This is pretty amazing — even if it isn’t Bus work: a brand new academic paper finds a relationship between civic engagement in communities and lower levels of unemployment during this latest recession. That’s right, engaged communities are employed communities. Now, putting on our social science hats, we should clarify that the causal relationship here is not clear. But the underlying connection is quite impressive.
In fact, the new study finds that levels of civic engagement were a better predictor of changes in unemployment than were economic factors. Community matters, more than we might suspect.
