Customer Reviews

Racial Diversity and Social Capital: Equality and Community in America

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Social capital is a scholarly measure of the personal interconnectedness of individuals within a society. Is it a mere coincidence that a drastic decline in "social capital" was accompanied by the civil rights movement and advances in minority rights? Is the declining level of social capital due to a decline in American society (as scholars like Putnam have argued), or is it due to racial factors? Hero sets out to answer these questions in this book.

Hero's basic premise is that the decline of social capital in America is due to existing "racist" social patterns being broken apart by increasing minority rights. This is in contrast to other scholars such as Robert Putnam (_Bowling Alone_) who attribute this phenomenon to increasing social disconnectedness and lament the moral decay of society.

Hero uses statistics, graphs, and charts to make a scientific case for his point. This is perhaps the finest example of political _science_ that I have seen - in each chapter, Hero proposes a hypothesis, tests it with data and statistics, and discusses the results. He highlights data that do not support his hypothesis, but in the end he finds substantial empirical support for his "Racial Diversity" hypothesis and significant evident against Putnam's "Social Capital" hypothesis.