CONCEPT
Social Capital
The connections among individuals — the social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them — whose accumulated stock determines whether communities can coordinate action, build trust, and sustain institutions.
Social capital refers to the features of social organization — networks, norms, and trust — that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives. Unlike financial capital, which is held individually and depleted through use, social capital is held collectively and increases through use. Every time a norm of reciprocity is honored, every time trust is demonstrated under conditions of uncertainty, the stock grows. Robert Putnam's decades of research demonstrated that communities with higher stocks of social capital perform better across virtually every metric: lower crime, better schools, healthier populations, more responsive government. The mechanism is not mysterious. People who trust each other cooperate more readily, monitor institutions more effectively, and invest in public goods more generously. The workplace, by the twenty-first century, had become one of the last remaining sites of rich social capital production for American adults — and AI's elimination of structural interdependence threatens precisely this remaining reservoir.
