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September 25, 2024
Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life
Key Points College graduates report having greater access to community spaces than do Americans with a high school degree or less. More than one in five Americans have no access…
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…
March 12, 2024
Family Dinners Offer a Silver Lining in a Bleak Social Capital Landscape
…the 8-point drop Cox finds between the two generations. It’s possible that, since the Millennials are looking further back in time than the Gen Zers in Cox’s 2021 survey, they…
September 27, 2023
The Good and Bad News About Boys and Men in Utah
Utah is doing exceptionally well on most metrics. The state is booming population-wise, with an almost 7 percent increase in population since 2018. Unemployment remains below the national average and the Beehive State’s economy…
September 17, 2023
Tracking ‘two-parent privilege’ in Utah
…percentage of married two-parent families is associated with a larger percentage of students graduating from high school in states across the union, according to research by Brad Wilcox at the University of Virginia,…
August 10, 2023
The Real Reason People Leave Religion
More than a decade ago, the Pew Research Center released a path-breaking study on people without religion: “Nones” on the Rise. At the time, I was in graduate school studying political science…
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…
June 7, 2023
The Price We’ll Pay for Our AI Future: More Loneliness
Americans are trapped in a loneliness epidemic. Across the country, people are having fewer social interactions, spending more time alone, and reporting fewer close friends. These trends aren’t just a symptom…
May 4, 2023
The Social Breakdown: The Poverty of Family, Community, and Religious Life in America
On May 4, AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility (COSM) hosted the launch of “The Social Breakdown,” a new research series dedicated to the study of social capital. https://www.youtube.com/embed/SWmPhcul8NE…
May 3, 2023
The Mainline Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Social Capitalism
…and areas with many mainliners the best. Sociologists have observed these trends in prior work, including our colleague, W. Bradford Wilcox. Wilcox argues that mainline adherents tend to “talk left…