There is growing polarization in youth social capital as economic inequality increases.

There is an increasing gap in the social capital of young Americans compared to the generation which came of age in the 1950s. In new research which uses indicators of social capital, Matthew Wright finds that this gap can be explicitly tied to the growth in economic inequality since the 1970s. He writes that greater resource inequality means that the cost of engagement becomes relatively higher for those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale than it is for their better-off peers.