This is an interesting and insightful report by libertarian-leaning Senator Mike Lee of Utah. So because of the interest beyond economic matters to the health of our associational life.
The Geography of Social Capital in America
You can read the rest. Here's some of the data so you can see what matters and the results.Social capital is almost surely an important factor driving many of our nation’s greatest successes and most serious challenges. Indeed, the withering of associational life is itself one of those challenges. Public policy solutions to such challenges are inherently elusive. But at present, policymakers and researchers lack the high-quality contemporary measures of social capital available at the state and local levels to even try proposing solutions that are attuned to associational life.
This report describes a new social capital index created to rectify this problem....
Among the findings:
- The top fifth of states, in terms of social capital scores, are home to just nine percent of Americans, while 29 percent live in bottom-fifth states.
- We have social capital scores for 2,992 of 3,142 counties, containing 99.7 percent of the American population. Just eight percent of Americans live in the top fifth of these counties, while 39 percent of the population lives in the bottom fifth of counties. Nearly six in ten (59 percent) of Americans live in the bottom two fifths of counties, compared with 24 percent living in the top two fifths.
- The 12 states with the highest social capital scores are distributed across two continuous blocs: nine states running from Utah, through Wyoming and Colorado, across the Dakotas and Nebraska, and over to Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin; and the three Northern New England states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. These states tend to rank highly across all seven subindices as well. Utah has the highest social capital score, followed by Minnesota and Wisconsin.
- Of the 11 states with the lowest levels of social capital, ten of them fall within a contiguous bloc of states running from Nevada, across the Southwest and South over to Georgia and Florida. New York is the only state in the bottom 11 that is outside this group. Louisiana has the lowest social capital score, followed by Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico.
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You should go there to see your state and county scores.
Here's a breif summary of what social capital is:
As discussed in our flagship report, “What We Do Together,” the basic idea of social capital as something important that is related to social relationships, social networks, and civil society has a long history. 2 The reference to capital suggests that key to the concept is the conjecture that aspects of our associational life are productive for us. 3 Some scholars have described social capital as inhering in our social networks, as an attribute of collectives. 4 Communities may be said to have more or less productive social capital, or social capital that is differentially productive for the particular ends valued by community members. Others have put the focus on the individual, so that a person’s social capital may be characterized as more or less productive for them. 5 These different emphases may be reconciled by positing social capital as a feature of individual relationships, so that an individual’s social capital is typified by the aggregation of her relationships, and community-wide social capital is the aggregation of all the relationships across members.