May 6, 2024
How States and Communities Can Strengthen Marriages
Family is the greatest source of social capital, providing the setting in which people grow, develop, and anchor their lives. Stable and healthy marriages are at the foundation of strong families. Marriage is associated with myriad positive outcomes, including greater happiness and satisfaction with life, less loneliness, and better health.[1] Children raised in intact families…
March 12, 2024
Family Dinners Offer a Silver Lining in a Bleak Social Capital Landscape
Across a variety of indicators, social capital in America is deteriorating. But one trend appears to be cutting across conventional wisdom—gathering the family around the dinner table. Dinners offer an especially valuable chance for family members to come together and share the day’s highs and lows; discuss personal issues, current events, and big questions of…
February 5, 2024
Why We All Rely On the Organized Kindness of Strangers
Our church caught fire [i] a few weeks ago. The pastor and a few other leaders had just gotten out of a Monday night meeting when they found the sanctuary was filled with smoke and the entrance to the church was covered in flames. Fortunately, firefighters[ii] responded to the immediate 911 calls and saved the…
November 13, 2023
Family’s Place in America’s Social Fabric
The family is arguably the most basic building block of community life.[i] But even as Americans continue to say their own families are centrally important in their lives[ii], family life in the United States more broadly has changed dramatically in recent decades. At the same time, adults are finding satisfaction in their relationships with friends…
November 8, 2023
Measuring the Geography of Social Networks
Social interactions shape social and economic activity across a range of domains, from migration and trade flows to job search and investment behaviors. However, quantifying the effects of social interactions has traditionally been complicated by the absence of large-scale representative data on social networks. Over the past years, we have worked with deidentified data on…
November 1, 2023
The Ultimate Social Capital: A Story to Save the Union
The American Republic is on the brink; a revived civic national story can help us all come together to pull ourselves back from the abyss That the bonds holding the United States have been weakening has been obvious for more than a decade now, a phenomenon this research series has been probing in regards to…
August 2, 2023
Measuring Social Capital: Can We Tell If Some Places Are Richer in Social Capital Than Others?
The concept of social capital has been inconsistently defined and described.[1]That should not be surprising, given that social capital is intangible and not easily measured. (The same is true of human capital, though researchers have defaulted to measures of educational attainment and test scores, only recently expanding the set of indicators to encompass noncognitive skills.)…
July 12, 2023
Local News and Social Capital
Joseph Schumpeter famously observed that capitalism unleashed “creative destruction.”[i] If that is so for American journalism, just such a wave has, without doubt, been destroying local newspapers. What’s not yet clear is whether such destruction will be complemented by creation. The result matters not just as it affects a select group of business enterprises. Arguably, local…
May 3, 2023
The Mainline Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Social Capitalism
When Alexis de Tocqueville penned his seminal Democracy in America lauding the strength of American communities, institutions, and associations, he noted the unique status of religion. Religion, he wrote, “must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the…
April 28, 2023
Social Capital: What Is It?
Words and phrases, as they say, can do a lot of work. Sometimes, evocative terms can be useful even if they paper over imprecise concepts or obscure definitional disagreement. But vagueness often overwhelms the utility of an idea, as, for instance, with the term “systemic racism.” Imprecision can be a feature but also a bug….