Nice places finish first: the economic returns of civic virtue.

• Author: Bridgeland, John M.
• Position: OPPORTUNITY IN AMERICA

SAN JOSE ave. starting salary $86,000

The American Dream is a core part of our national ethos. It is the idea that anyone can advance up the economic ladder with hard work and determination, regardless of where they come from or what zip code they're born into.

Over the last few years, however, the American Dream has taken a beating, and not just because of the Great Recession. A number of careful studies have found that there is less upward mobility in America than in other wealthy countries, such as Germany, Demark, Sweden, and the UK. In fact, only 8 percent of Americans born in the lowest fifth of the income scale ever make it to the top fifth in our so-called classless society, while the percentage is 11 to 14 percent in these "Old European" countries.

These new revelations would have shocked Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who traveled through the United States in the 1830s and was among the first to write about the restive, egalitarian scramble for material success that then characterized America, so different from the class-bound Europe of his day.

Fortunately, America may be able to get back in the upward mobility game by paying greater attention to another phenomenon that struck Tocqueville about Americans in the 1830s: our propensity to join groups and volunteer our time for the public good.

"Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations," the Frenchman observed in his famous book Democracy in America. Americans, he continued, banded together not only to advance their political and commercial interests but also "to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books ... and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools." Whereas in Europe such civic endeavors were typically controlled by wealthy individuals or the state, in the U.S. average citizens worked together to drive these organizations.

Today, Tocqueville would be writing about our nonprofit sector, or civil society. It is comprised of a vast array of different kinds of groups--local sports leagues and PTAs, church-based charities, labor unions, business and professional societies, fraternal organizations like the Elks and the NAACP, and national cause-oriented membership groups like the Humane Society--that operate in the space between the individual and the government.

This sector gained renewed attention in 1995, when Harvard's Robert Putnam published an article (later a book) called "Bowling Alone," in which he posited hat the tradition of voluntary association was in steep decline in America. Citizens, he argued, were increasingly apt to spend their time watching TV rather than attending Rotary Club meetings. Many academics questioned Putnam's thesis--old-line fraternal organizations might be losing members, they observed, but...