Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:
Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.
Then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamental, they stopped visiting one another. From 1975 to 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. Although cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared with the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys.
In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update.
So what’s the state of hosting in the 21st century? To get an apples-to-apples answer to that question, the polling group Data for Progress replicated the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys cited by Putnam. Unfortunately, the upshot is about as brutal as you’d imagine.
In the past 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. They are less likely to play cards; attend a sporting event; go to the bar; volunteer; work on a community project.
When it comes to hosting people at home, the declines are particularly stark. Since 1995, the share of Americans who say they’ve hosted guests or attended a dinner party has declined by about 20 percent, from 88 to 67 percent—and that’s in addition to the declines that Putnam noted a quarter century ago.
Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half century.
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