Scott Winship on Rebuilding Social Capital
New research finds that social mobility is most often found in communities with intact families.
Every parent appreciates that good parenting plays a critical role in a child’s success. And most people appreciate that their social networks play a key role in their professional advancement. But how do we measure the impact of families and communities on economic opportunity? Are we facing an epidemic of loneliness and despair in America that harms social mobility? These are the questions Scott Winship is trying to answer.
Scott is a charter member of FREOPP’s Board of Advisors, and served as a Visiting Fellow at FREOPP before becoming Project Director at the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, where under Utah Sen. Mike Lee he has been leading the JEC’s Social Capital Project.
I caught up with Scott on my Ricochet podcast, American Wonk, to discuss Scott’s efforts at the JEC to develop ways to measure social capital.
Avik Roy: So Scott, you’ve been busy over the last few years, particularly these last couple years, trying to quantify and document this issue to whatever degree it is that there has been a decline in associational life. Tell us about the overall goals of what you’re trying to do at the Social Capital Project, and about this major report that you put out last year.
Scott Winship: Sure. Well, as you mentioned, the project began in early 2017. It really was the brainchild of Senator Mike Lee, and there aren’t very many members of Congress, I think, who would sponsor a project like this. We’re essentially a startup think tank sitting within a congressional committee. It’s been a real blast to be able to run it. The senator is, I think, interested in social capital primarily because of the things that we know about the importance of our social relationships to our lives, our families, our communities, our religious co-congregants, and our coworkers. He really just wanted us to really shine a spotlight on these issues of social capital. I think what we pursue in policy a lot of times follows what we have evidence for, and there’s a lot of evidence, as you know, and a lot of data on our economic problems. But there’s less of a fact base for the social aspects of the various problems that we’re facing. I think that actually ends up being a big part of the debate over why Donald Trump won in 2016, for instance.
The project has put out a series of reports. Our first one was really intended just to document longer term changes in various indicators of social capital. I can go through that later on if we want to talk about that. We found a number of areas where it looks like our social lives are less rich, less healthy than they used to be. So when we started seeing people talk about an increase in loneliness it made sense to us, that this was part and parcel of the story of our withering social lives. But suspiciously, none of these claims were ever really well-documented, or documented at all.
We did a deep dive on the evidence on loneliness trends, and essentially decided that this is … It’s all a strange game of telephone where people are citing some other thing that was written that claimed that loneliness was on the rise, which cited something else, but ultimately there’s nothing. There’s nothing there behind the claim that is really reliable. We basically say that it could be that loneliness has increased, but there’s certainly no good evidence to support that. It could be that we’ve got a loneliness epidemic, but that could be true without it being the case that loneliness is a lot worse than it used to be.
The strong correlation between social mobility and marriage
Avik Roy: Yeah, it’s interesting. When I read your most recent report on trying to quantify loneliness, and compared that to the original opening salvo from that 81-page report on associational life, what I thought was interesting is, as you know the most recent report, quantifying loneliness itself seems to be harder. The data seems to be more of a mixed bag. But what we know for sure is that the number of Americans who are growing up in married households has declined tremendously. You have this beautiful map in that 2017 report on a county basis, talking about the decline in marriage [the blue-green map below].
What’s interesting to me is if you look at some of the other data out there, if you look at Raj Chetty, the Harvard economist who’s doing a lot of great work on social mobility. His map [the red-orange-yellow one below], county by county, of looking at social mobility tracks almost exactly to the map that you produced in terms of marriage rates and family formation. That seems to be the strongest correlator above all else. In that original report you talk about religious participation, you talk about a couple other things. But that seems to be the one, marriage in particular, that seems to have the strongest association with what we might be looking at here.
Scott Winship: Yeah, I think that’s right. We highlight in that first report a few ways in which family life has probably become less healthy. Certainly more single parenthood is the thing that jumps out, and that’s increasingly the result of more out-of-wedlock births, births to couples who aren’t married. But it’s also due to rising divorce. That trend is actually a little bit tougher to tease out because there are age effects, and the baby boomers screwed things as they go through their life cycle. But it looks like marriages are more likely to end in divorce when you control for all that. Less automatically worrisome, but certainly indicative that family lives are different than they used to be.
There are fewer people who live in families of any sort. There are more people who just live alone on their own, and there are fewer children among families who have children. In a number of ways, it’s definitely true that there are reasons to be worried about our family life. You’re absolutely right that it’s very strongly correlated with economic mobility. We did another report earlier this year where we built the social capital index. Family health is a big part of that index. We show that that is also strongly related to Chetty’s economic mobility indicators, and a bunch of other stuff.
Avik Roy: What else is in the social capital index besides the marriage stats, and the out-of-wedlock birth type stats?
Scott Winship: We create two indices. One at the state level, and one at the county level. It turns out there’s not a lot of great county data out there. The state one is definitely the better one of the two. That has things like family health. It has things like community health, including the number of nonprofit organizations in the area, which also includes religious congregations. It includes things like voting rates. We’ve got the violent crime rate is in there as well as an indicator of how communities are able to enforce social order in their communities. We’ve got several other things in there.
Interestingly, our first report was organized around family, religion, community, work. We started out with a number of indicators for religion. It turns out most of the stuff that you would think is about social capital tends to be pretty strongly correlated with each other. Having states with healthier families tend to also have more volunteering, and more charitable giving, and lower violent crime.
The big exception was that the half a dozen religious indicators that we had were not very strongly correlated with everything else. That’s something that we need to explore a little bit more, but it was very striking. We’ve looked into a little bit more since, and there’s something about the different kinds of congregations, denominations out there that we think is probably accounting for. It turns out Southern Baptists it looks like have low social capital, and so a lot of the states with the lowest social capital have large numbers of Southern Baptists. Then there are other denominations and ethnic groups that have stronger social capital, it looks like.
Avik Roy: Yeah. One of the interesting things about all the visualizations you’ve done of the data, particularly geographic stuff, is that in one map that I’m looking at, the [greenish] part of the map is the good part. The navy blue is the bad part in terms of unhealthy social capital. That blue part of the map basically stretches … It’s the bottom half of the country, from the bottom geographic half of the country. From California through New Mexico, through Arkansas, through North Carolina and south. That’s where social capital seems to be at its weakest. It’s not really a red and blue state phenomenon. It seems to be a southern United States phenomenon, to a large degree. You mention the point about high proportions of Southern Baptists being associated with some of these challenges. You’d think that’s somewhat counterintuitive, right? Because Southern Baptists are talking a lot about family formation, its importance, and family coherence and its importance. What do you think is going on there?
Scott Winship: Yeah. It’s a fascinating result. Of the bottom 20 states in terms of social capital, 17 of them are in this contiguous block that goes from California all the way over to Florida and Georgia. They’re home to 45 percent of Americans, and 74 percent of Americans who live in bottom fifth social capital counties.
Avik Roy: That’s amazing.
Why do Southern Baptists have low social capital?
Scott Winship: Yeah. It’s really striking. We’ve started to think about why that might be the case, and played around a little bit with some data. For Southern Baptists specifically, of course there’s a bunch of things that are inter-correlated here, and that make it really difficult to tease out what’s going on. Poverty I think is a big thing that’s common to both the Southeast and the Southwest. We have three different blocks, demographically, of people in these states that are very distinct geographically. There’s a disproportionately white Appalachian area. There’s a disproportionately Black Southeast area, and a disproportionately Latino and Native American Southwestern area.
Each of those, I think, probably has a unique history behind it. But the Southern Baptists … We’ve started thinking about this distinction between public Protestants and private Protestants. So if you think about the old Puritans, and the Yankees in the Northeast, they were really all about creating the perfect community on Earth. They were very interventionist, versus a lot of other parts of the United States. One of the driving factors behind the Civil War … States that actually were settled by a lot of these Yankees and Puritans still have stronger social capital today. In contrast, it may that there are other denominations like Southern Baptists where the emphasis is more on the individual’s relationship with God, and less on creating community, than there is just on the individual relationships.
That’s one thing we’re looking at. There’s this other interesting finding. We looked at ancestry of people, and how that correlates with social capital across states. It turns out there’s this group where if you ask them what their ancestry is, instead of saying German American, or Mexican American, or African American they just say they’re American. Those folks tend to be southern whites. Lots of them are in Appalachia. It turns out that the more people who answer that they are of American ancestry, the worse is the state’s social capital. That’s another cultural finding that we’re looking at.
Avik Roy: That’s definitely a counterintuitive one as well.
Scott Winship: Yeah. There are some other obvious patterns that stick out in the data as well. There’s an area in the Southeast that I’ve been calling the southeast crescent, that very clearly stands out on the county map. You just see this crescent stretching from North Carolina through Alabama, Mississippi, and then over to Louisiana and Arkansas. We’ve held that map up to maps of slavery in the 1860s, and it’s just an incredibly striking correspondence on a county by county basis. That’s an instance where clearly history really does make a big difference for today’s social capital levels. I think a big part of the story is history and migration patterns, what sorts of people settled to different parts of the country. We’re really only beginning to take a crack at that.
Oh, and the other crazy theory is one of the strongest correlations we’ve found, if you look at our map this isn’t surprising. One of the strongest correlations we’ve found is between temperature and social capital. You can come up with half-baked ideas about why that might be. If there are places that are hotter, maybe people are less inclined to go outside. They’ve got air conditioning now. There could be nothing there at all, as I said. All of this stuff is correlated with each other, but that was a really interesting result.
Avik Roy: Anything else that was surprising to you coming out of the research you’ve been doing over the last several years?
Scott Winship: In terms of the geographic patterns, I was certainly surprised at how concentrated in geographically the worst states were. The best states that we’ve found tend to be states that were settled by Yankees. They tend to have high German populations. They’re two geographic blocks. One goes from Utah to Wisconsin. I should say I was horrified when this all came when we finished up the index. The number one state in the country was Utah, which is my boss’s home state. The number two country was Minnesota, which is the home state of the chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. It looks a little suspicious in that regard, except that the report—
Avik Roy: Correlation is not causation.
Scott Winship: That’s right, and in the report we point to any number of other results that support us. Actually, our index correlates at .8 with one that Robert Putnam created in the 1990s. That’s the one block, and the other block is Northern New England, which is where I’m from. It looks even worse, like the books were cooked. But I can assure you they were not.
Deaths of despair
Avik Roy: I have complete confidence in your integrity, Scott. How about the research by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton? They found this rise in opioid deaths, alcoholism, suicide for whites without a college degree. Does a map of that problem also map onto what you’ve described here, or is that map different?
Scott Winship: Yeah. It’s a great question. We are currently working on a report that will specifically answer that. It looks like our initial attempts to just eyeball maps are that it doesn’t look as strongly related to most of our social capital indexes. We have some sub indexes that are around community, or around families. The correlations aren’t as strong as you might expect. I think the report may end up being more about the incoherence of this construct of deaths of despair.
Case and Deaton combine deaths from drug overdoses, deaths from essentially alcoholic liver disease, and suicides. If you look at the geographic patterns for which states are high, and which of these … If you look at the time trends, there’s not nearly as much correspondence as you might think. I’ve always felt that this is a little bit of a … In social science we call this “specification search” when you’re looking at a bunch of things, and then you find one instance where a finding sticks out.
I tend to think that’s the story with deaths of despair. It’s certain cohorts of whites, but not younger cohorts, or older cohorts, and certainly not true among non-whites that deaths of despair, or that mortality generally is increasing. I’m inclined to look at each of these things separately. We’ve done a fair amount of work on the opiod crisis, actually. I’m not sure what we gain by throwing them all together, and then talking about them as if they were primarily problems of economics too, which I think Case and Deaton have also done. They’ve soft pedaled a little bit, I think, to criticism. Hopefully we’ll lay all that out here within another couple of months with our own report.
The legacy of slavery
Avik Roy: One other thing I wanted to ask you, Scott, is you alluded to earlier the crescent of slavery in the 19th century with your social capital maps. We’ve been talking a little bit about, obviously, the Case-Deaton issue with whites without a college degree. But your work is not looking exclusively at whites. You’re looking at everybody. To what degree is social capital, the declines in social capital, the problems with social capital a white issue, or the trends a white issue versus a broader issue? Or is it different ethnic compositions as you implied in different parts of the country? What’s going on there? To what degree is social capital something that is a universal problem in America, or a problem connected to certain populations in certain parts of the country?
Scott Winship: Yeah, another great question. We have not looked a lot at that, partly just because there’s not … There’s surprisingly little trend data, especially longer term trend data, on social capital indicators. The big exception there, of course, is family data. There’s a case where things look like they’ve gotten worse across the board. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously, in 1965, put out the Moynihan report in which he basically warned that—he was talking about African American families at the time—he warned that if trends continued that we would see these big societal problems related to the fact that more kids were growing up without both parents present.
It was very controversial at the time. History proved him right, but he also wrote in later stuff about how this was not just a problem in the African American community by any means. We’ve absolutely seen among whites out-of-wedlock births become much more common. Single parenthood become much more common, to the extent that they’re really at levels that Moynihan was trying to sound the alarm about among African Americans in the early 1960s. That’s at least one case where we’ve got good data, and where it’s pretty clear it’s been across the board.
We find, in terms of geographic variation, that states with more, as I said, more American ancestry folks who tend to be white, states with more African-Americans, states with more Mexican-Americans do tend to have lower social capital. Before I think people jump to oh, pick your pet theory about race, whether evil or progressive. We also found that the more Indian-Americans, for instance, more Chinese-Americans, East Indian-Americans, the more Chinese-Americans a state has, the worse its social capital.
There could be also something just about diversity that reduces social capital. That’s a live debate in academia, I think. It makes intuitive sense to me that forget ethnicity, if you live around people who don’t share a lot in common with you it’s going to be more difficult. It’s going to require more work to create a social life that benefits everybody, as opposed to if lots of these states Northern New England I could tell you are almost entirely white, entirely Christian. When you know everybody, and everyone is like you it’s going to be easier for social capital to develop. I think it’s a live debate, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if diversity itself, ethnic or otherwise, makes social capital tougher to build.
Avik Roy: It’s interesting that you bring that up, because one thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, or actually for a long time is I think it’s pretty well … There’s a growing mountain of evidence that I know you’ve participated in about the correlation in the United States of out-of-wedlock births to poverty. You’re more likely to grow up in poverty if you grow up in a family where you don’t have both parents. What’s interesting about that is actually, if you look at the industrialized world, if you look at the statistics from the OECD out-of-wedlock births in the US are right around the OECD average at about 40 percent or so.
Some of the countries that are really high in terms of out-of-wedlock births are countries like Denmark, Sweden and Norway, which hover in the 60 percent range overall. Those are countries with pretty high social capital, and not a lot of the kind of problems with economic and social breakdown that we’re always concerned about here. Maybe the reason is that you have a lot more cultural coalition cohesion because those countries have, relative to the Unites States, much smaller minority populations, much stricter immigration policies.
Scott Winship: Yeah, I think there could be something to that. A lot of those states are also just very small. I think when you have a large country like the United States you’re just inevitably going to have more diversity than you do in a much smaller country. It’s the difference between looking at California and looking at Rhode Island, in some ways. But immigration policy I think certainly can make a big difference. The other things that’s different about a lot of the social democratic Scandinavian countries is that there are a lot of births where the couple isn’t legally married, but cohabitation in those countries tends to be quite a bit stronger than cohabitation in the United States.
Cohabitation in the United States is very, very fragile. I think a pretty strong majority of couples who are together at the birth of their kid but who aren’t married, the relationship tends to dissolve. That’s one way in which maybe our social capital deficits are actually really are worse there in a way that the data doesn’t reflect because, while they’re not legally married, they do, it appears, have stronger relationships outside marriage than in the United States.
Avik Roy: What are you seeing in terms of the very latest data? What I mean by that is we’ve had this problem, as you alluded to, that Daniel Patrick Moynihan talked about famously in the ’60s about out-of-wedlock births. We’ve seen out-of-wedlock births rise for every racial and ethnic group. We’re now at about 75 percent for African-Americans, and I think it’s 50 percent or so for Hispanics. What is it? 40 percent or so for white Americans. We’re seeing rising numbers. The question I have now is okay, are we plateauing to some degree? Are those numbers continuing to rise? Is there a bottom or a ceiling to the rise in out-of-wedlock births?
Scott Winship: Yeah. Partly it varies by group. I would say in general there’s been some reversal of the problematic trends that we’ve seen for decades, since the financial crisis and the Great Recession. We’re still only a decade out so it’s unclear whether these are permanent trends or not, but it does look like things are getting a little bit better in some regards in terms of out-of-wedlock births, for instance. I have done some work arguing that welfare reform in the 1990s actually may have been responsible for making some of the trends, some the bad trends, stop, or reverse, or just slow down.
If you look at trends for African-Americans, if you look at trends for younger mothers, if you … In other words, the groups who were disproportionately affected by welfare reform. The trends change and shift more dramatically than if you look at whites, or if you look at older women. It’s patterned in ways that are exactly what you would expect to see if welfare reform really did make a difference. It’s probably not the conventional wisdom in academia, that welfare reform did affect families. I think the conventional wisdom is that it didn’t because we had these marriage promotion programs that we tried in the 2000s, and which turned out not to have worked that well. But I think it’s at least possible that some of the trends started getting better in the early 1990s because of welfare reform, and the federal experimentation with state reforms that preceded it.
How does U.S. welfare policy affect family formation and breakdown?
Avik Roy: I love the way you’re answering my questions Scott, because you keep leading to me to the next thing I wanted to ask you. In this case, it’s just what you described. You’re certainly one of the people who has been raising this concern over the years about the degree to which welfare policy affects family formation and breakage. How does that work in your mind? What is it about welfare policy, whether it’s the pre-’96 welfare policy or today’s welfare policy that encourages people to live in non-intact families? What is it about welfare that does that? If there were someone more on the left on this show with us that person’s like come on, everyone wants to live in a marriage. Everyone wants to live in intact families. Why on Earth would welfare disincentivize that?
Scott Winship: Yeah, absolutely. I think the problem is much less severe in our cash welfare program, TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families], today than it used to be. But all of the ways that it used to be a problem for AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] are still problems I think in a number of other safety net programs we had. But before welfare reform there were about 10 percent of the families I think getting AFDC were married parent families. That grew over time, as policymakers became a little bit more generous towards married couple families. But for the most part, the old cash welfare program, AFDC, was something for families headed by single mothers. If a mother got married, especially if her husband had significant income, then they might no longer qualify to get AFDC benefits. All the incentives were for people to not get married in the first place, to even divorce if they were already married.
Charles Murray I think has argued most eloquently in his old classic, Losing Ground. It really does look like that there are patterns that would suggest that as welfare became more generous, single parenthood rose. Certainly I don’t think anyone argues it was the only reason for that, but I think it probably was a big deal. Today in programs you have these similar marriage penalties in say the SNAP program, where if you have two people, a man and a woman, with a child but living apart, each of them getting SNAP benefits, if they got married and moved in together their combined incomes might be such that they would no longer be eligible for benefits.
There are also some tax programs like the earned income tax credit, which I think is fantastic, but which also have a marriage disincentive built into them. Again, if you have this mother father family living apart, and they’re both getting the earned income tax credit, which means they’re both working. It’s something everybody wants. But then they decide to get married, and move in together and continue both working. Well, their combined incomes may make them ineligible for the EITC or will reduce the amount of the EITC they get. I do think this is one of the few policy areas where I can imagine the federal government doing something differently to promote social capital. We haven’t done a lot with policy yet on the project, and that’s just as well for me because when I start to think about how the federal government, for instance, could affect some of these trends it’s just not always obvious at all.
Avik Roy: It’s interesting because it’s a bit of a Catch-22. If you say, “Let’s reform the welfare system so as to not penalize low income married couples, or to reward single motherhood,” which implicitly, as you point out, many programs do, if we were to reform welfare to adjust for those problems you’d certainly have a lot of people concerned with some legitimacy that you’d be punishing single mothers. Okay, the person’s already single. Now you’re going to take away their benefits on top of that. That person is going to have even a tougher time trying to break through. Conceptually, how would you actually try to reform these systems in a way, or these programs in a way that wouldn’t punish marriage, or that would encourage family formation in ways that could gain wider acceptance, perhaps?
Scott Winship: Yeah. I think the two types of proposal that I’ve had in the past … I should say this is not anything that I’ve done for The Social Capital Project, so it should not be attributed to the JEC or Senator Lee. I do think that the welfare reforms of the 1990s are a model for what we could do in other programs. At the time, I was actually pretty far left, and pretty convinced as Moynihan was that welfare reform was going to be a disaster for poor people, and opposed it on those grounds.
Over time, I think the evidence is just pretty clear that, in terms of poverty anyway, low income kids and low income families headed by single moms are much better in part as a result of the welfare reform. I do think the magic combination that we came up with in the 1990s that could be applied to things like SNAP, the food stamp program, potentially Medicaid are one, work requirements, and potentially time limits. But two, with a very generous exemption for people who really just have such profound personal problems that they’re never going to be attractive to employers, or children of young mothers, things like that, and see work incentives like the earned income tax credit that ensure that the people who do the right thing actually are better off for it. I think, absent the EITC expansion, it’s not at all clear that people who move from welfare to work would be better of in terms of poverty.
I think that is one way to go. As I said, I do think it did have an impact on some of the trends on family structure. The other proposal that I’ve had, which nobody has wanted to touch at all for not unsurprising reasons, is we have this child tax credit program that is refundable, so even if you don’t pay taxes, as long as you work you’re eligible for at least a small tax credit. What I proposed is not to cut that for single mothers, but to expand it, make it more generous for married parents. To make it quite a bit more generous, such that people who were … Imagine 19 year olds who aren’t always thinking the most rationally, or may not have as much hope about their futures as a lot of us might’ve had at 19.
But some sort of big signal that oh, if I’m a little bit more careful in terms of not getting pregnant, if I wait a few more years until I’m in a better situation myself with a partner that I like a lot more, then I would qualify for this big child tax credit. Over, say, 10 or 12 years of a child’s lifetime that would translate into quite a bit more money than if somebody wasn’t careful, and became pregnant as a single parent earlier. I should emphasize that I wouldn’t actually qualify for this tax credit that I’ve proposed. It’s not me wanting to dump on single parents. I actually am a halftime single parent. But I also think it’s just, in some ways, because I’m a single parent I can see how growing up with two parents really is just an incredible leg up in life, I think. Those are the two proposals that I’ve played around with in the past.
Avik Roy: Related to that, one thing that we’ve alluded to several times it the welfare reform of ’96. One of the things at least that’s remarkable about the welfare reform effort in ’96 is that it was signed into law by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. In fact, there was a whole movement in the late ’80s and early to mid ’90s by what was then called the neoliberals, the center left Democrats who, while generally progressive, were much more pragmatic on welfare, and agreed with the Charles Murray critique of LBJ-era welfare policy. It seems like the Democratic Party has moved in the opposite direction lately.
Around the time that you published that report on the 20th anniversary of the welfare reform bill, there had been a similar amount of commentary on the left saying welfare reform was a total failure. It was a total mistake. It was a betrayal of Democratic principles, et cetera. I’m wondering now that you’re on Capitol Hill, you’ve been working on the Hill for a couple years now, or almost a couple years. What’s your sense of the degree to which it’s possible to have a bipartisan approach to welfare reform like we did in the ‘90s? Is that just impossible to conceive of, or are there people that you run into on the Democratic side who are open to some of these ideas?
Scott Winship: Yeah…I think actually Republicans have really made some pretty strong efforts to temper some of the most red meat, tougher proposals that are out there to the point where there are folks that at The Heritage Foundation, for instance, I think who believe that the Senate version of the SNAP bill is just unbelievably weak. But at this point, the red lines I think for most progressives are a very high threshold to clear if folks want a bipartisan bill. As long as the left believes that welfare reform was a failure despite all the evidence that poverty dropped, despite the fact that the extreme poverty, two dollar a day poverty evidence that they cite has really been shown to be just wrong. But until the left acknowledges that welfare reform probably did help poor people I don’t think they’re going to be willing to move at all on the direction of the reforms that we did in 1996.
I should say the thing that maybe could bring some people on board is if more Republicans were interested in expanding the earned income tax credit. I think there’s a dangerous movement on the right to be opposed to the EITC. There’s a fair amount of improper payments made in the program, as there are in a lot of tax programs. It’s usually characterized as fraud. I think it’s often probably much more complicated. It’s couples who both have custody of children, and are both taking the credit when only one of them should be. But nevertheless, there is a suspicion among conservatives that this EITC is not a good program. That would be a real tragedy to me, because the EITC promotes work. It’s really the conservative response to liberal efforts to raise the minimum wage, which again I think would hurt poor people. That’s one area I think were Republicans, if they wanted to win some bipartisan support, could move a little bit on.
Avik Roy: What’s next from The Social Capital Project?
Scott Winship: Well, we’ve got a busy fall. We hope to have another report out by the end of the month, potentially within a couple weeks, on disconnected men, men who are out of the labor force. Mining the area that AEI’s Nick Eberstadt has really been the top researcher on. Trying to figure out who these guys are who are neither working nor looking for work. I think we’ll have some interesting things to say there. We’ve uncovered a dataset that social scientists haven’t really discovered. It’s allowed us to say a few new things, I think.
We’re going to do something on brain drain, which we’re concerned about in terms of regional polarization in the United States, this divide between cosmopolitan coastals, and heartland traditionalists. We’re looking at for each state how much brain drain they have, in terms of the extent to which they’re losing the people born in the state, who then go onto to get the highest education. We’re still analyzing that data, but I think that’ll be a really interesting report. We will have this report on deaths of despair that I mentioned that’ll come out after that.
Then the other big one that we’re looking at is economic mobility, where we’ll show the correlations of our index with various majors that Raj Chetty has come out with, where we’ll highlight the social capital findings in Chetty’s research that I think have been lost a little bit just in the stream of great papers that have come out from that project. But we want to highlight the ones related to family and social capital that I think haven’t gotten quite enough attention. That’s our fall at this point, and then we’ll see how the elections go. That will determine whether Senator Lee is the chairman of the committee in the next Congress or not, and go from there depending on what happens.
Avik Roy: Well, that’s a full menu. Best of luck with all that. I want to thank you for joining us today. It’s been a great conversation.
Scott Winship: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Avik. It’s always a pleasure.
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