Overview

Whole nations now worry about their social lives. There s a growing awareness that social ties are fundamental to wealth creation, economic growth, and competitiveness. As we saw in chapter 1, four decades of growing environmental awareness have taught us to value natural capital as well as industrial capital. Now social capital defined as networks, together with shared norms, values and understandings, that facilitate cooperation within or among groups ^{[ 1]} is also on the agenda. The worry is that although some people may be getting richer in money terms, economic progress damages the ties that hold society together. Social capital is harder to measure than industrial or natural assets; it also seems to be delicate and hard to exploit, like a rain forest most of whose secrets remain undiscovered. But social capital interests governments because they see it as a possible solution to the care crisis. Turnover in the third sector or support economy is huge 65 percent of GDP by some estimates. Expenditures on health care, disability allowances, retirement and pensions, survivors pensions, family and child benefits, unemployment, and other forms of social support play a major role in the budget of modern states and the amounts keep rising: Health care spending is growing faster than GDP in most rich countries. ^[2]

The financial situation is less extreme in so-called less-developed countries. The poorest nations spend two hundred times less per person on health ($11) than do high-income ones, which average $1,907. ^[3] But rich countries risk impoverishing themselves by...