Is Britain bowling alone?

Britain’s benefits system may be doing something far worse than trapping people in poverty. It may be destroying the one resource they need to escape it.

We have become fluent in one language of inequality. We speak of income gaps, wealth gaps, the Gini coefficient, decile distribution effects, the gap between the top ten per cent and the bottom ten per cent. These measures have their place. But they share a common assumption: that inequality is, at its core, a story about money, and that what separates the thriving from the struggling is primarily the quantity of resources they possess.

This is wrong — or at least radically incomplete.

Inequality is multidimensional and self-reinforcing. The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen spent much of his career arguing that what matters is not just what people have, but what they are able to do and be: their capabilities. A person with a disability may have sufficient income but lack the freedom of movement that makes independence possible. A person with adequate money but no social connections may be unable to access the labour market, the housing market, or the informal networks through which opportunity actually flows. Income is one resource among many. It is not a proxy for the others, and it cannot purchase them.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know

One of the most important of these non-income resources - perhaps the most important - is social capital: the value that inheres in relationships. Trust between neighbours. Membership of civic organisations. Neighbours. Family stability. Participation in communal life. The informal networks through which people find jobs, receive support in hard times, develop a sense of collective purpose, and feel that they belong to something larger than themselves. Social capital is not a soft concept. It is a resource, as real and as consequential as money (perhaps more so), and its distribution across society is as unequal as the distribution of income - and as consequential for life outcomes.

But in the UK, we don’t measure it. As a result, we only see social cohesion and equality through the bars of an income spreadsheet. We’re losing sight of each other. But the pieces are there, for those with an eye to see them.

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Enter Robert Putnam

The person who did most to put social capital at the centre of public debate was the American academic Robert Putnam. His 2000 book Bowling Alone documented one of the most striking social trends of the twentieth century: the collapse of associational life in America.

Hus argument was built on an extraordinary range of evidence. Americans were joining fewer clubs, attending fewer meetings, going to church less, trusting their neighbours less, voting less, socialising less. The bowling leagues that had once filled church halls and community centres across America were emptying — while the number of people bowling was actually rising. Americans were bowling alone: physically present in the same building, but no longer embedded in the shared institutions that had once constituted community life.

The decline was not random. It tracked across virtually every measure of civic engagement simultaneously — membership of the PTA and the Rotary Club, attendance at town meetings, participation in local elections, even the frequency of having friends over for dinner. And it was concentrated in the generations that came of age after roughly 1960. Putnam called the cohort that built social capital through the Depression and the Second World War the “long civic generation.” As that generation aged and died, it was not replaced by equally civic successors. Something had broken in the transmission of social habits.

In his 2020 book The Upswing, Putnam widened the lens dramatically. The social capital decline documented in Bowling Alone was not an isolated phenomenon, he argued, but part of a vast, century-long arc. From the 1890s through to the 1960s, America moved across every measurable dimension — economic equality, political cooperation, social connectedness, cultural communitarianism — toward a more cohesive, more trusting, more “we”-oriented society. Then, around 1965, something turned. Inequality started rising. Political polarisation deepened. Social trust collapsed. The culture shifted from “we” toward “I.”

Putnam called this the “I-we-I” curve: America’s long upswing toward solidarity, followed by its long descent back into fragmentation. The social capital story was not a blip. It was the defining feature of American social life in the second half of the twentieth century.

What Putnam did not fully pursue (at least not at the level of the individual) was the question of who, specifically, had been most harmed by this collapse. His analysis was aggregate and geographic: states, counties, communities. He could tell you that West Virginia had lower social capital than Minnesota. He could not tell you which individuals within West Virginia had high or low social capital, or what predicted their position. And he did not systematically ask what role the welfare system played in the distribution of social capital across people. That question has been left to others.

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The AEI update

In August 2024, three economists at the American Enterprise Institute — Kevin Corinth, Scott Winship, and Thomas O’Rourke — published a paper that takes Putnam’s framework and did something with it that Putnam never attempted: it measures social capital at the individual level and maps it against income, broken down by source. It was a major advance towards the measurement and understanding of this.

They took 22 variables across six dimensions - community engagement, family strength, social trust, social connection, religious involvement, and work - drawn from four nationally representative American datasets. It is the most methodologically rigorous individual-level social capital measure yet produced. It correlates strongly with Putnam’s own state-level indices when aggregated upward, confirming that it is capturing the same underlying concept.

What it finds is stark.

Social capital rises with income. This is not surprising - wealthier people are more connected, more civically engaged, and more trusting. But the more important finding is what happens when you decompose income by source. For those at the bottom of the income distribution, earning an extra $10,000 from work is associated with measurably higher social capital — more civic participation, stronger community ties, greater trust in others. The same $10,000 from welfare pulls in the opposite direction. And when you look at the cumulative effect (comparing those who rely on the state for most of their income, vs net tax contribitors) the gap in social capital is larger than the difference between America's most and least connected states. That is not a rounding error. It is a chasm. And it holds even after controlling for age, sex, race, ethnicity, and education.

The AEI authors are careful about causation. They acknowledge that unobserved characteristics may explain both low social capital and high benefit dependency simultaneously. But low social capital and welfare are correlated - independently of income level and demographics - then this has implications. A benefits system that successfully raises the incomes of the most disadvantaged while doing nothing about their social capital is, at best, addressing half the problem.

And here is the mechanism that makes this genuinely dangerous rather than merely unfortunate. The people at the bottom of the income distribution are precisely those for whom social capital matters most as a pathway out. For them, a $10,000 increase in salary corresponds to big lift in social capital — more than four times the gain for $10k for those higher up the distribution.

Work, for the poorest, is not just income.

Work is the primary mechanism through which social capital accumulates: the colleagues, the routines, the civic habits, the sense of mutual obligation, the professional networks, the generalised trust that grows from sustained participation in shared institutions. A welfare system that swaps salary for handouts therefore imposes what the AEI paper describes as a “double disadvantage.” The individual has low income and low social capital.

These twin deficits compound each other. Low social capital makes escape from low income harder, because it is through social capital that people actually find jobs, access opportunities, and develop the agency that makes self-improvement feel possible. But the benefit system, which might seem to address the income problem, simultaneously suppresses the accumulation of the social capital that would enable escape. It pushes people down and, in the same motion, takes away the ladder.

This is not what the system intends. It is what the system does.

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Where is Britain’s alternative?

The Corinth-Winship paper is an American study. The data is American, the welfare system is American, and the political context - the long debate about “welfare dependency” that runs from Daniel Patrick Moynihan through Charles Murray to the present - is distinctively American. This self-critical country whose social fabric astonished De Tocqueville is leading the world in examining the strength of this fabric - and sounding the alarm if its weak.

But in the UK, we don’t. We buy Putnam’s books and talk about the fate of America but we don’t think of applying the same lens to our own country. We write welfare cheques, and think that’s enough. We care enough to pay, but not to ask. Not to look at how life really is in our poorest neighbourhoods. We don’t ask whether the welfare has destroyed the work incentive for the low-paid, or is eroding that all-important social capital.

But the notion of social capital is universal. If work generates social capital and welfare does not - if the source of income matters, not just the quantity - then any welfare system, in any country, that substitutes welfare for salary risks the same dynamic. The social capital erosion the AEI paper documents is not a peculiarity of American poverty. It is a predictable consequence of any system that removes people from employment without providing an alternative source of the non-income goods that work supplies.

Britain has not had this debate. Niall Ferguson came close in his Reith lecture, but there has not been much else. I was one of the guests invited to see Putnam give an the RSA’s Patron Lecture on this last year in the presence of the Princess Royal:-

The Royal Society of Arts then launched a piece of original UK research called “Revealing Social Capital,” funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Analysing six billion friendships in the UK using anonymised Facebook data, it found that children who grew up in areas where people from different socioeconomic backgrounds become friends earn around £2,924 more per year at age 28. It is perhaps most high-profile social capital research ever conducted in Britain.

And yet - and this is the crucial gap - the RSA study asks a fundamentally different question from the one that matters most for welfare policy. It asks whether cross-class friendships predict higher earnings. It doens’t look into benefit dependency, isolation and the effects of that isolation. It documents the destination - social capital leads to mobility - without examining the effects of government policy on that capital. The RSA study describes what social capital does for you. What nobody has yet studied, in Britain, is what the welfare system does to it.

The British disease

An obsession with social class is the British disease. As a result the welfare discourse in the United Kingdom operates almost entirely in the language of income distribution: are benefits high enough? Are the rich too rich? Is the two-child limit cruel? Is the cost of living crisis being felt hardest by those out of work? All legitimate concerns. But they all accept, without examination, the premise that income replacement is the right (and, indeed, only) tool: that the problem is the calibration of welfare, not their nature.

The concept of social capital is almost entirely absent from British welfare policy debates. It’s not really measured -and what’s no measured tends to be invisible. Nobody is asking whether the British welfare system, whatever its intentions, is inadvertently imposing on its 6.5 million out-of-work recipients the same double disadvantage the AEI paper documents in America. We talk about closing pubs, but without the devastating impact that has on communities who will lose a focal point. Ministers will spend tens of millions combating loneliness when they’d do better from not taxing the pubs into bankruptcy. The CSJ did a brilliant paper linking antidepressants to loneliness: an important part of the jigsaw. But no one, as far as I’m aware, has done a Putnam or an AEI and attempted to paint the whole picture.

This is not a technical oversight. It is a profound, systematic blind spot in how Britain thinks about poverty and welfare, and it has shaped policy in ways that may be actively harming the people the system is designed to help.

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In search of British social capital

The good news is that the methodology has been proven and the data very likely exists. The AEI paper is not a data-collection exercise: it is a linking and analysis exercise. Corinth et al. built their index by drawing social capital variables from four existing surveys and combining them through a statistical technique called sequential regression multiple imputation, which infers values for individuals who appear in one dataset but not another, using shared demographic variables as bridges.

Their four US data sources were:

1. Current Population Survey (income, demographics, employment)

2. American Time Use Survey (how people spend their days — volunteering, socialising, civic activity)

3. General Social Survey (social trust, values, civic participation)

4. Volunteer and Civic Life Supplement (volunteering and community involvement). From these they extracted 30 candidate variables, refined to 22 through statistical validation, and combined into a single index using principal component analysis.

The United Kingdom has near-equivalent datasets for each of these, and in at least one crucial respect the UK data is better.

1. Understanding Society (the UK Household Longitudinal Study) is the natural base dataset: the equivalent of the CPS. It is richer and more longitudinal than its American counterpart, and crucially it records income by source with a granularity that Corinth et al. could only approximate. Understanding Society separately captures market earnings, the Universal Credit standard allowance, the UC health element (the additional payment for those with limited capability for work), Personal Independence Payment, housing benefit and other welfare. This means a UK replication could decompose income sources with greater precision than the original American study — testing, for instance, whether the social capital effect of UC health element payments specifically differs from that of market income.

2. The ONS UK Time Use Survey, with a new wave completed in 2024-25, covers volunteering, social time, civic activity, and daily time allocation — directly analogous to the ATUS variables used for the community engagement and social connection sub-indices.

3. The Community Life Survey, run annually by DCMS, measures volunteering, charitable giving, civic participation, social trust, and loneliness.

4. The British Social Attitudes Survey carries the generalised trust question — “most people can be trusted” — which is the single most predictive variable in the Corinth-Winship index, the one that carries the highest weight in their final composite score. They don’t publish the metadata anymore, but it does exist.

Together, these datasets cover every dimension of social capital that the AEI paper measures. The linking methodology is established. The validation approach — checking that the individual-level index aggregates upward to match known regional social capital patterns — is replicable using existing area-level data for UK local authorities.

But a UK study could go further than the American original in one critical respect. Understanding Society follows the same individuals across multiple annual waves. This longitudinal structure would allow researchers to track individuals before and after entering the benefit system — to observe whether social capital falls following entry into dependency, or whether those who enter benefits already had lower social capital before doing so. That distinction — causation versus selection — is precisely what Corinth et al. say their cross-sectional data cannot resolve. The AEI authors close their paper by calling for exactly this kind of longitudinal work. UK data makes it possible.

If such a study were conducted for Britain, and if it confirmed what the American data suggests, it would transform how we think about welfare and inequality in this country.

The conventional framework for measuring welfare policy asks: are recipients materially better off? Are they lifted above the poverty line? Are they shielded from destitution? These are necessary questions, but they measure only one dimension of what matters. A system can be generous by these metrics and still be failing — if the welfare it provides come at the cost of the social capital that recipients need to eventually not need it.

A UK social capital study would allow us, for the first time, to measure the full dimensionality of what welfare dependency costs. Not just income foregone by taxpayers, but social capital eroded in recipients. Not just the fiscal cost of a claim — which on current evidence runs to hundreds of thousands of pounds per person over a lifetime — but the social cost, in depleted trust, weakened civic life, fragmented families, and diminished capacity for self-sufficiency.

It would also reframe the political debate in ways that cut across existing lines. The left has always been right that poverty is multidimensional — that it is not just about income, but about dignity, belonging, and capability. The Corinth-Winship findings, if they replicate in the UK, would vindicate that instinct while challenging the policy conclusion that flows from it. More generous welfare, on this evidence, would not be able to restore the non-income dimensions of poverty -and may deepen them.

The compassionate case for welfare reform is not the case for cutting benefits - it is the case for designing a system that includes everyone. One that repairs the horizontal ties that bind people to each other, not just the vertical ties that connect individuals to the state.

Britain has 6.5 million people on out-of-work benefits, a figure projected to rise. The DWP’s own data shows that fewer than one per cent of those on the health element of Universal Credit enter employment each month. Some 92pc of those with the most severe incapacity designation remain on benefits after two years. Reassessments have stopped and for many, perhaps most, a sickness benefit diagnosis is a one-way strete. This is not a system that is helping people up. It may be a system that, by neglecting the social dimensions of disadvantage, is actively making it harder for people to rise.

Putnam showed that social capital can collapse across a whole society. Britain has not yet asked how its own social capital is in collapse - and, if so, what can be done about it. It’s time to find out.