Although the literature on Social Capital has literally blossomed in the last twenty years, no author has yet ever tried to understand what relationship exist between the level of generalised trust in the economy and the economic opportunities available. This paper makes a first step in filling this gap. We propose a formalised model that relates SC to the distribution of economic opportunities in the form of rents in a given economy. We move from a critical perspective on the SC literature. From Coleman (1990), and Putnam (1993), SC is a by-product of human instrumental activities that sediments in the form of generalized trust and has a positive impact on overall productivity. In this paper we argue such approach is flaw and it minimizes collective actions to a pure externality of self-interest maximizing behaviours.
On what concerns policy issues, we show that despite the large amount of resources spent by Bretton Woods and other international institutions in generating SC by "getting the (individual) incentives right", when we take into rents into the analysis, SC becomes a concern for developed more than developing countries. This seems to sustain Ben Fine's thesis (2001b) that the sudden popularity of the concept mostly aims to the proliferation of methodological individualism, both in economics and other social sciences. A more accurate study of social interactions, instead, would call for a deeper understanding of trust, trustworthiness, reciprocity and altruism, capable, when needed, to abandon postulates such as self-interest and rationality.