gonna publish a paper arguing that what's wrong with america is all the sports and television and im like HOLINESS-WESLEYANISM LEVELS ARE OVER 9,000!!!

did you know american men spend more time playing sports AND more time watching tv than men in legit any other country for which we have comparable time use data, and it's not even close?

women are pretty internationally normal on sports but also elevated on TV

also did you know that the US is actually one of the *only* countries to have a major long-run decline in generalized social trust?

totally a coincidence

in a twist im sure youll find shocking, membership in sports clubs is associated with fewer follow-on indicators of social capital (trust, membership in other orgs, reporting help received, etc) than membership in ~~any other kind of organization

guess what the problem with bowling alone isn't that you're alone it's that you're bowling and it's sunday and you should be at church

anyways don't mind me just standing on the side of all of Christianity before the 1870s on the "are sports good or bad" question

one of the very bad moral compromises christianity made with modernity was sports

I mean heck individuals killed in jousting tournaments in Medieval Europe ***were denied Christian burial*** because of how strongly the church opposed the activity!

so, fun fact

there are AFAIK actually zero studies of the impact on whole-school outcomes of adding/removing sports teams. All studies focus on athletes *themselves* and find slightly positive effects. https://twitter.com/trellisjumper/status/1294308351376064512

But that's an irrelevant factor, since the question isn't "Is having a basketball team good for basketball players?" but "Is having a basketball team good on net for the entire community?"

What we need is a quasi-random intervention adding/removing some sports teams

well I played in one for a few years (I'm terrible for the record, not my game) so they're a lot of fun..... and I think sporting activities occurring as subordinate functions of other institutions which have some other value may be useful https://twitter.com/ksbugeater/status/1294309196347912194

But I think that participation should be weighed carefully. And in general churches should make a requirement that all players attend church and bible study in any week in which they're gonna play.

lol can you imagine a church league where they actually required the players to go to church

the thing to understand is the proper baseline for "are sports good?" is not "do sports have some benefit?" (yes!) but rather "do sports have more benefit than the counterfactual use of the time and money dedicated to them?"

Sports are DRAMATICALLY more popular now than a few decades ago! Americans are as or more sports-obsessed than ever! https://twitter.com/DanielRogoff/status/1294310665637826560

I didn't say sports are anti-social. I said they're bad. They create a worthless sociality, and furthermore create the weakest form of social capital imaginable, even while displacing more valuable forms. This is what the extant empirical research suggests https://twitter.com/ianmichaelbrown/status/1294311186465423360

But sure I think going and playing soccer is probably better than literally sitting at home and staring at the wall, but that's not actually the alternative.

Also, similar-method academic studies have found online games create similar trust effects as team sports. (!!!)

My favorite American-sports-history moment is when Alexis de Toqueville traveled America and talked all about our great life together and never once mentioned sports because he rarely saw any team sports happening....

EXCEPT....

For when he says he saw Kentuckians playing lots of sports because their dependence on slave labor had made them leisurely, violent, and wanton, so they wasted their days in pointless sports, whereas industrious Ohioans started farms and businesses.

He mentions "games" a few times. As in "financing games and spectacles will bankrupt the state" and "lawless game-players" and "children play such games"

Which is to say the definitive early work on social capital in America is FIRMLY anti-sport

Me and Alexis

also it's funny to me that all the @ s on this thread are about sports but empirically TV is WAY more popular but everyone's just like, "yes, of course, we know TV is bad"