IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

6 Conviviality
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 spending endlessly on health.
Health care spending in the United States had reached 15.3 percent of
GDP by 2003, an amount equivalent to nearly five thousand dollars for
every single U.S. citizen. It all adds up to a two-trillion-dollar service