The New Leviathan Blog

Christmas: the celebration of social bonds?

We could imagine: people living in towns with high purchasing power are not the happiest. The well-being of the population is higher outside the centers, where social relations are still intact, reports a study by Deutsche Bank Research. The healthiest Germans apparently live in the Ulm region. Well-being analysis is very trendy in Germany. (…) To identify the problem, researchers from the main German bank identified six criteria: three “soft” factors that they noted by survey (people’s satisfaction with their own lives, their trust in compatriots and their state health) and three other “hard ” factors taken from official statistics (unemployment rate, birth rate and income). It appears that among the 97 German spatial planning regions, the prize for well-being goes to the Danube-Iller region around Ulm, straddling Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. Next comes eastern Württemberg, a region with a small population, and then two urban regions, Osnabrück, the peaceful center of Lower Saxony, and the southern suburbs of Hamburg. In Ulm and surrounding areas, people do not consider themselves particularly satisfied, but they have a lot of trust in those around them. If purchasing power alone made people happy, the big cities of southern Germany would come out on top. However, Stuttgart, the automobile capital, is only twenty-second and Munich, “the world city with a big heart”, twenty-fifth. Bonn (in position 31) arrives well before Berlin (80) which nevertheless stole the title of capital. The authors of the study note that in happy regions like Biberach (Baden-Württemberg), people are distinguished by high cultural engagement; elsewhere, they attend sports and other associations. Political leaders, who are increasing the number of crèches to increase the birth rate, the authors of the study suggest a broader approach: in regions with high unemployment and weak social consensus, we do not have children, even if there are has crèches (source : Marcel Linden, La Libre, 12/24/2007).

Now Deutsche Bank is concerned about social capital to the point of trying to measure it in Germany. We will leave it to Mr. Linden, who often has some difficulties with the French language, the responsibility for his distinction between hard factors and soft factors. More interesting is that social capital is “trendy” in Germany, to the point that the President of the Federal State insists in his Christmas speech on the necessary strengthening of links between generations. We can hypothetically compare this increased interest in social capital with the sudden and radical changes made under a social-democratic government: in bulk, abandonment of blood law, romanization of spelling, neoliberal modifications of the law of negotiation, abandonment of the Mark, reform of corporate shareholding (which resulted in the accelerated end of cross-shareholdings with bank support constitutive of German-style capitalism), Hartz-IV weakening of socio-economic protections…it is no wonder that all this, by undermining the very basis of the German system: the spirit of community, has led to a weakening of social capital, and that this society whose spirit of community had always been strong is in search of what it may be losing. Despite the confusion of the summary given to us, we see the link confirmed between happiness (or satisfaction, or perceived quality of life), on the one hand, and social capital (trust in others, associative commitment, density social relations, small size of communities), on the other hand.