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thanks to everyone who voted in this you're all wrong and you'll be prominently mocked and shamed in my next big paper for aei https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1294474497811243008
and to the people who said it was building social capital to gang up with strangers to murder somebody you all hate but not building social capital to vigilante cliff-push a serial killer *chef kiss*
I know it's not vogue to say "social capital means good things only" but then again "capital" is generally considered to be a component of the production function, it produces returns. So social capital should produce returns for society's production function.
And society's production function generally precludes wanton murder and generally includes raising children to be decent and so activities which fail to set a good standard of behavior will never qualify as social capital sorry not sorry
If it's not morally laudable under at least some publicly-justifiable and coherent moral system which will be endorsed by some non-trivial non-abhorrent constituency which actually can be shown to exist today then it is categorically not social capital.
which is to say, "there is no neutral account of social capital"
all social capital means is immanentize the eschaton is what im saying
Now, not sarcastically:
Thanks to everybody who voted! Your responses were interesting, as were the comments. And you proved the point I was hoping to prove, which is that "social capital" is a term very few people understand and those who think they understand it disagree
Thanks to everybody who voted! Your responses were interesting, as were the comments. And you proved the point I was hoping to prove, which is that "social capital" is a term very few people understand and those who think they understand it disagree
One kind of funny thing is that of all these questions basically the only one that social capital researchers actually have data on is the one that a majority of people said was NOT social capital: nonprofit registrations! https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1294481081828290561
Now of course many registered nonprofits actually DO stuff so it's not quite that question..... but a toooon of nonprofits are dead letters. NCCS data suggests like 70% of nonprofits may just be paper entities.
And yet, that's the kind of data we actually have.
*shrugs so hard the heavens collapse on Robert Putnam*
*shrugs so hard the heavens collapse on Robert Putnam*
ASIDE: I always forget his first name is Robert. I usually remember it as Thomas. Because I played Thomas Putnam in the Crucible in high school.
I've always resented type-casting.
I've always resented type-casting.
