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August 29, 2023

Skate Parks: Appreciating Another Third Place

My young daughter was extremely excited when I pulled up to the large, two-level skate park in Riverhead, New York. I have been taking her brother there for many years and, despite her young age and small size, she wanted to take her scooter to the park. Other parents already at the park warned me…

July 24, 2023

The Power of the Humble Pub

My AEI colleague, Charles Murray, recently shared a figure showing that beer drinking in the United Kingdom shifted from the pub to the home, noting that the graph was a “Great brilliant indirect indicator. Of what, precisely, has yet to be determined.” The data from the British Beer and Pub Association revealed that 2014 beer sales in UK shops…

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…

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….

April 18, 2023

Introduction to The Social Breakdown

“Social capital” is an esoteric and often loosely defined concept, yet it captures a deep-seated intuition and shared sensibility among virtually all Americans: Our relationships have value, and what we do together matters. Social capital derives from our participation in—and belonging to—society’s “middle layers.” These middle layers are the myriad institutions, associations, and communities between…