{"id":120,"date":"2026-05-25T09:08:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T09:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=120"},"modified":"2026-05-25T09:08:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T09:08:10","slug":"social-capital-which-u-s-regions-are-bowling-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=120","title":{"rendered":"Social Capital: Which U.S. Regions Are Bowling Alone?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>You\u2019ve probably heard of <em>Bowling Alone<\/em>, the hugely influential 2000 book diagnosing our country\u2019s malaise by Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist. In it, Putnam showed that Americans\u2019 stock of social capital\u2014the fabric of a community\u2019s trust and cooperation\u2014had been plummeting since the 1950s, and that its decline was harming our well-being, personal relationships, health, lifespan, and economic growth. In the quarter-century since the book received widespread attention, social trust, accepted norms, and community cohesion continue to come undone, paving the way for the rise of authoritarian populism and damage to the republic. Indeed, the number of people saying they trust the American people to make judgments under our democratic system stands at just 53 percent, down from 83 percent in April 1974, when\u00a0Gallup\u00a0first started asking the question, amid Watergate and the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=118\">Could New Orleans Be the Model for Fixing Public Schools?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>This loss of trust, which Putnam documented through nearly half a million interviews, has had all sorts of ill effects. It hurts economic activity because, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow\u00a0observed, commercial transactions rely on it. (\u201cIt can be plausibly argued,\u201d he once said, \u201cthat much of the economic backwardness in the world can be explained by the lack of mutual confidence.\u201d) It undermines social mobility,\u00a0as Harvard\u2019s Raj Chetty and his colleagues have shown. And it creates the social alienation that, in\u00a0the words of the Brookings Institution\u2019s Isabel Sawhill, can lead to \u201cschool shootings, opioid addiction, police brutality, and racial strife.\u201d As Putnam found in his fieldwork in Italy in the 1970s, social capital has a profound effect on the functioning of democratic institutions: When it is present, it can build on itself. When it is absent, it is very difficult to rebuild.<\/p>\n<p>At Nationhood Lab, the project I run at Salve Regina University\u2019s Pell Center, we wanted to see if there are regional differences in social capital mirroring those we\u2019ve documented for\u00a0life expectancy,\u00a0gun violence,\u00a0various health problems,\u00a0social vulnerability,\u00a0persistent poverty,\u00a0intergenerational economic mobility, the\u00a0prevalence of authoritarian personalities, and\u00a0support for President Donald Trump and Trumpism. Using a county-level Social Capital Index developed by the economists Anil\u00a0Rupasingha, Stephen J. Goetz, and David Freshwater, we calculated the social capital reserves in each U.S. region, as defined by my American Nations model. That model is based on the settlement geography of the rival societies that colonized North America between the 16<sup>th<\/sup> and late 19<sup>th<\/sup> centuries and comes out of my 2011 book \u202f<em>American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America<\/em>, which showed how this fractured regional geography has shaped our history, constitutional structure, and our varied social and political environments, past and present. (I have written about its political implications\u00a0in the\u202f\u00a0<em>Monthly<\/em>\u00a0for over 15 years; you can also find a detailed summary\u202fhere, and an even wonkier description for scientific researchers in this paper.)<\/p>\n<p>The social capital index score is based on the density of 10 types of associational institutions in the county\u2014including bowling leagues, churches, sports clubs, civic organizations, and labor unions\u2014plus turnout in presidential elections, the Census return rate, and the number of non-profit organizations. Using data for 2014 collected by researchers at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, here are the results by county and, at the top of this article, by regional culture (for clarity.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>The regional pattern<\/strong> <strong>map<\/strong>\u2014which calculates the score for the entire region by weighting each county\u2019s score by its population\u2014reveals a clear pattern. It largely follows whether a region\u2019s cultural value set is oriented toward individualism (\u201cless taxes, less government, less regulation equals more freedom\u201d) or communitarianism (invest in public goods to maintain an environment where the bottom 90 to 99 percent of the population can live in freedom). Three of our \u201caggressively communitarian\u201d regions lead the pack. The Midlands\u2014which had its origins in William Penn\u2019s utopian colonies on the shores of Delaware Bay\u2014has the highest reserves of social capital with an overall index score of -0.16, followed by the Left Coast at -0.2 and Yankeedom (the Greater New England cultural space) at -0.26.<\/p>\n<p>The two regions founded by Imperial Spain, El Norte and Spanish Caribbean, had very poor scores, -1.23 and -1.01, respectively, as did (communitarian, but hyper-urbanized) New Netherland (-1.07) and First Nation, a long-oppressed indigenous region, which was at the bottom of the list at -1.47. This is very similar to the spatial pattern we found for persistent poverty, and reflects previous findings that wealthier places tend to have more social capital.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=116\">Frappuccino Socialists<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Three southern regions that often have among the worst metrics in whatever phenomenon we\u2019ve analyzed\u2014Greater Appalachia, Deep South, and the New France enclave in southern Louisiana\u2014are in the middle of the pack for social capital, as is the Far West. Tidewater, a region that\u2019s rapidly transformed from the apartheid of Jefferson Davis and Jim Crow to among the wealthiest and most progressive of the \u201cnations\u201d over the past 60 years, had the fourth-best score, just behind Yankeedom at -0.34. Hawaii, despite being aggressively communitarian, fared worse than the southern regions and the Far West, with a score of -0.99, probably because its population is highly urbanized, as urban places get dinged, by dint of density and diversity, in the economists\u2019 social capital index.<\/p>\n<p>To control for urbanity effects, we repeated the exercise using only non-urban counties, and the pattern grew starker, with the \u201cbig three\u201d communitarian regions greatly outpacing the rest.<\/p>\n<p>And this is what the results look like if you only look at core, major metro counties, defined as Category 1 in the federal government\u2019s six-tier county classification scheme:<\/p>\n<p>You can see more maps and wonkier explanations over at Nationhood Lab, but the bottom line is this: the distribution of social capital is regionally correlated and likely a product of the divergent attitudes toward public goods across our balkanized federation. The 2014 data is the most recent available that can fully power this particular social capital model. Still, there\u2019s every reason to assume social capital reserves have declined in the ensuing Trump era. Those regions already running on empty are likely to fall into social crisis first. If there\u2019s a return to normalcy in the coming election cycles, it\u2019s these regions that will need help most urgently.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=94\">Vote While You Still Can<\/a><\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Social capital is scarce in atomized \u201cBowling Alone\u201d America, and the fault lines reflect long-standing geographical and social divides<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,5,2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-foreign-policy","category-podcast","category-politics","category-the-monopolized-economy"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Social Capital: Which U.S. Regions Are Bowling Alone? 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