The Surprising Geography of Social Capital in America

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COMMENTARY

The Surprising Geography of Social Capital in America

Michael Hendrix
Medium June 29, 2018
In a moment scarred by the untimely deaths of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, America has confronted the terrible reality that suicide is on the rise in nearly every state in the country. In 2016, suicides outnumbered homicides by two-to-one. More than half of those that took their own lives had no known mental health conditions. Rather, interwoven with substance abuse, was one of the most pernicious afflictions facing modern America: social isolation.
American life in the past few decades has undergone a dramatic transformation. Reports are emerging of a fraying social fabric disentangling the ties of faith, family, and community. Loosening the ties that bind us as a country to one another has profound effects not only on society but on each of us individually, sometimes to terrible effect. Rising affluence has afforded us independence, but we have yet to count the cost to community.
That is, until now. The Joint Economic Committee’s recently released Social Capital Index found few Americans living in areas with high levels of social capital, a measure of how closely tied we are to our communities and to one another. Nearly 60 percent of Americans reside in the bottom two-fifths of states for social capital. There is an unmistakable divide between north and south, with the bottom tier of states running in an unbroken stretch from Florida to California. New York is the only poorly ranked state that sits outside the South....

For the entire article go to:
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/surprising-geography-social-capital-america-11330.html

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