ABSTRACT
Inside and outside our families, we all have interlocking and overlapping social networks, based on mutual activities, types or locations of jobs, schools or other past experiences, children’s (or parents’) friends, churches, clubs, neighbourhoods, and so on. Dense and overlapping networks are associated with healthy civil societies. Conversely, the absence of network ties may be a sign of something societally amiss, as Robert Putnam noted in his well-known book Bowling Alone (Putnam, 2000). Putnam, who has shown that Italian states whose people have strong associative ties (churches, social clubs and other organizations) also exhibit high economic performance (Putnam, 1993), discusses in Bowling Alone the decline of such associative ties in the US. Particularly important are ties that overlap; for instance, I could interact with someone by being in the same bridge club and also shop in the store that she owns, while a fellow customer might have a child who is friends at school with her child, and so on.
