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John Leo Selected Responses: Sent by Steve Sailer on 07-01-2007: The actual chronology is a little complicated. Putnam talked up his findings in 2001, when I wrote about them for VDARE.com, but then he "hunkered down" and maintained virtual radio silence about them until the fall of 2006, when he gave his indiscreet interview to John Lloyd of the Financial Times. He immediately regretted it and has been on the warpath ever since to get people to ignore his admission to Lloyd that he was covering up until he could come up with solutions (which, by the way, are vapid). Sent by Bob Putnam on 06-27-2007: John Leo's recent article about my work on diversity claims that I intentionally delayed publishing our findings. That claim is demonstrably false.
In fact, within weeks of getting the original survey results in early 2001 (six years ago) I issued a national press release describing our preliminary findings in detail. (You can see that press release here; see especially the long section entitled "the opportunity and challenge of diversity.") That press release was covered at the time in many publications, including the LA Times, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and others, often quoting me specifically about the diversity-distrust connection. The SF Chronicle of March 1, 2001, for example, quoted me as follows: “‘Places that are ethnically diverse and that have large numbers of recent immigrants are places that have greater challenges in building connections because people feel more isolated there,’ Putnam said. ‘And that's not just along racial lines, [but] generalized social isolation.’” And a few months later in 2001 (just as soon as the data had been cleaned) we made the full, raw data-set publicly available to anyone through the Roper Center data archive. Over the last six years, those data have become one of the most widely-used data-sets in the social sciences, downloaded and analyzed by hundreds of other researchers. Finally, contrary to Leo's claim, we have not “published only an initial summary” of our findings, but an elaborate 38-page journal article, packed with charts, statistics and methodological details, and as I have said, the raw original data have been publicly available for six years, an invitation to early scrutiny that is almost unprecedented in social science. In short, this story is the exact opposite of suppressing results. Leo may or may not like our results, but it is both false and irresponsible for him to claim that we have suppressed them or delayed making them public. John Leo responds: I did not say that Professor Putnam deliberately delayed publishing his findings. He said that (Financial Times, October 8, 2006). His press release of March 1, 2001 did not contain any information about the study as blunt or dramatic as his new article in Scandinavian Political Studies. Neither did any of the newspapers he cites as reporting on the 2001 announcement. Headlines included “Survey says Atlantans Have Low Trust Level” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), “Love Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A.” (Los Angeles Times), and “Involvement Knits a Community” Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Professor Putnam did mention the diversity-distrust issue in the San Francisco Chronicle, but only to say that large-scale immigration presents challenges in building connections. No doubt. But the newsworthy and (I would say) devastating short- to mid-term impact of immigration and diversity on communities of all kinds was not reported. Why not? I erred in saying that Professor Putnam's speech, published as an article in SPS, represented preliminary findings. I should have said it was a summary or commentary on what he found, not the study itself.
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