The Social Breakdown

Is life worse today than it was 50 years ago? A solid majority—58 percent—of Americans thought so when asked by the Pew Research Center in early 2023.¹ Populists today interpret findings along these lines primarily in economic terms. They argue that economic policy over the past 50 years has produced slow and uneven growth, not only leaving many Americans worse off materially but also leading to the deterioration of the social fabric.

American Compass’s Oren Cass, for example, suggested in his 2018 book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America, that “without the stable foundation of a labor market that allowed for self-sufficiency, social structures buckled” and “social capital drained away.” He spoke for many when he argued that fewer “well-paying jobs for less-skilled workers” and diminished availability of “productive work” “undermine stable families, decimate entire communities, foster government dependence, and perhaps contribute to skyrocketing substance abuse and suicide rates.”²

Perception, of course, is not necessarily reality. When asked how they view their own material circumstances, Americans express considerable satisfaction, while their impression of how others are doing paints an inaccurately negative picture. There’s little objective evidence of diminished economic well-being over the long run.

In contrast, data on the strength of relationships and social connection reinforce the view that American life is worse—that the social fabric has frayed, trust has depleted, and community life has withered. Society’s middle layers—families, communities, and voluntary associations—that sit between individuals and the impersonal mega-institutions of the nation and economy are weaker today than in the past.

The erosion of social capital is one of Americans’ greatest national challenges. But economic populism is an unhelpful lens for examining the impoverishment of associational life. It’s not just that the American labor market today delivers greater economic benefits to workers—including less-skilled workers—than ever before. As we will see, social capital declines are hardly confined to less-skilled workers and their families and communities.

The erosion of social capital has occurred not only while the nation has grown more affluent but also because of the choices that an increasingly affluent people have made. Those choices have brought higher living standards but increased social isolation (Figure 1).

If ordinary Americans—rather than economic elites or policymakers—are the primary villains of the social breakdown story, what, if anything, can the federal government do to reverse these social trends? We turn to this question after describing the social breakdown’s extent. First, however, let’s dispense with the idea that Americans are worse off materially than they were 50 years ago.

Figure 1. Material Gains, Social Impoverishment, and Declining Happiness, 1972–2018

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Total Private (AHETPI), September 5, 2025, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1LSXO; and authors’ analysis of University of California, Berkeley, Survey Documentation and Analysis, Study: GSS 1972–2024 Cumulative Datafile—Release 1, https://sda.berkeley.edu/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=gss24rel1.
Note: Hourly earnings estimates are adjusted for inflation to 2024 dollars using the personal consumption expenditures price index.

Our Affluent Economy

The American economy is in much better shape than populists believe. Start with perceptions. The year Cass’s book was published, the share of Americans who rated their financial situation as excellent or good was 56 percent—a peak in Gallup’s data since the start of the century.³ By April 2021, that share increased to 57 percent, which was higher than the 43 other times since mid-2001 when Gallup has fielded this question.⁴ We have similar data points from 1970, 1975, and 1994, and none of them reach this level of satisfaction.⁵ The share of Americans rating their economic situation as poor in 2021 was just 9 percent.

True, within a year of the 2021 high, thanks to inflation, the share of Americans who considered their financial situation excellent or good fell to around 45 percent, where it remained early in 2025. But there is no long-term evidence suggesting a downward trend. Fewer people surveyed by Gallup think “economic conditions in this country” are excellent or good than believe their own financial situation is that strong (about half as many).⁶ This impression of how other Americans are doing is clearly too negative given what Americans say about their own situation.⁷ But this indicator, which in the Gallup data goes back to the early 1990s, rises and falls cyclically.⁸ There’s no evidence that the Americans of 30 or 50 years ago thought the economy was better than Americans do today.

Objectively, contrary to the claims of Cass and other populists, the best indicators show that the American labor market delivers greater economic benefits to workers—including less-skilled workers— today than ever before. The most careful research shows that median inflation-adjusted hourly pay is higher today than ever—for men and women.⁹ Hourly pay is also at all-time highs for workers earning below-median pay, including men.¹⁰

If we instead consider annual compensation, the conclusion remains: American men and women are doing better than ever before, whether we examine the typical worker or workers lower down the socioeconomic ladder.¹¹ Median wealth is at an all-time high, and poverty is at all-time lows.¹² The decline in work among men began before union membership peaked, before married women’s labor force participation rates accelerated, before trade deficits opened, and well before the “China shock” occurred. It appears to reflect men’s greater freedom to retire, take care of home and family, attend school, or avoid working while in pain or injured and the (sometimes perverse) effects of the modern welfare state. It has little to do with the economy’s long-term health.¹³

Declining Social Capital

Unfortunately, when we turn to the state of social life in America, the picture darkens considerably.

“Social capital” is an inconsistently and imprecisely used term. However, our definition is straightforward. Something qualifies as “capital” if it is an asset that provides value to its holder and “social” if it involves our relationships. Therefore, “social capital” signifies valuable relationships to people and to the institutions they create.

Individuals vary in how much social capital they have—that is, they have more or fewer relationships and different kinds of relationships, which are more or less valuable for achieving various goals. Communities, too, have more or less social capital, depending on the people who compose them, the social networks that connect them, and the institutions they have established.

We cannot measure social capital directly, but we can observe what people do together and various indicators that suggest the presence or absence of valuable social capital. Analysts have created indexes to measure the social capital levels of places (such as states and counties) and individuals. Different place-based indexes tend to be strongly correlated with each other.¹⁴ Moreover, in research with our colleague Kevin Corinth, we found that aggregating individual social capital index scores up to the state level produces estimates strongly correlated with state summary indexes of social capital.¹⁵ Unfortunately, no one has been able to construct an index of social capital to track it over an extended time, due to a lack of data. In lieu of such an index, we turn to trends in various social capital indicators.

Our examination builds on past research—particularly that of Robert Putnam, Charles Murray, and the Social Capital Project, which operated in the US Congress Joint Economic Committee under Senator Mike Lee’s chairmanship and vice chairmanship. Putnam’s analyses generally ran from the 1970s to the 1990s. His Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) famously documented the decline of social and civic institutions, showing empirically for the first time that Americans had grown much less likely to volunteer, belong to religious institutions, or otherwise participate in community life.¹⁶ In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012), Murray focused on long-term trends in indicators of social capital and what might be considered deviance from prosocial norms among working- and upper-middle-class Americans.¹⁷ The Social Capital Project analyzed overall trends in a 2017 report, What We Do Together: The State of Associational Life in America, and the project’s subsequent studies considered various trends in family and community life, sometimes broken out by education and race.¹⁸

Family Decline

At the root of social capital’s decline is the center of all social life: the family, which is often where one’s closest social connections reside. Stable and loving familial relationships not only are important for socialization and development but also lay the foundation for active participation in social and community life. The family serves as a social, emotional, and financial safety net when people fall on hard times. A vast body of research documents the social, emotional, and economic benefits of living in a stable, two-parent family—benefits realized by children and parents alike.¹⁹

Figure 2. Share of Women Age 35–44 Who Are Married, 1880–2024

Source: IPUMS, Study: United States 1850–2023, https://sda.usa.ipums.org/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=all_usa_samples; and IPUMS, Study: March CPS (ASEC), 1962–Present, https://sda.cps.ipums.org/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=all_march_samples.
Note: Estimates for 1880–1960 are from decennial censuses, while those for 1962–2024 are from the Current Population Survey. Estimates count women as married when a spouse is temporarily not living in their household but do not count women in separated couples. Adults in group quarters are excluded from the census estimates.

In various respects, family life in America has sharply declined over the past several decades, particularly—but not exclusively—among society’s most disadvantaged members. One way to measure the strength of American families is simply to measure the share of women around age 40 who are married. Few relationships can match the importance of a strong marital bond with a loving partner. Over the long run, many fewer adults have come to enjoy such a relationship. During the late 19th century, around 80 percent of women age 35–44 were married (Figure 2). That figure rose to about 85 percent during the early to mid-1960s. By 2024, however, it was down to 63 percent.

Consider this trend in terms of social capital generally. This data series is one of the longest-running indicators of social capital. The Joint Economic Committee developed a social capital score for each of the 50 states, constructed from 25 individual measures of social capital.²¹ Across states, the share of women who were married was one of the measures most strongly correlated with a state’s overall score.²²

This decline in social capital has not occurred evenly across social and economic classes. According to another Joint Economic Committee analysis, the drop in marriage from 1962 to 2019 among women age 15–44 was 46 points for the least educated 20 percent of women, 37 points for women in the middle 60 percent of the education distribution, and 17 points for women in the top 20 percent. It was 41 points for black women and 26 points for non-Hispanic white women.²³

Figure 3. Share of Births to Married Women, 1917–2023

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Data Table for Figure 1. Number, Percentage, and Rate of Births to Unmarried Women: United States, 1940–2013,” August 2014, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db162_table.pdf; Brady E. Hamil-ton et al., Births: Final Data for 2014, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, December 23, 2015, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_12.pdf; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Births: Final Data for 2015; Supplemental Tables, January 5, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/nvsr66_01_tables.pdf; Joyce A. Martin et al., Births: Final Data for 2016,
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, January 31, 2018, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr67/nvsr67_01.pdf; Joyce A. Martin et al., Births: Final Data for 2017, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 7, 2018, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr67/nvsr67_08-508.pdf; Joyce A. Martin et al., Births: Final Data for 2018, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 27, 2019, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_13-508.pdf; Joyce A. Martin et al., Births: Final Data for 2019, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 23, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-02-508.pdf; Michelle J. K. Osterman et al., Births: Final Data for 2020, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, February 7, 2022, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-17.pdf; Michelle J. K. Osterman et al., Births: Final Data for 2021, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, January 31, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr72/nvsr72-01.pdf; Michelle J. K. Osterman etal., Births: Final Data for 2022, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, April 4, 2024, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr73/nvsr73-02.pdf; Michelle J. K. Osterman et al., Births: Final Data for 2023, March 18, 2025, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and US Census Bureau, Vital Statistics of the United States, 1939, pt. 1, Natality and Mortality Data for the United States [. . .], 1941, 8, table Q, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/VSUS_1939_1.pdf.

These trends primarily reflect a decline in the likelihood of ever marrying, an increase in age at first marriage, an increase in the likelihood of divorce, and a reduction in the shotgun marriage rate.²⁴ The latter is the likelihood that an expecting, but unmarried, couple will marry before their child’s birth. The combination of more unmarried women and fewer emergency marriages in the event of pregnancy accounts for most of the rising likelihood that a birth will be outside marriage. Shotgun marriage is down among all educational and racial groups, especially for women under age 30.²⁵

The fall in the share of births within marriage is another social capital indicator for which we have data from over 100 years ago. In 1917, 98 percent of births were to married women (Figure 3). By 1940, 96 percent of births still occurred within marriage, which was also true in 1950. The figure was 95 percent in 1960, but it fell steadily to 59 percent by 2009 and has remained about the same since then.

The decline in marital childbirth varied with education and race but occurred across all groups. From 1970 to 2018, the share of births to married mothers fell by 29 percentage points. For women in the bottom fifth of the education distribution who gave birth, the drop over this period was 47 points, while it was 41 points for women in the middle three-fifths of the distribution and just 6 points for those in the top fifth.²⁶ But in relative terms, the decline was large for each group; the likelihood that a birth occurred to an unmarried woman more than tripled for the least educated women and more than doubled for the most educated.

Similarly, from 1950 to 2018, the share of births to married mothers fell by 51 points among black women and 26 points among non-Hispanic white women—a larger absolute decline for the former but a proportionally larger increase in nonmarital births for the latter.²⁷

The Friendship Decline

Just as family ties have weakened, so, too, have social connections outside families. Americans spend less time with friends, have fewer friends, and spend far more time alone.

First, and perhaps most concerning, is the growing share of Americans reporting that they have no close friends. According to recent research from our colleagues in the Survey Center on American Life, just 3 percent of Americans in 1990 reported having no close friends. By 2021, however, that figure had risen to 12 percent.²⁸ The increase was greater among those with no more than a high school education, but it occurred among college graduates too.²⁹ From 1990 to 2021, the share of Americans who reported having a best friend fell from 75 percent to 59 percent.³⁰

Americans also spend less time socializing with friends than in the past. The Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey allows us to track time spent with friends over the past two decades (Figure 4). We show separate trends by educational group. Since educational attainment rises over time, we divide adults roughly into thirds each year rather than using fixed categories that depend on years of schooling or degree completed.³¹

Americans on every rung of the socioeconomic ladder are spending less time with friends. In 2003, individuals in the bottom third of the education distribution spent, on average, 36 minutes per day with friends, while those in the top third spent an average of 44 minutes. Those figures rose a bit by 2014—38 minutes and 48–49 minutes, respectively. By 2024, however, average time with friends declined to 17 minutes per day for the least educated third and to 24 minutes for the most educated third. In other words, time with friends declined by 55 percent in 10 years for the least educated third of Americans and by 51 percent for the most educated.

Historical data reinforce this conclusion from the time-use data: Unlike the deterioration in intact families, the drop in socializing with friends seems to date to the early 2010s. The General Social Survey—administered by NORC at the University of Chicago and one of the longest-running surveys of Americans’ social attitudes and behaviors—asks respondents how often they spend a social evening with friends. In 1974, when the question was first asked, 24 percent of Americans reported spending an evening with friends at least several times per week (Figure 5). The same share reported doing so in 2012. But by 2018, the figure had fallen to 18–19 percent.³²

Community Decline

That Americans’ time with friends has been decreasing does not necessarily indicate they have abandoned social activities altogether. The share of Americans spending a social evening with relatives more than once a week held steady at 39 percent in 1974 and 2018.³³ Perhaps Americans are spending less time with friends but more time with neighbors or coworkers—or participating in civic life. Unfortunately, however, a wide array of indicators tell a story of decline in these dimensions of social capital too.

For instance, the share of Americans who spent a social evening with a neighbor at least once a month fell steadily over recent decades—from 61 percent in 1974 to 46–47 percent in 2018.³⁴ Absent trend data on familiarity with neighbors, we can compare the share of adults of different ages saying in 2018 that they didn’t know any of their neighbors. That share was 4 percent of Americans 65 and older and 7 percent of those age 50–64, compared with 15 percent of those age 30–49 and 23 percent of those age 18–29. The observation that familiarity with neighbors declines with age suggests a secular decline over recent decades. Similarly, of those Americans who knew at least some of their neighbors, the share who said they would trust them with house keys was 80 percent of the elderly and 70 percent of those age 50–64, in contrast to 63 percent of those age 30–49 and 50 percent of those age 18–29.³⁵

Figure 4. Average Minutes per Day Americans Age 25–54 Spent with Friends, by Education, 2003–24

Source: Data from Sarah M. Flood et al., American Time Use Survey Data Extract Builder, version 3.3, IPUMS, 2025, https://doi.org/10.18128/D060.V3.3.

Talking with and doing favors for neighbors declined between 2008 and 2023, and a Social Capital Project analysis found the decline was similar across racial and educational groups. The study cited a 1948 Gallup survey suggesting that, in the 60 years before 2008, neighborliness had declined substantially.³⁶

The limited data on socializing with coworkers also suggest less time together. The Social Capital Project reported that between the mid-1970s and 2012, time spent with coworkers outside the workplace fell from 2.5 hours per week to under one hour.³⁷ Meanwhile, the decades-long drop in labor force participation has isolated many working-age men from coworkers and social life generally.³⁸ That trend, too, has been more dramatic for men of lower socioeconomic status than for other men, but it has occurred even among college graduates.

Furthermore, participation in civic life has declined. According to Social Capital Project analyses, the share of adults participating in at least one of 16 types of voluntary associations declined from 75 percent to 62 percent between 1974 and 2004.³⁹ Putnam reported a decline in the share of Americans who had served as a committee member or officer in a local organization.⁴⁰ In 1972, 95 percent of adults declared some kind of religious affiliation, but that fell to 76 percent by 2018 (Figure 6).⁴¹ Reductions in religious participation and affiliation have occurred across demographic groups.⁴² Volunteering rates fell steadily between 2002 and 2023, declining by one-fourth.⁴³

Figure 5. Share of Americans Spending a Social Evening with Friends Several Times per Week, 1974–2018

Source: University of California, Berkeley, Survey Documentation and Analysis, Study: GSS 1972–2024 Cumulative Datafile—Release 1, https://sda.berkeley.edu/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=gss24rel1; and NORC at the University of Chicago, “General Social Survey,” https://gss.norc.org/.

Figure 6. Share of Americans Indicating Affiliation with a Religious Denomination, 1972–2018

Source: Authors’ analyses of University of California, Berkeley, Survey Documentation and Analysis, Study: GSS 1972–2024 Cumulative Datafile—Release 1, https://sda.berkeley.edu/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=gss24rel1; and NORC at the University of Chicago, “General Social Survey,” https://gss.norc.org/.

Figure 7. Average Hours per Day Americans Age 25–54 Spent Alone, by Education, 2010–24

Source: Data from Sarah M. Flood et al., American Time Use Survey Data Extract Builder, version 3.3, IPUMS, 2025, https://doi.org/10.18128/D060.V3.3.

Rising Social Isolation

The predictable consequence of this rising detachment from social life is that Americans have been spending much more time alone. Figure 7, based on American Time Use Survey data, shows the average number of hours per day each educational group spends alone, not including time sleeping or bathing.

Between 2014 and 2024, the time Americans spent alone increased by over an hour per day on average.⁴⁴ For those in the top third of the education distribution, average time alone per day increased from four hours and 53 minutes to six hours and 29 minutes. For those at the bottom of the distribution, time alone increased from four hours and 48 minutes per day to five hours and 40 minutes.⁴⁵

Interestingly, while this is not apparent in Figure 7, the large jump after 2019 in time alone for prime-working-age Americans appears to be due primarily to an increase in being alone while working, implicating remote work and other COVID-era changes in work arrangements.⁴⁶ However, among younger and older Americans, time alone has risen even when excluding time at work.

The recent increase in social isolation and decline in time spent with friends contrast with the best evidence from preceding decades. The sociologist Claude Fischer concluded in his 2011 book, Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970, that “Americans’ contact with relatives and friends, as well as their feelings of emotional connectedness, has changed relatively little since the 1970s.”⁴⁷ While COVID-induced changes in work arrangements clearly were important, the timing of these isolation trends strongly suggests the impact of technology.

New sources of entertainment, such as smartphones, online video games, and so-called social media, have made it much more comfortable to live in solitude, and fewer people are motivated to form relationships or engage with their communities.⁴⁸ As a result, Americans have experienced a decline in “social fitness,” a term that lead researchers of the Harvard Study of Adult Development coined to describe the ability to socialize and form relationships.⁴⁹

Figure 8. Share of Adults Saying Others Can Generally Be Trusted, 1972–2018

Personal technology undoubtedly has benefited people of all ages, and concern about technology’s social impact long predates the smartphone era. Social media, messaging apps, and even video games provide new opportunities for maintaining connections virtually and making new (if relatively thin) ones.

But social isolation nevertheless has serious negative consequences. The researchers in the Harvard study—which has followed over 1,000 individuals (and their descendants) since 1938, tracking their relationships, physical and mental health, employment, and various other indicators of well-being— concluded that strong personal relationships are the single greatest predictor of a happy, healthy life.⁵⁰ Childhood has been transformed by the social isolation that smartphones have wrought.

It should come as no surprise that depression and anxiety rates have skyrocketed in recent years— particularly among young people, who have also experienced the largest increases in social isolation.⁵¹ The uptick in depression and anxiety is not merely a consequence of reduced stigma or increased diagnoses; it reflects a real increase in mental anguish among a growing subset of the American population. Since 2010, for instance, emergency room visits due to adolescent self-harm have increased markedly.⁵²

Declining Trust and Political Polarization

Americans’ retreat from social life has decreased social trust, reducing the value of social capital (Figure 8). In 1972, nearly half of Americans (48 percent) agreed that, generally, others could be trusted; by 2018, the share affirming this had fallen to 35–36 percent.⁵³ Social Capital Project analyses found that the decline in trust was steeper for Americans without a college degree, but it had fallen substantially for every educational group.⁵⁴ In Coming Apart, Murray documented that, for working- and upper-middle-class Americans, the perceived trustworthiness, fairness, and helpfulness of others had fallen.⁵⁵

Moreover, Americans’ trust and confidence in a range of institutions have deteriorated over the long run. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans trusted “the government in Washington” to do what was right most of the time. That fell to about one-quarter of the population by 1980, and just over one-fifth (22 percent) professed such trust in 2024.⁵⁶ Gallup data indicate that the share who answered “none at all” when asked how much “trust and confidence” they had in the executive branch rose from 4 percent to 34 percent between 1972 and 2024, while the increase was from 3 percent to 19 percent for Congress and from 7 percent to 21 percent for the federal judiciary. Americans’ lack of confidence in the federal government’s ability to handle domestic problems and international affairs has similarly risen. Likewise, the share of Americans with no trust and confidence in their state government rose from 6 percent to 18 percent.⁵⁷

Outside government, trust in clergy and organized religion has fallen considerably. Americans are less trusting of the media to report news fairly. They have less confidence in public schools, higher education, the police, the criminal justice system, the military, the medical system, big business, tech companies, and banks.⁵⁸

Given these institutions’ diversity, the causes of reduced confidence are varied, and diminished institutional trust often seems an appropriate response to the untrustworthiness of institutions. For example, various sexual abuse scandals have shaken trust in religious institutions.⁵⁹ Incidents of police brutality, sometimes captured on ubiquitous phone-based cameras, have undermined trust in police forces.⁶⁰ For some culturally central institutions, their ideological imbalance has likely been a factor in their loss of the public’s trust.

For example, according to a 2015 analysis, 93 percent of social workers who made political contributions gave primarily to Democrats.⁶¹ That was also true of 93 percent of people working in film, television, and stage production; 92 percent of editors; 90 percent of mental health professionals; 90 percent of professors; 89 percent of people in arts management; 88 percent of writers; 87 percent of performing artists; 86 percent of researchers; 84 percent of visual artists; 83 percent of people in media production; 83 percent of academic administrators; 80 percent of people working in philanthropy; and 79 percent of teachers. Republicans are overrepresented in occupations such as energy, surgery, agriculture, insurance, and construction, but these fields shape the culture much less than the institutions dominated by progressives do. (And even in these occupations, there is more ideological balance than in the most left-leaning fields.)

Ideological imbalance in institutions and the general decline in social trust have probably contributed to rising political polarization. While Democrats’ and Republicans’ warmth toward their respective parties has held steady over the past 45 years, members of each party have increasingly negative views of the other party (Figure 9).⁶² Among political independents, warmth toward both major parties has declined.

Rising Affluence and Declining Social Capital

We have seen that declines across social capital domains have occurred over a period when material well-being has improved. Indeed, for various reasons, rising affluence is likely a primary cause of deteriorating social capital.

First, the richer a society becomes, the more people can afford market and commercial solutions to their needs rather than having to rely on the scarce time, resources, and goodwill of family, friends, neighbors, and fellow religious congregants. More people can pay for childcare, for instance, and afford private insurance against various risks. Americans today routinely pay for housekeeping and landscaping, hire people to do their taxes, and use apps for food preparation and delivery, transportation services, and many other tasks they might have asked intimates to help with in the past. Americans have access to credit via numerous financial instruments, which substitute for interpersonal loans and gifts.

Figure 9. Average Feeling from Zero (Coldest) to 100 (Warmest) Toward Political Parties, 1978–2020

Source: American National Election Studies, “The ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior,” https://electionstudies.org/data-tools/anes-guide/index.html

This greater access to market solutions has naturally weakened Americans’ reliance on and connection to people in their social circles. It has reduced the financial necessity of living near parents or other family members and getting or staying married. It means churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and other institutions are less instrumental to many people.

Second, affluence allows members of a society to focus on higher-level wants rather than lower-level needs. Instead of worrying about basic imperatives like satisfying hunger and maintaining a roof over their heads, Americans now have the luxuries of attending to self-fulfillment and self-expression, enjoying privacy, and seeking experiences. Their relationships increasingly become vehicles to satisfy these wants, and the obligations attached to them become thinner. Commitment to a marriage and family must compete with lifestyles that offer more freedom and less compromise.

As Americans have become richer, more women have had the means to pursue professional aspirations rather than support a male breadwinner, as under traditional arrangements. The proliferation of improved home appliances and prepared and processed foods has reduced the time necessary to maintain a home, and more families can afford two cars and childcare services, all of which have facilitated the dual-earner family. The birth control pill gave women much greater ability to plan the timing of births and their career trajectories. Moreover, affluence has allowed more women to delay marriage, end unhappy unions, or forgo marrying entirely.

Greater workforce participation by women who in the past would have been housewives thinned community life, since husbands generally did not take on homemaking and community making as more women worked longer hours. For children, reduced marriage and fertility meant fewer siblings, cousins, and neighborhood kids with whom to hang out.

Third, rising affluence eroded prosocial norms. As one of us—Scott Winship—and Rachel Sheffield have noted, the pill (and the availability of safer and legal abortion procedures)

undermined the view that nonmarital sex was wrong and to be avoided. In a more general sense, by reducing the consequences of risky choices, affluence eroded support for moral constraints that impeded the self-realization and freedom of well-off Americans who could manage risk well.⁶³

Greater professional opportunities for women made single parenthood more viable, which reduced the social stigma around nonmarital births and divorce. Winship and Sheffield note, “Increased demand for divorce led to liberalized divorce law, making the trend self-reinforcing.”⁶⁴

When the large baby boom generation came of age, its affluence financed and spread a commercial and ideological counterculture that eroded traditional norms. Religious institutions became marginalized because of all these changes (and the scientific discoveries that accompanied rising affluence). The decline of religious identity and family bonds may have fed a demand for other forms of identity to replace them.⁶⁵ In particular, greater attachment to political tribes has likely bolstered polarization in government and the public square.

Fourth, Americans’ increasing wealth has facilitated the growth of a more generous public safety net. In turn, that has created incentives that have weakened the two-parent family and disconnected people from work—which entails not just economic costs but also social ones. For example, three in four prime-working-age men outside the labor force are in a household receiving government safety-net benefits, and these men report having less social support than other men do.

Finally, technological development, while breaking down the barrier to connection of physical distance, has tended to isolate people. This trend long predates the smartphone—radios and televisions drew people from movie theaters and the public square decades ago. But the combination of a private handheld screen and access to an explosion of entertainment and information via the internet offers a convenience that outweighs the work of scheduling and negotiating in-person interactions. Meanwhile, social media’s impersonality has fostered antisocial behavior, polarization, and anxiety, especially in children.

The claim that social capital declines are due to rising affluence is not inconsistent with the observation that social capital declines have been worst in absolute terms among the less affluent. Less educated Americans have long looked worse on social capital indicators than more educated Americans. And as we’ve seen, in relative terms, declines have not always been worst lower down the socioeconomic ladder. Poverty and material hardship, especially when concentrated within families or neighborhoods, can make relationships challenging. Mistrust tends to be pervasive in low-income communities.

Moreover, as more educated Americans have become less committed to advocating and enforcing prosocial norms (even if their behavior has largely remained consistent with those norms), the consequences of the norms eroding have fallen on those lower down the ladder. Those norms often made the difference between antisocial and prosocial behavior for people with fewer resources. For example, more educated Americans formerly needed little moral incentive to avoid getting pregnant outside marriage, given what they stood to lose socially and economically. In poorer communities, the economic costs of becoming a single parent were weaker to begin with, so reducing already diminished social sanctions was much more consequential for them.

Finally, increased economic segregation has removed upper-income Americans from the institutions serving the less well-off. Those institutions have been left with fewer financial resources and leadership. Living outside the communities with the greatest economic challenges has made upper-income Americans less influential as moral leaders, further weakening prosocial norms. For all these reasons, affluence’s impact on social capital paradoxically may be felt most strongly among the least affluent.

What Can Policy Do?

The evidence suggests two distinct patterns of social capital decline. The first is longer running, dating at least to the mid-20th century. The second reaches back only 10–15 years and seems related to the rise of smartphones and social media. Both reflect the choices Americans have made as the nation has become richer. Needless to say, policymaking that would try to undo these freely made choices must tread carefully.

Reversing the Decline in Civil Society

If the goal is to rebuild family and community life and revive local institutions, federal policy’s role is fundamentally constrained. A basic issue is federal policymakers’ great distance—physical and otherwise—from local communities. Federal bureaucrats implementing national policy, no matter how good their intentions, start with inherent disadvantages relative to local institutions of civil society and local elected officials: limited familiarity with local needs, context, and culture; reduced flexibility in tailoring policy to local circumstances; lack of personal relationships; and diminished authority and legitimacy as outsiders.

As far back as 1977, scholars under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute organized the Mediating Structures Project to resist federal encroachment into matters they believed should be reserved for local institutions. This overreach, they argued, crowded out not only state and local government but also institutions of civil society, neighborhoods, and families in their roles of serving human needs.⁶⁶ The muscles of civic engagement and activity have atrophied. Rebuilding them will require that federal policy adhere more closely to the principle of subsidiarity: By default, power and authority should reside as close to the individual as possible, and exceptions should be based on effectiveness.

Subsidiarity, in many cases, implies the federal government should simply do less and return responsibility for numerous policy areas to states and localities. In particular, keeping Washington out of culture wars to the extent possible would allow various approaches to many divisive issues to coexist across the country. That would loosen a pressure valve on national debates that fuel political polarization.

In other instances, subsidiarity might call for federal funding to address some need but require that it be paired with greater administrative responsibility and flexibility for states, localities, and nonprofits. As Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus argued in To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy, the culmination of the Mediating Structures Project, the state should impede the institutions of civil society as little as possible and should rely on them for service delivery to the extent feasible.⁶⁷

For example, in 2014, then–House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposed a pilot “Opportunity Grant” program to reform federal safety-net policy.⁶⁸ In participating states, Ryan would have combined funding streams for 11 antipoverty programs into a single block grant. States would have relied on competing local public and nonprofit institutions to administer benefits. Those institutions, in turn, would have customized benefits according to life plans developed with individual families.

Various other methods could empower local decision-making.⁶⁹ Using vouchers for service provision can stimulate competitive local activity to meet people’s unique needs and preferences—a better alternative to federally funding public monopolies or state-favored contract winners. Significantly deregulating nonprofit organizations would allow them to operate more effectively. In particular, charitable choice policies ensure that religiously affiliated providers— often some of the most vital in an area—are eligible for federal funding.

A more federalist approach to policy guided by subsidiarity would respect individual choices and preferences better than blanket policies from Washington do, and it would help revive civil society and community building. It could also temper the toxic effects of national political polarization.

Reversing Family Decline

Perhaps none of the social capital declines are so worrisome or consequential as the decades-long deterioration of the two-parent family. It seems difficult to make headway repairing the social fabric generally without first shoring up family life. Fortunately, numerous policies could move the needle.

First, as Robert VerBruggen discusses in this handbook’s preceding chapter, some federal policies disincentivize marriage and marital childbearing. That is true of means-tested safety-net programs generally. Any policy that reduces benefits as income increases will tend to discourage marriage, because many couples will find themselves better-off keeping their respective incomes separate so one or both members can maximize the transfers they receive. Moreover, a public safety net, while keeping families out of destitution, necessarily makes single parenthood a more viable option.

Rather than make safety-net programs more generous for married couples, which would prove expensive and make more people dependent on government benefits, a better approach to the marriage disincentives in safety-net programs is to rely on work requirements and time limits on benefit receipt. The disincentives to marrying become much smaller when the disincentivizing benefits are relatively unappealing or temporary. The recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s community engagement requirements for recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid benefits should provide good evidence as states experiment with different policies. Similar reforms are warranted for housing benefits and parents receiving disability benefits for children with mild (and often questionable) diagnoses.⁷⁰ Moreover, evidence suggests that numerous able-bodied adults receive disability benefits despite being unambiguously capable of work.⁷¹

Other safety-net reforms that would promote two-parent families were included in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the historic 1996 reform of the nation’s primary cash welfare program. The minor-parent provision required teenage parents receiving benefits to live with a responsible adult and attend school. The law gave states the option to implement family caps, which limit assistance to a maximum number of children. These policies could be extended to other safety-net programs.

Tax policies also sometimes disincentivize marriage. As VerBruggen notes, this problem is difficult to solve among the general population; many couples see a marriage bonus rather than a marriage penalty when they do their taxes. For low-income families, however, the earned income tax credit (EITC) schedules often result in a couple being worse off if they marry. Tweaking these schedules so they begin to phase out at higher incomes and more slowly could mitigate this marriage penalty.

A more paternalistic approach would be to use the EITC to incentivize marriage. Winship has proposed basing EITC schedules on individual rather than combined couple incomes and letting both members of a married couple count all children in their household to determine the amount they receive.⁷² So instead of two unmarried parents, each with one child, each getting the one-child benefit amounts, each member of a married couple would get the two-child benefit amounts. Under current policy, their combined income might leave them ineligible for any EITC. Separately, Winship has proposed letting married couples with one or two children use the more generous EITC schedule for married couples with three or more children.⁷³

Child support enforcement could also be a lever to change the incentives around marriage and nonmarital childbearing. Federal policy could require states to condition Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, housing benefits, and childcare subsidies on cooperation with child support enforcement efforts, as it does for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid.

Rather than address financial incentives, federal policy could experiment more with locally administered social programs to promote healthy marriage and relationship education, responsible fatherhood, and teen pregnancy prevention. The Department of Health and Human Services funds Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programs. Many have proved ineffective, but some models have produced encouraging results.⁷⁴ This is generally true of social programs, and policymakers should be willing to fund rigorously evaluated programs even so, attempting to identify successful and scalable models for additional support.

Another strategy for strengthening the two-parent family is promoting the “success sequence,”⁷⁵ which is based on observing much lower poverty rates among people who graduate high school, have a full-time job, and delay childbearing until marriage. If more teenagers and young adults knew the difference these bourgeois choices could make to their opportunities, more might commit to following the success sequence.⁷⁶

The success sequence can be encouraged through financial incentives. Winship proposes a baby-bonds program that would provide generous resources to young adults but restrict access to the funds unless they complete high school, demonstrate a stable work history, and avoid nonmarital childbearing.⁷⁷ The success sequence could also be promoted through federally funded, locally administered social programs in schools. Or it could be elevated in a messaging campaign.

The nonprofit, industry-funded Ad Council has promoted various causes over the past decades, including through advertisements about the Peace Corps, pollution, the United Negro College Fund, seat belt use, AIDS prevention, childhood obesity, racial diversity, suicide prevention, pandemic containment, and COVID vaccine education. Many of these campaigns were coordinated with American presidential administrations. A president seeking to increase awareness of the success sequence could work with the Ad Council to develop a campaign as iconic as the council’s past “Smokey Bear,” “Just say no,” “Take a bite out of crime,” “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” and “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” ads.

Another way to strengthen family life would be to make it easier for young adults to form families. Many people wish to settle down and raise a family in their 20s. Two major sources of the fertility decline are the increased delay in marriage and the increasing share of people who never marry. A basic problem with the timing of family formation is that young people are relatively unprepared financially to afford it. Young adults have accumulated little professional experience, and if they attended college, they may be burdened by student debt. In contrast, when they are older, they will be in a stronger financial position but no longer forming families. Their earnings will have risen over the course of their career, their children will be grown and independent, and they may own their home and live debt-free.

It remains true that pooling two incomes and realizing economies of scale by living with a partner are compelling ways to afford more of everything. This is one reason for skepticism that the decline in marriage is due primarily to economic factors. But it’s still the case that at the margin, if people could tap their future income to finance family formation when young, many would do so.

Winship has proposed a policy agenda that would effectively shift future income to young adults and shift their current expenses into the future.⁷⁸ For instance, as a Social Capital Project report has described, eliminating the deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes would mean higher taxes and lower home values for older homeowners, but the lower home values would make it easier for young adults to purchase a starter home.⁷⁹ People would benefit as young adults even though later, as older homeowners, they would be worse off than under current tax policy. Other examples are allowing people to receive future anticipated child tax credits when their children are younger, as Katharine Stevens and Matt Weidinger have proposed, and paying for family leave from future Social Security benefits.⁸⁰

Other policies could promote family affordability without this inter-temporal quality. Housing and land-use regulations, permitting requirements, and environmental review policies prevent local housing markets from responding to the demand for starter homes. Reducing these burdensome regulations would set more young Americans on the path to homeownership and family formation. Adam Ozimek and John Lettieri of the Economic Innovation Group recently proposed a federal “Density Zones” program. The proposal would create a model zoning and building code that municipalities could adopt for specific geographic areas. They would then receive federal funds toward economic and community development proportional to new housing created in the zones.⁸¹

Reversing Social Isolation

What should policymakers do when, en masse, people become asocial? Focusing on family formation is a good place to start. Parents inevitably interact over soccer games, school events, playdates, and holiday gatherings. A revived interest in marriage would stimulate dating and perhaps group outings. Increased fertility might draw extended families closer together.

Another possible avenue for increasing social interaction is fostering basic communication and relationship skills. In the past, prosocial norms and instrumental considerations necessitated a certain amount of social interaction, regardless of how difficult, frustrating, or unsatisfying it was to engage with specific people. Today, people’s relationships are more discretionary and compete with an expanded set of ways to use their time and derive fulfillment. Since social interaction can be challenging, particularly when participants are not strongly committed to its success, more fluency in navigating disagreement, offering empathy, and finding compromise might encourage greater social activity.

An indirect way to achieve this goal while strengthening family relationships would be to offer, for example, a $2,000 tax credit or payment to newlyweds who can verify their completion of a state-approved relationship skills course. The payment would help couples afford their wedding while gaining valuable skills to start their marriage on a solid footing. Meanwhile, the skills would generalize and spill over to relationships outside the marriage. Here again, a family-first social capital policy could produce wider benefits.

Another outside-the-box idea is to create two new federally recognized civic renewal holidays, separated by six months. On these days, people would be encouraged to socialize with family or neighbors, volunteer in their community, or organize and participate in community events.

Of course, any effort to increase social interaction must compete with the smartphone. Here, it may be most effective for policymakers to start with kids and hope they can change their habits in ways that last into adulthood. The movement for phone-free schools has accelerated, and federal policies could encourage its adoption. For instance, they could encourage or require smartphone manufacturers to include more robust and easier-to-use parental controls that allow parents to remotely limit kids’ phone use and monitor their activity.

Parents should be able to easily name a phone as belonging to either a parent or a child and instantly have powerful controls over their children’s phones. These controls should be readily available in a user-friendly app, not buried in multiple phone settings. Setup should occur when the user first powers on their phone and establishes other settings, such as the default language. Popular social media sites and apps—and those using artificial intelligence–powered chatbots—could be encouraged or required to provide stronger age verification and parental controls.

Additionally, reforms to promote workforce participation among able-bodied adults would reintegrate a profoundly isolated group into social life.⁸² In 2021, the Social Capital Project issued a comprehensive report suggesting a wide variety of reforms toward this end.⁸³

Reversing Distrust

Generating stronger families, rebuilding civic life, and reducing social isolation should increase general trust in others somewhat. However, various institutions must reform in domain-specific ways to regain the trust of those they seek to serve. Too many institutional leaders have strayed from their core mission in pursuit of selfish professional goals.⁸⁴

Federal policy can sometimes make a difference at the margins here. Institutions receiving federal dollars can be held accountable for pursuing their core mission. One Social Capital Project report outlined a variety of policy reforms (including at the federal level) to restore confidence in police forces by rooting out the few “bad apples” who are responsible for an overwhelming share of cops’ misconduct.⁸⁵ Another sought ways to encourage “educational pluralism” in schools to ensure a diversity of educational philosophies and providers.⁸⁶ If parents could better align their kids’ schooling with their own values, priorities, and needs, increased trust in educational institutions would follow.

Of course, there is a danger in the federal government becoming too involved in institutions’ missions. Policy leadership must distinguish between, on the one hand, removing barriers to institutional pluralism and holding institutions accountable to their mission and, on the other, imposing arbitrary demands on institutions that lack broad consensus.

Conclusion

Over the past half century, America has made incredible progress on numerous fronts. Poverty has been more than cut in half,⁸⁷ life expectancy has grown by seven years,⁸⁸ and luxuries once reserved for the elite are now available to most. But despite immense material progress, many Americans still have a pervasive sense that their nation’s golden years are behind it.

The reason for this declensionism is that America’s awe-inspiring march of progress has not extended to some of life’s most important aspects. Compared with 50 years ago, today’s families are weaker, social connections more tenuous, and trust in others and institutions depleted. These vital indicators of the nation’s social and civic health have long been subordinated to measures of economic progress. It is long past time to focus on the strength and integrity of the most important parts of life—families, communities, and local institutions of civil society—and address the domains in which Americans’ lives have, in fact, grown measurably worse.

It is easy to see why so many populists blame economic policy for social breakdown. For one, it comports with their emphasis on economic doomsaying. Moreover, blaming social problems on economics is appealing because there is no shortage of government economic policies to indict or reform. If falling marriage rates were due to the trade deficit, it would be straightforward to propose federal trade policy reforms to reverse the decline.

Notwithstanding the tendency toward economic declensionism, this impression is at odds with not only objective economic data but also the fact that most people are satisfied with their own economic status.⁸⁹ This tension suggests that Americans are well-informed about their own circumstances but misinformed about other Americans’. Ironically, social capital declines may explain some of the country’s misguided economic “doomerism,” since loneliness seems to intensify nostalgia.⁹⁰

But the data are equally clear in demonstrating that social capital deficits are large and growing (or stuck at depleted levels). This deterioration has occurred while the nation has reached new heights of affluence, suggesting that policies seeking to reverse it by giving people cash, pursuing industrial policy, or trying to reshore manufacturing are unlikely to have much impact.

Fortunately, policymakers’ options are not limited to pulling inappropriate economic policy levers and sitting passively on the sidelines while more Americans become socially adrift. National leaders should convene a summit to address America’s slow-moving social crisis. We hope the evidence and policies offered here help shape an agenda to reverse the social breakdown.

Notes

Like so much else these days, that finding reflected political polarization, with 72 percent of Republican-leaning Americans rating the past more favorably than the present, compared with 43 percent of Democratic leaners. However, in four Pew surveys from 2016 to 2021 spanning the Obama, first Trump, and Biden administrations, a plurality of Americans (41–44 percent) believed life was worse than a half century earlier. Andrew Daniller, “Americans Take a Dim View of the Nation’s Future, Look More Positively at the Past,” Pew Research Center, April 24, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/24/americans-take-a-dim-view-of-the-nations-future-look-more-positively-at-the-past. For trends, see Pew Research Center, 2023 Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel Wave 125 March 2023 Final Topline March 27–April 2, 2023 N = 5,079, https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/sr_2023.04.24_america_topline.pdf.
Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (Encounter Books, 2018), 23, 20, 19.
Gallup asked the same question 36 times before 2018, starting in August 2001. The surveys were conducted every April beginning in 2004, and we compare those surveys with the April 2002 and March 2003 surveys. December 2001 and December 2002 were the only previous times the survey registered a higher share saying their financial situation was excellent or good (56 percent and 57 percent, respectively), but the three times the question was asked in December (2001, 2002, and 2008), ratings were higher than in the subsequent April surveys and, for 2002 and 2008, higher than in the prior April surveys. (The question was not asked in April 2001.) See Gallup, “Personal Financial Situation Index,” https://news.gallup.com/poll/1621/personal-financial-situation-index.aspx.
The share was also 57 percent in December 2002, but a smaller share that month answered “excellent” than in April 2021.
In January 1970, Gallup asked, “In general, how would you describe your financial situation in terms of meeting your needs?” Just 42 percent said excellent or good, compared with 46 percent saying fair and 12 percent saying poor. Twice in 1975, Gallup asked, “How would you describe the current financial situation of you and your family?” In February that year, shares saying excellent or good, fair, and poor were 42 percent, 45 percent, and 13 percent, respectively. In September, they were 48 percent, 33 percent, and 9 percent, respectively (with 10 percent giving no response). In a May 1994 Gallup survey, using the exact question wording from the 21st-century surveys, the shares were 47 percent, 43 percent, and 10 percent, respectively. For the 1970 and 1975 estimates, see Cornell University, Roper Center for Public Affairs, Gallup Poll # 1970-0796: Economy [Roper #31087774], https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31087774/questions#b90b0002-d565-4e09-b2cf-308bde1d9070; Cornell University, Roper Center for Public Affairs, Gallup Poll # 1975-0922: Economy [Roper #31087876], https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31087876/questions#f295ee00-3f66-4989-8b47-ff528bd4e908; and Cornell University, Roper Center for Public Affairs, Gallup Poll # 935 [Roper #31087889], https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31087889/questions#2b34eb08-0402-426a-a16b-10005711654b. For the 1994 estimates, see Gallup, “Personal Financial Situation Index.”
See Gallup, “Economy,” https://news.gallup.com/poll/1609/consumer-views-economy.aspx.
Scott Winship, “Should We Believe the Economic Data or Americans’ ‘Lyin’ Eyes? The Answer Is Yes.,” Civitas Institute, January 16, 2025, https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/should-we-believe-the-economic-data-or-americans-lyin-eyes-the-answer-is-yes.
Gallup data since January 1992 are available from Cornell University, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research et al., Rating of Economic Conditions, Four-Way, Excellent to Poor (1992–2025), 2025, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/trend/00885766-271e-4e28-8e16-718f47a38eb2.
Scott Winship, “Introducing the ‘More Accurate Consumer Price Index’” (working paper, American Enterprise Institute, November 7, 2024), https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/introducing-themore-accurate-consumer-price-index/; Scott Winship, Understanding Trends in Worker Pay over the Past 50 Years, American Enterprise Institute, May 14, 2024, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/understanding-trends-in-worker-pay-over-the-past-50-years/; Adam Ozimek et al., The American Worker: Toward a New Consensus, Economic Innovation Group, June 2024, https://eig.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The-American-Worker-Project.pdf; Christina King et al., Reconnecting Americans to the Benefits of Work, US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, October 27, 2021, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/47745fcc-deba-418a-b05e-9fea2a32de71/connections-to-work.pdf; and Economic Policy Institute, Median Real Hourly Wage (2024$), 2025, https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_median/line/year/national/real_wage_median_2024/gender?timeStart=1973-01-01&timeEnd=2024-01-01&dateString=2024-01-01&highlightedLines=gender_male&highlightedLines=gender_female.
King et al., Reconnecting Americans to the Benefits of Work, 22, fig. 10; Economic Policy Institute, Real Hourly Wage (2024$), 2025, https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year/national/real_wage_2024/wage_percentile?timeStart=1973-01-01&timeEnd=2024-01-01&dateString=2024-01-01&highlightedLines=wage_p10&highlightedLines=wage_p50&highlightedLines=wage_p90; and David Autor et al., “The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Labor Market,” Working Paper No. 31010 (National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2024), https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf.
Winship, “Introducing the ‘More Accurate Consumer Price Index’”; King et al., Reconnecting Americans to the Benefits of Work; and Scott Winship, The Effect of Taxes and Transfers on Low-Earning Workers’ Income, Economic Innovation Group, October 2024, https://eig.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/TAWP-Winship.pdf.
Richard V. Burkhauser et al., “Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty Since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure,” Journal of Political Economy 132, no. 1 (2024): 1–47, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/725705; and Congressional Budget Office, Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989 to 2022, October 2024, https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-10/60343-family-wealth.pdf.
Scott Winship, “America Is Still Working,” Fusion, https://www.fusionaier.org/post/america-is-still-working.
Scott Winship and Thomas O’Rourke, “Measuring Social Capital: Can We Tell If Some Places Are Richer in Social Capital Than Others?,” American Enterprise Institute, July 20, 2023, https://www.aei.org/articles/measuring-social-capital-can-we-tell-if-some-places-are-richer-in-social-capital-than-others/.
Kevin Corinth et al., “The Distribution of Social Capital Across Individuals and Its Relationship to Income,” (working paper, American Enterprise Institute, August 2024), https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/the-distribution-of-social-capital-across-individuals-and-its-relationship-to-income/.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (Crown Forum, 2012).
US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, What We Do Together: The State of Associational Life in America, May 15, 2017, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/6f670ee8-74de-497a-85f6-4cf6502d52d4/1-17-what-we-do-together.pdf. One of us, Winship, served as the project’s first director for over three years.
Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (Basic Books, 2016), 4.
Sara McLanahan et al., “The Causal Effects of Father Absence,” The Annual Review of Sociology 39 (July 2013): 399–427, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24489431/; Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell, “How’s Life at Home? New Evidence on Marriage and the Set Point for Happiness,” Journal of Happiness Studies 20, no. 2 (2019): 373–90, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-017-9941-3; and Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, The Geography of Social Capital in America, April 11, 2018, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/e86f09f7-522a-469a-aa89-1e6d7c75628c/1-18-geography-of-social-capital.pdf.
See the data in US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, The Geography of Social Capital in America.
Rachel Sheffield and Scott Winship, The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home, US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, July 23, 2020, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/84d5b05b-1a58-4b3f-8c8d-2f94cfe4bb59/3-20-the-demise-of-the-happy-two-parent-home.pdf. Data were provided by Sheffield.
US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, Love, Marriage, and the Baby Carriage: The Rise in Unwed Childbearing, December 11, 2017, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/bc6c3b18-b268-4178-b65f-56fec2b26002/4-17-love-marriage-and-the-baby-carriage.pdf; Jaden Loo, Marriage Rate in the US: Geographic Variation, 2022, Bowling Green State University, 2023, https://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sciences/NCFMR/documents/FP/FP-23-23-Geo-Var-Mar-Rt-2024-03-14-kkp.pdf; Richard Fry, “A Record-High Share of 40-Year-Olds in the U.S. Have Never Been Married,” Pew Research Center, June 28, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/28/a-record-high-share-of-40-year-olds-in-the-us-have-never-been-married/; and Valerie Schweizer, Divorce: More Than a Century of Change, 1900–2018, Bowling Green State University, 2020, https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/schweizer-divorce-century-change-1900-2018-fp-20-22.html. The divorce rate is down from its peak, but that reflects a subtle dynamic. Because marriage is much less common today than in previous decades, those who have married in recent years likely differ from those who married four or five decades ago. They probably are more religious, have a higher income, and are generally more committed to their marriages than those getting married in preceding generations. Therefore, recent declines in divorce probably reflect the fact that a more select group of people are getting married in the first place. See Wendy Wang et al., “New Census Data: Key Takeaways on Divorce, Marriage, and Fertility in the U.S.,” Institute for Family Studies, September 22, 2022, https://ifstudies.org/blog/new-census-data-key-takeaways-on-divorce-marriage-and-fertility-in-the-us. The magnitude of the decline in divorce also reflects the fact that the relatively large baby boom cohort has aged through the peak divorce years. Holding age constant, divorce was higher in 2010 than at its ostensible peak in 1980. See Sheela Kennedy and Steven Ruggles, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Count: The Rise of Divorce in the United States, 1980–2010,” Demography 51, no. 2 (2014): 587–98, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3972308/.
US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, Rising Unwed Pregnancy and Childbearing Across Educational and Racial Groups, February 14, 2018, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/cab97d60-bf46-417a-9138-288d69e5385f/rising-unwed-pregnancy-and-childbearing-across-educational-and-racial-groups.pdf.
Sheffield and Winship, The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home; and data provided by Sheffield.
Sheffield and Winship, The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home; and data provided by Sheffield.
Daniel A. Cox, The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss, AEI Survey Center on American Life, June 8, 2021, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss.
Daniel A. Cox and Sam Pressler, Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life, AEI Survey Center on American Life, August 22, 2024, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/disconnected-places-and-spaces.
Cox, The State of American Friendship.
Specifically, we assign American Time Use Survey respondents to an education tertile for the year when they responded to the survey. To ensure that each tertile includes an equal number of respondents, we broke ties randomly.
Authors’ analyses of the General Social Survey using the Survey Documentation and Analysis tool, University of California, Berkeley, Survey Documentation and Analysis, Study: GSS 1972–2024 Cumulative Datafile—Release 1, https://sda.berkeley.edu/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=gss24rel1. Estimates are available through 2024, but we choose not to report post-2018 data because survey administration changes introduce a break in the series between 2018 and 2021. (The trend continues downward, however.)
Authors’ analyses of University of California, Berkeley, Survey Documentation and Analysis, Study. Again, we choose not to report post-2018 estimates, but they are down substantially.
Authors’ analyses of University of California, Berkeley, Survey Documentation and Analysis, Study.
Leslie Davis and Kim Parker, “A Half-Century After ‘Mister Rogers’ Debut, 5 Facts About Neighbors in U.S.,” Pew Research Center, August 15, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/15/facts-about-neighbors-in-u-s.
Authors’ analyses of IPUMS, Study: CPS: Volunteer Supplements, https://sda.cps.ipums.org/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=all_volunteer_supplement_samples; and IPUMS, Study: CPS: Civic Engagement Supplements, https://sda.cps.ipums.org/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=all_civicengagement_supplement_samples; and Wells King et al., The Space Between: Renewing the American Tradition of Civil Society, US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, December 18, 2019, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/69a8feee-726c-4b67-ae6a-ee567ccc4da3/newjec-report-space-between.pdf.
US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, What We Do Together.
Nicholas Eberstadt, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis (Templeton Press, 2016); Scott Winship, What’s Behind Declining Male Labor Force Participation: Fewer Good Jobs or Fewer Men Seeking Them?, George Mason University, Mercatus Center, September 26, 2017, https://www.mercatus.org/research/research-papers/whats-behind-declining-male-labor-force-participation; and US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, Inactive, Disconnected, and Ailing: A Portrait of Prime-Age Men out of the Labor Force, September 18, 2018, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4a929c09-9936-47eb-89e3-a77fd3fcd139/3-18-jec-report-inactive-disconnected.pdf.
US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, What We Do Together.
Putnam, Bowling Alone.
Authors’ analyses of University of California, Berkeley, Survey Documentation and Analysis, Study. Estimates are available through 2024, but we choose not to report post-2018 data because survey administration changes introduce a break in the series between 2018 and 2021. (The trend continues downward, however.)
King et al., The Space Between.
Authors’ analyses of IPUMS, Study: CPS: Volunteer Supplements. There is a clear break in the series between 2015 and 2017 due to survey changes that produced more refusals, but the annual trends from 2002 to 2015 and from 2017 to 2022 are similar.
Before 2010, we cannot tell in the American Time Use Survey whether a survey respondent is alone while working, which is why Figure 7 begins at 2010. However, trends from 2003 to 2009 suggest that time spent alone did not rise during this earlier period.
On time-use analyses of social connectedness, see also Viji Diane Kannan and Peter J. Veazie, “US Trends in Social Isolation, Social Engagement, and Companionship—Nationally and by Age, Sex, Race/Ethnicity, Family Income, and Work Hours, 2003–2020,” SSM—Population Health 21 (March 2023): 101331, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36618547/.
Time alone still rises over the past 10 years among the least educated and moderately educated, even when considering non-work time, but not nearly as much after 2019 as when work time is included. Time alone declined until 2020 among the most educated when ignoring work time, but it rose modestly thereafter.
Russell Sage Foundation, “Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970,” https://www.russellsage.org/publications/book/still-connected.
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024); Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood: And What That Means for the Rest of Us (Atria Books, 2017); and Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 3rd ed. (Basic Books, 2017).
Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (Simon & Schuster, 2023).
Waldinger and Schulz, The Good Life.
Dan Witters, “U.S. Depression Rates Reach New Highs,” Gallup, May 17, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx; Renee D. Goodwin et al., “Trends in Anxiety Among Adults in the United States, 2008–2018: Rapid Increases Among Young Adults,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 130 (November 2020): 441–46, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7441973/; and Kannan and Veazie, “US Trends in Social Isolation, Social Engagement, and Companionship—Nationally and by Age, Sex, Race/Ethnicity, Family Income, and Work Hours, 2003–2020.”
Jonathan Haidt, “Teen Mental Health Is Plummeting, and Social Media Is a Major Contributing Cause,” testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Technology, Privacy, and the Law, May 4, 2022, https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testimony.pdf.
Authors’ analyses of University of California, Berkeley, Survey Documentation and Analysis, Study. We again choose not to report post-2018 data because survey administration changes introduce a break in the series between 2018 and 2021. (The trend continues downward.)
King et al., The Space Between.
Murray, Coming Apart.
Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2024,” June 24, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024/.
Gallup, “Trust in Government,” https://news.gallup.com/poll/5392/trust-government.aspx.
Gallup, “Confidence in Institutions,” https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx.
Jessica Grose, “Even Religious People Don’t Trust Religious Institutions,” The New York Times, January 22, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/opinion/religious-institutions-church.html.
Jonathan Ben-Menachem and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, “Police Violence Reduces Trust in the Police Among Black Residents,” PLOS One 19, no. 9 (2024): e0308487, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0308487.
Verdant Labs, “Democratic vs. Republican Occupations,” https://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/index.html. For the analysts’ methodology, see Mark, “Democratic vs. Republican Occupations,” June 2, 2015, https://verdantlabs.com/blog/2015/06/02/politics-of-professions/.
See American National Election Studies, Affective Polarization of Parties: Own-Party and Rival-Party Feelings, https://electionstudies.org/data-tools/anes-guide/anes-guide.html?chart=affective_polarization_parties; and American National Election Studies, “Average Feeling Thermometer Rating Toward Parties,” https://electionstudies.org/data-tools/anes-guide/anes-guide.html?chart=avg_ft_parties.
Sheffield and Winship, The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home, 24–25.
Sheffield and Winship, The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home, 25.
Mary Eberstadt, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics (Templeton Press, 2019).
Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (American Enterprise Institute, 1977).
Berger and Neuhaus, To Empower People.
House Budget Committee Majority Staff, Expanding Opportunity in America: A Discussion Draft from the House Budget Committee, US House of Representatives, Committee on the Budget, July 24, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20150301070908/http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/expanding_opportunity_in_america.pdf.
For a broader discussion, see King et al., The Space Between.
Chana Joffe-Walt, “Unfit for Work: The Startling Rise of Disability in America,” National Public Radio, 2013, https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/.
Scott Winship, “How to Fix Disability Insurance,” National Affairs, Spring 2015, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/how-to-fix-disability-insurance.
Scott Winship, “Reforming the EITC to Reduce Single Parenthood and Ease Work-Family Balance,” Institute for Family Studies, July 10, 2023, https://www.aei.org/op-eds/reforming-the-eitc-to-reduce-single-parenthood-and-ease-work-family-balance/.
Scott Winship, Reforming Tax Credits to Promote Child Opportunity and Aid Working Families, American Enterprise Institute, July 29, 2021, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/reforming-tax-credits-to-promote-child-opportunity-and-aid-working-families/.
Rachel Sheffield, Building a Happy Home: Marriage Education as a Tool to Strengthen Families, US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, March 4, 2022, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/3d102525-6f0d-48ed-92f4-d71edd468ad6/building-a-happy-home.pdf; and Rachel Sheffield, Promoting Stable Marriages and Healthy Families: A Guide for States, Heritage Foundation, November 15, 2023, https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2023-11/BG3797.pdf.
For an intellectual history of the idea, see Winship, Reforming Tax Credits to Promote Child Opportunity and Aid Working Families.
Ian Rowe, “Improving Economic Mobility by Teaching the Success Sequence,” testimony before the Ohio Senate Education Committee, May 6, 2025, https://www.aei.org/research-products/testimony/improving-economic-mobility-by-teaching-the-success-sequence/.
Winship, Reforming Tax Credits to Promote Child Opportunity and Aid Working Families.
Scott Winship, “Our Older Versus Our Younger Selves: Time Travel, Wealth and Family Formation,” in The Future of Building Wealth: Brief Essays on the Best Ideas to Build Wealth—for Everyone, ed. Ray Boshara and Ida Rademacher (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Aspen Institute, 2021), https://www.aei.org/articles/our-older-versus-our-younger-selves-time-travel-wealth-and-family-formation/.
US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, Priced Out: Why Federal Tax Deductions Miss the Mark on Family Affordability, May 18, 2020, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d883d4cc-f94a-47d2-8993-09a3a825f0cd/1-20-priced-out-report.pdf.
Katharine B. Stevens and Matt Weidinger, Improving Early Childhood Development by Allowing Advanced Child Tax Credits, American Enterprise Institute, April 8, 2021, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/improving-early-childhood-development-by-allowing-advanced-child-tax-credits/.
Adam Ozimek and John Lettieri, “How the Next President Can Solve America’s Housing Crisis,” Agglomerations, October 16, 2024, https://agglomerations.substack.com/p/how-the-next-president-can-solve.
US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, Inactive, Disconnected, and Ailing.
King et al., Reconnecting Americans to the Benefits of Work.
Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (Basic Books, 2020).
Jacqueline Varas, Accountability for Bad Apples: Police Reforms to Restore Faith in Institutions, US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, March 22, 2021, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/e54f6c37-017c-49c2-ad0b-de12bcc48978/3-21-police-reform.pdf.
Patrick Brown, Multiple Choice: Increasing Pluralism in the American Educational System, US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Social Capital Project, December 10, 2019, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/a1bed438-766c-40f1-a2c6-9dc85369ee91/jec-report-multiple-choice.pdf.
Burkhauser et al., “Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty Since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure.”
World Bank, Life Expectancy at Birth, Total for the United States (SPDYNLE00INUSA), Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed August 27, 2025, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNLE00INUSA.
Winship, “Should We Believe the Economic Data or Americans’ ‘Lyin’ Eyes?”
Tim Wildschut et al., “Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91, no. 5 (2006): 975–93, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6737405_Nostalgia_Content_Triggers_Functions.