some of the initiatives that Bayside Church is pursuing in Melbourne

where their founders were actively involved in helping out the two Australians who were sentenced to death in Indonesia and providing spiritual advice, but also campaigning against the use of the death penalty there. Do you think the new atheism movement has gone astray in its critique of religion? It can be too hard line, yes. I think the theological focus can miss the value that religion brings to community. And as somebody who wouldn't exist without religion,

I'm well aware of the value that religion brings. My great-grandfather on my mum's side was a minister. My grandfather on my dad's side was a minister. My parents met when my dad was giving a sermon for his father and my mum was in the congregation and they met up afterwards. He asked her if she needed to lift home. She lived almost within sight of the church and she said, oh yes, a lift home in your car would be lovely. And so were it not for Ivanhoe Methodist Church, I wouldn't be chatting to you today.

And I'm aware of the social glue that religion has provided, particularly the community, instant community that it provides often to new migrants. So it's been a very important force in Australian social life and I hope will continue to be in the future. So moving from like taking off your community building hat for a moment

and putting on your policymaker hat, what are some systems level or like design level things that we could do to make social capital the building of social capital more likely in australia um one one example of of what i'm talking about is i think one of the big insights to come out of putnam's work is that building in redundancy of contact is really important for boosting social capital. So redundancy of contact means like lots of opportunities for people to cross paths, to talk, to interact, to connect, rather than just like one-off kind of meetings or pitches. So that's one example, But are there any other things that

could be done at the level of policymaking? There's huge areas of design, I think, that matters here. I'm probably influenced by being married to a landscape architect. But when I look at city design, having more bike paths makes a vast difference. Here in Canberra, we have these local neighbourhood shopping centres, which have largely still worked, where you'll have a small supermarket, cafe, sometimes a chemist or a news agent. And they're places where neighbours can easily meet one another. And they mean that you don't have to burn a litre of petrol to buy a litre of milk. There's also design of buildings. So the creation of nice staircases,

I think, is critical. Don't put the lifts front and centre of the building. Have a funky staircase that people enjoy going up and down so they get fit but also run into those nearby. Make public transport clean and attractive. We know people who are using public transport are more likely to chat with others. Of course it's got environmental benefits but it's also got great social benefits as well. And put footpaths in place because where you've got footpaths, people are more likely to be out and about, again, getting fit, but also running into their neighbours there. So it's very much on the design side that I'd be thinking about building social capital, certainly in terms of meeting friends and neighbours.

Peter Thiel has a famous question, which is, what valuable company is No One currently building? And I want to, this is a tricky one, but I want to ask you like the non-profit version of that question. So what impactful community organisation is No one building in Australia? There's a lot to be done in terms of engaging underserved communities with politics. So we're quite influenced and reconnected by the work of the Tufts political scientist Etan Hirsch, who critiques what he calls hobbyist politics. People approaching politics as though it's like barracking for a sports team or playing a hobby, without any intention of making a difference, but just cheering or jeering from the sidelines. But the thing is, as you well know with politics, Joe, everyone's on the field. Everyone's a political actor. And so we need to encourage environments in which people are able to come together and persuade those of different

and differing views to adopt a different perspective. This is one of the hallmarks of the marriage equality movement, which in the space of just over a decade manages to shift public opinion on marriage equality to an extent that I've never seen on a social issue before. It's characteristic of the work of Liz Dawson here in Canberra, who in less than a decade was able to build a movement to create a building called Common Ground, which is just less than a kilometre from where we're having this conversation today

and provides long-term stable accommodation for the homeless. And it's also a characteristic of deliberative democracy, which has been pioneered by a range of state and local governments in Australia and provides a chance for people to have a conversation about difficult issues, not just to be opinion polled, but to change, to engage with different minded people, to talk with experts, and ultimately to form a considered view. How you do deliberative democracy

with the most vulnerable Australians, I think is critical. And so this is, you know, I mentioned before Sutton's law of social capital. If you want to build social capital, go where the need is greatest. Disadvantaged Australians are more disconnected from politics than advantaged Australians. We need to turn that around and I'd love to see more initiatives aimed at doing that. Awesome. So that's a hint for eager community builders in the audience. Absolutely. Come and talk to me. I'd love to have the conversation. Great. Is there a final message that you'd like to leave people with? Engaging with community is more fun than you think. You put people in brain scanners and ask

them to think about giving money. The part of the brain that lights up is the same part of the brain that lights up if you ask them to think about food or sex. There is such a thing as the helper's high, the pleasure that people get from helping others. It's not just anecdotal. I'm a random-ister, as you know, Joe, and we have these terrific randomised trials where one group of people are given an amount of money at the start of the day and asked to spend it on themselves. Another group of people are given the same amount of money but asked to spend it on others. At the end of the day, we measure their happiness and the second group is way happier than the first group. The first group's bought some trinket that jumped out at them. The second group has assisted with a cause that matters to them. So altruism is not just an

ethically better way of living but is also a way of living more happily. Let's face it, on your deathbed are you really going to be wishing that you had spent another hour scrolling through social media or wishing that you'd spent another hour chatting with friends and family? So a more connected Australia will not only be more productive, more egalitarian, but also just a happier place to live. Andrew Lee, thank you for joining me. Great pleasure, Joe. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. For links and notes covering everything Andrew and I discussed,

you will find those on my website, josephnoelwalker.com. That's my full name, J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-E-L-W-A-L-K-E-R.com. Finally, our 2020 listener survey is open for its final week. It's a great way for me to receive feedback and to learn from you what you like what you dislike about the show so that we can always be improving based on the hundreds of listeners who've already completed the survey it seems to take about five and a half minutes to complete if you would like to leave your feedback i would be incredibly grateful you can find the survey, again, on my website, www.josephnoelwalker.com. The audio engineer for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield. Our very thirsty video editor is Alf Eddy.

I'm Joe Walker. Until next week, thank you for listening. Ciao.