January 7, 2025
Tax Policy Should Prioritize Shoring Up the Family
During the Biden years, tax policy related to the family revolved around the child tax…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
November 8, 2023
Measuring the Geography of Social Networks
Social interactions shape social and economic activity across a range of domains, from migration and…
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…
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,…
July 17, 2023
What the Rise in Dog Attacks Signals About the State of America’s Social Capital
If you have ever had the unfortunate experience of being attacked or bitten by a…
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,…
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…
April 28, 2023
Social Capital: What Is It?
Words and phrases, as they say, can do a lot of work. Sometimes, evocative terms…