When your car can’t start in the morning and you dash next door to ask your neighbour to take your kids to school, you don’t take out money from your wallet to pay them for it. When you go and visit another country and stay with friends they don’t pull out a rate card to bill you for bed and breakfast. These things are example of social capital, which basically is a summation of the goodwill one creates.
I first came across this term a few years back when I was reading an article that spoke about how several decades ago, the people in many middle income American neighbourhoods were really close together and did things as a unit, including sometimes having neighbourhood barbecues. The article spoke about how one could rely on their neighbours to go out on a limb when you were in trouble and said that the extent of this goodwill where people built such rapport that they were willing to do things for each other was a measure of ‘social capital’. Continue reading
