2003-03-25

Notes


From the Cabinet Office Social Capital paper:

good definition on p5:
- social capital consists of the networks, norms, relationships, values and
informal sanctions that shape the quantity and co-operative quality of a
society's social interactions.


1. the graph on page 9, "The Exponential Growth of References to Social Capital
in the Academic Literature, 1985-2000", is really cool
2. Social Capital is "not the exclusive property of any one individual. Social
capital is shared by a group, or by groups, of individuals."

This ties into something else. The important of power laws is that we can
predict what sort of systems display power law distributions, and what other
properties are coherant with that. If we know that's the root of unfairness,
then we don't want to manipulate the system, we want to CHANGE THE ABSTRACT
MACHINE THAT DRIVES THE SYSTEM.

so... money is a rival good => power law distribution of money. to change it,
change the nature of money.

social capital *is* a nonrival good. anchor the market to this instead. we'll
get different ways of gaming it, certainly, but will the distribution be
different? what would the consequences of those novel types of gaming be?

3. -> table 2 on page 11 is also great. the networks, norms and sanctions in
social capital. all of this ties into A human nature B social software.


page 16 of that social capital paper:
- companies are facilitated by "crucially, tacit knowledge"
which is what Kuhn calls (somewhere between p29 and p50) knowledge that is
known through training but can't be articulated.

I feel I'm going through Kuhn's revolution with my life so far. Fact gathering
until it compresses into a beautiful unified theory, which I can write down as
a single highly shielded memebullet. heh.



p45 of the social capital paper (paragraphs 95, 96, 97) is the counterpoint to
Putnam's pointing at tele as the major contributing factor of falling social
capital.

p46/para99: "it has been found that people who remember being told by their
parents not to trust other people end up - unsurprisingly - not trusting other
people are adults". although how causitive this is, i don't know [given
pinker's Blank Slate saying your nature is mainly determined by genes and
peers, not parents.] but this is an interesting doves [trusting people] and
hawks [take advantage of people trusting] system: what is the Evolutionary
Stable State? are we perturbed from that now, and will we snap back?

pp49,50;para113-118: september 11 2001 testing putnam's hypothesis that
national crisis could increase social capital. studies showing that this is
indeed the case.

p57;para136: using Home Zones (or indeed, the Congestion Charge) as a method of
increasing social capital in neighbourhoods by excluding non-resident cars.

- in fact, there's a large section of this paper on what government can do to
increase social capital, including things like (p67) pooling bits of gardens.

p69: "mobile telephones could have emergency help keys or codes that would
activate the nearest five phones to indicate the holder is in trouble and needs
assistance"


Links:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/socialcaptial
http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/scapital/
This paper I'm reading:
http://www.cabinet-office.gov.uk/innovation/2001/futures/attachments/
socialcapital.pdf