Social capital accrues value to others beyond those who create it.

Evidence

For example, in some schools where there exists a dense set of associations among some parents, these are the result of a small number of persons, ordinarily mothers who do not hold full-time jobs outside the home. Yet these mothers themselves experience only a subset of the benefits of this social capital surrounding the school. If one of them decides to abandon these activities-for example, to take a full-time job-this may be an entirely reasonable action from a personal point of view and even from the point of view of that household with its children. The benefits of the new activity may far outweigh the losses that arise from the decline in associations with other parents whose children are in the school. But the withdrawal of these activities constitutes a loss to all those other parents whose associations and contacts were dependent on them. — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 208

But most forms of social capital are not like this. For example, the kinds of social structures that make possible social norms and the sanctions that enforce them do not benefit primarily the person or persons whose efforts would be necessary to bring them about, but benefit all those who are part of such a structure. For example, in some schools where there exists a dense set of associations among some parents, these are the result of a small number of persons, ordinarily mothers who do not hold full-time jobs outside the home. Yet these mothers themselves experience only a subset of the benefits of this social capital surrounding the school. If one of them decides to abandon these activities-for example, to take a full-time job-this may be an entirely reasonable action from a personal point of view and even from the point of view of that household with its children. The benefits of the new activity may far outweigh the losses that arise from the decline in associations with other parents whose children are in the school. But the withdrawal of these activities constitutes a loss to all those other parents whose associations and contacts were dependent on them. — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 207

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the public-goods / collective-action problem in economics and Ostrom’s commons governance. — connects to: Social capital is productive, structural, and defined by its function.; A bazaar can function as an organization through merchants’ social capital. — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 63; Organizations outlast their original purpose and remain usable as social capital — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 129 (+7 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The asymmetry between private cost and social benefit in social-capital production is a genuinely rich idea worth sitting with.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the tree-as-infrastructure piece: social/communal goods (school-mother networks, living root bridges) are underproduced precisely because individual creators capture only a subset of their value — the same collective-action logic as planting shade trees.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 208; Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 207

Related

• Social capital is productive, structural, and defined by its function. (similarity 0.86)
• Communal social capital shapes children’s development beyond family resources. (similarity 0.84)
• Social capital facilitates actions that would otherwise be impossible. (similarity 0.83)
• Social capital valuable for one activity can harm others. (similarity 0.82)
• Social networks themselves constitute capital with measurable productive value (similarity 0.81)
• Social capital exists as obligations, information flows, and sanctioned norms (similarity 0.79)
• Community social capital substitutes for missing family social capital. (similarity 0.79)
• Parental human capital only benefits a child’s development when family relationships activate it. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Social capital’s benefits mostly accrue to others, not its creator. #corroborates (1.00)