Utah has the highest social capital score, followed by Minnesota and Wisconsin. These states tend to rank highly across all seven subindices as well. 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.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. 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. We have social capital scores for 2,992 of 3,142 counties, containing 99.7 percent of the American population.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.And we hope it will aid policymakers as they seek to address the country’s needs. It is our hope that the availability of the index will inspire researchers to focus more on social capital and its relationship to other features of economic and social life. The Social Capital Project is concurrently providing the state and county data underlying each index, as well as the indices and subindices themselves. The report also presents the geographic distribution of several subcomponents of social capital, including family unity, family interaction, social support, community health, institutional health, collective efficacy, and philanthropic health. It details the construction of the index, presents maps summarizing the geographic distribution of social capital, and establishes that the index is consistently-and often strongly-related to a range of economic, social, and demographic indicators. This report describes a new social capital index created to rectify this problem. 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. Public policy solutions to such challenges are inherently elusive. Indeed, the withering of associational life is itself one of those challenges. Social capital is almost surely an important factor driving many of our nation’s greatest successes and most serious challenges. Download Data (xlsx), Interactive Maps and Rankings
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |