Whiteness of states and their social capital
This is probably like a Pythagorean Theorem of sociology, so I don't claim the finding is original. Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone website has lots of free data, and at the bottom is a list of states and their social capital indexes -- basically, how socially cohesive communities are in that state. It jumps out at you, but here's a scatter-plot just to convince you:
The Spearman rank correlation is +0.72, p less than 10^-6. He later showed that greater ethnic diversity predicted lower trust in neighborhoods, so he surely noticed this pattern earlier. I haven't read the book, so it may even be in there.
posted by agnostic @ 1:17 AM
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The white percent axis only goes down to 60. What about California, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Texas? Aren't they all less than 50% white?
I have an old Putnam post here.
No, they're what is shown. I should add that Putnam left out Alaska and Hawaii, and I left out DC, not being a state.
Interesting. Though the plot is also consistent with the possibility that a small fraction of minorities has no harmful effect; the tipping point in that case seems to be somewhere around 90%.
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