The first chapter (free on NY Times) of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest best-selling book, Outliers, details the 1950’s medical mystery of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Why such a low incidence of heart disease, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, and crime? Researchers ruled out diet, exercise, genetics, and environmental conditions… and eventually declared that it was the town itself that was responsible. The hard and soft social capital of the Italian community was what made the difference.
A blogger in Lowell, MA details this wonderfully in a blog post titled: Malcolm Gladwell, Social Capital, the ‘Roseto Effect,’ and Lowell.
