{"id":1637,"date":"2009-04-21T12:12:36","date_gmt":"2009-04-21T16:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/?p=1637"},"modified":"2009-04-21T12:12:36","modified_gmt":"2009-04-21T16:12:36","slug":"social-capital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/21\/social-capital\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Capital"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the next few days I will be helping friends and family with various moves, construction projects, and the like.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s stuff that happens every year in the Canadian spring after a long winter spent groggily shoveling snow in the dark.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like the grass and trees, Canadians wake up and start moving around a bit more when the snow finally goes.\u00c2\u00a0 Um, the trees and grass don&#8217;t actually move around, unless you have spent your winter consuming pharmaceutically interesting things.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, it seems that these tasks that are too big to do alone mean that we usually end up spending some social capital and asking for help.\u00c2\u00a0 You don&#8217;t ask just anyone, you ask those who you have helped in the past, usually.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s the most basic form of economics, bartering and probably dates back to when we helpfully clubbed the sabre toothed tiger from a hunting buddy&#8217;s face.\u00c2\u00a0 We help people out because we know there will no doubt come a time when we just might need some help ourselves, and by depositing something into the social bank, we can reasonably expect to make a withdrawal sometime in the future.<\/p>\n<p>No matter how saintly and helpful and available you are however, social credit does have a limit.\u00c2\u00a0 Much like your real bank if you try to withdraw too much or too often (without making a deposit) you may find yourself with a body to move, and nobody there to help you, and that&#8217;s not good&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>I realize that at least some of the people I am going to be helping may actually read this before I can actually assist them in their endeavours, so realize that this is not a snarky comment on the state of anyone&#8217;s social capital.\u00c2\u00a0 I just started thinking about how that kind of stuff works, and realized it&#8217;s almost exactly like money, but it&#8217;s easier to make.<\/p>\n<p>Neat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the next few days I will be helping friends and family with various moves, construction projects, and the like.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s stuff that happens every year in the Canadian spring after a long winter spent groggily shoveling snow in the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/21\/social-capital\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piGNU-qp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1637"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1640,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1637\/revisions\/1640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}