The Value of Social Capital

In the last post, we considered our level of contentment with our present investment in social capital. Maybe you’re satisfied; maybe not. But social capital investment is declining, and the next section of Putnam’s book gives us some solid reasons why we should not be content with that overall social trend. In Section Four of Putnam’s (2000) work, he presents a broad range of data that indicates that social capital is immensely important to the well-being of our communities.

Putnam creates a Social Capital Index for each state in the U.S. as a combined measure of various dimensions of social capital. This unified measure of the level of social capital in each state allows him to perform a variety of statistical comparisons across a number of other well-being indicators. Basically, Putnam looks at the data to determine what correlation there is between social capital and various dimensions of well-being. As might be expected, there is a consistent correlation between social capital and things that most of us would value. Social capital has a strong positive correlation with child welfare, educational performance, and public health, but has a negative correlation with violent crime. Putnam also examines evidence that suggests that social capital contributes to economic growth and prosperity.

Photo credit: FreeImages.com/Dominik Gwarek

At a personal level, Putnam (2000, p. 331) puts it in stark terms:

The bottom line from this multitude of studies: As a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half. If you smoke and belong to no groups, it’s a toss-up statistically whether you should stop smoking or start joining.

Put simply, social capital is a very good thing! Putnam even spends the last chapter of this section examining possible concerns about social capital (e.g., does it come at the expense of tolerance or equality?) and largely lays those concerns to rest. Social capital is an important component of healthy, flourishing societies, and we ought to be deeply concerned about its decline.