SOCIAL TRUST AND VALUE CHANGE - THE DECLINE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL IN AMERICAN YOUTH, 1976-1995

Given the importance that generalized social trust plays in various th eories of American society, recent evidence of its low levels among yo unger people portends ominous changes in American civic life, Using su rvey data collected from high school seniors over the last 20 years, t his paper examines the origins of social trust among young people and the causes of change in beliefs about trust over time. Such changes co uld not be accounted for by the explanations for declining trust offer ed in other accounts of social capital. An alternative explanation, ba sed on the theoretical accounts of Alexis de Tocqueville and Emile Dur kheim, is that materialistic values may be undermining young people's views about the trustworthiness of others. Both aggregate time series correlations and an individual-level model show that the rapid rise of materialistic value orientations that occurred among American youth i n the 1970s and 1980s severely eroded levels of social trust. The pape r concludes with some observations about the likely trajectory of Amer ican democracy, given the kinds of trends observed in the youth data.