Accountability for Bad Apples: Police Reforms to Restore Faith in Institutions
The widely publicized deaths of Floyd, Taylor, and several other Black Americans over the past few years have weakened trust, sparked outrage, and led to widespread demands for increased police accountability across the nation.
Does Social Media Outrage Erode Civil Society?
Moral outrage, whether manifested as righteous indignation or misinformed vitriol, is a powerful, motivating emotion. According to the social-psychological notion of “negativity bias,” our human tendency is to give greater weight to negative feelings, events, etc. because they are more potent and co...
The Space Between: Renewing the American Tradition of Civil Society
Even in our twenty-first-century American society, associational life ought to be at the center of thinking about our social order and public policy. This report discusses rebuilding civil society. It lays out the nature of our diminished civil society, documents trends in its decline, and charts a ...
Reforming the Charitable Deduction
Rebuilding civil society will require capitalizing on the strengths of America’s associational life to address its weaknesses. One way of doing so is to reform policy so that less of the charitable giving of Americans is subject to taxation. Doing so would be more consistent with the principle that ...
The Wealth of Relations: Expanding Opportunity by Strengthening Families, Communities, and Civil Society
For two years, the Social Capital Project has documented trends in associational life—what we do together—and its distribution across the country. With this evidentiary base established, the Project turns to the development of a policy agenda rooted in social capital. Specifically, the focus will be...
Losing Our Minds: Brain Drain across the United States
Over the past 50 years, the United States has experienced major shifts in geographic mobility patterns among its highly-educated citizens. Some states today are keeping and receiving a greater share of these adults than they used to, while many others are both hemorrhaging their homegrown talent and...
The Wealth of Strong Families, Communities, and Congregations: Utah as a Case Study in Social Capital
Last year, the Social Capital Project released its Social Capital Index, a tool that measures the health of associational life across the United States. As explained in our earlier report, What We Do Together: The State of Associational Life in America, we define associational life as the “web...
Social Capital, Slavery, and the Long Reach of History
This week, marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Senator Mike Lee raised the question of whether a conservative populism could be racially unifying, rather than divisive. Senator Lee emphasized the importance of both advocating personal responsibility and acknowledging deep-seated barriers to opportun...
All the Lonely Americans?
Is America in the middle of a loneliness epidemic? Claims of rising loneliness are often part of a larger narrative about fraying social bonds in America. In this framing, loneliness is seen as one symptom among many of a larger set of problems.
The Geography of Social Capital in America
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, policymak...