The Problem of Measurement by Francis Fukuyama Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been an extraordinary amount of attention paid to the interrelated issues of social capital, civil society, trust and social norms as central issues for contemporary democracies. The propensity for civil society was said to be an essential condition for the transition to stable democracy in Eastern Europe, and the decline in social capital in the United States is said to be a major problem for American democracy today. Social capital can be defined simply as the existence of a certain set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permit cooperation among them. It is clear that the norms that produce social capital are partible, that is, they can be shared among limited groups of people and not with others in the same society. While social capital exists in all societies, it can distributed in very different ways.
Families are obviously important sources of social capital everywhere.
But family structure differs from one society to another and the strength of family bonds differs, not simply from family ties in other societies, but relative to other types of social ties. What made the Reformation important for Weber was not so much that it encouraged honesty, reciprocity and thrift among individuals, but that these virtues were for the first time widely practiced outside of the family. Robert Putnam has argued that the quality of governance in the different regions of Italy is correlated with social capital, and that social capital has been in decline in the United States since the 1960s. I do not want to engage in a prolonged discussion of the so-called Putnam debate in this context, except to use it to illustrate some of the difficulties involved in measuring social capital. Much of the debate over Putnam's research concerns the empirical validity of his basic finding that American social capital has been declining over the past two generations.