Skip Out On The Elks Lodge, Die In A Traffic Accident
Highway 401 Traffic In Canada Benson Kua/Wikimedia CommonsWell, not exactly. But new research suggests that communities with low "social capital" have 50 percent more traffic fatalities. Do you live around a cranky neighbor? Are you the cranky neighbor? These are important questions because, according to a new study, areas with low "social capital"--lack of neighborliness, I guess would be one way of putting it--are associated with higher rates of traffic fatalities. Love thy neighbor, or stay off the roads. All the usual caveats here are in full effect. Correlation doesn't mean causation (maybe people are on edge because of the higher-than-normal traffic fatalities?), but it's still an interesting find: not only were the numbers statistically significant, but the chances of dying were a full 50 percent greater in areas with low social capital. The City College of New York study, published in the Eastern Economic Journal, looked at 10 years...