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Across the 35 countries in this survey, social trust and civic engagement are strongly correlated; the greater the density of associational membership in a society, the more trusting its citizens. Trust and engagement are two facets of the same underlying factor--social capital.[End Page 73] America still ranks relatively high by cross-national standards on both these dimensions of social capital. Even in the 1990s, after several decades' erosion, Americans are more trusting and more engaged than people in most other countries of the world. The trends of the past quarter-century, however, have apparently moved the United States significantly lower in the international rankings of social capital. The recent deterioration in American social capital has been sufficiently great that (if no other country changed its position in the meantime) another quarter-century of change at the same rate would bring the United States, roughly speaking, to the midpoint among all these countries, roughly equivalent to South Korea, Belgium, or Estonia today. Two generations' decline at the same rate would leave the United States at the level of today's Chile, Portugal, and Slovenia.

Other demographic transformations. A range of additional changes have transformed the American family since the 1960s--fewer marriages, more divorces, fewer children, lower real wages, and so on. Each of these changes might account for some of the slackening of civic engagement, since married, middle-class parents are generally more socially involved than other people. Moreover, the changes in scale that have swept over the American economy in these years--illustrated by the replacement of the corner grocery by the supermarket and now perhaps of the supermarket by electronic shopping at home, or the replacement of community-based enterprises by outposts of distant multinational firms--may perhaps have undermined the material and even physical basis for civic engagement.

The technological transformation of leisure. There is reason to believe that deep-seated technological trends are radically "privatizing" or "individualizing" our use of leisure time and thus disrupting many opportunities for social-capital formation. The most obvious and probably the most powerful instrument of this revolution is television. Time-budget studies in the 1960s showed that the growth in time spent watching television dwarfed all other changes in the way Americans passed their days and nights. Television has made our communities (or, rather, what we experience as our communities) wider and shallower. In the language of economics, electronic technology enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully, but at the cost of the positive social externalities associated with more primitive forms of entertainment. The same logic applies to the replacement of vaudeville by the movies and now of movies by the VCR. The new "virtual reality" helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests? It is a question that seems worth exploring more systematically.

who stress that closely knit social, economic, and political organizations are prone to inefficient cartelization and to what political economists term "rent seeking" and ordinary men and women call corruption.

Among edX’s students are 300,000 from India alone, said CEO Anant Agarwal – also a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT who taught the first, hugely successful edX MOOCs – at a 19 June forum on “MOOCs in the Developing World” held at the United Nations headquarters in New York City

The proponents-versus-sceptics conversation was moderated by Ben Wildavsky, director of higher education studies at the Rockefeller Institute, policy professor at the University at Albany of the State University of New York and author of the award-winning book The Great Brain Race: How global universities are reshaping the world.

Unlike colonialism, Agarwal told the forum, MOOCs could boost human rights in some countries. “The numbers are staggering,” he said. “I’m really hard-pressed to understand how someone would say this is United States hegemony.”

Among those sceptical of MOOCs’ effects on the developing world is Professor Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College and a globally recognised higher education analyst.

He called the online ventures “neo-colonialism of the willing” and noted that US academics have developed most of the online curricula available to students in poorer countries.

The pedagogical assumptions are mainly Western,” Altbach said during the panel discussion as Agarwal shook his head vehemently. “One has to ask whether this is a good thing for students in non-Western learning environments.”

Although online classes can be helpful in engineering or other technical fields, the humanities are another story. The benefit to developing nations, therefore, is limited, Katz said.

According the United Nations, 25% of children who enrol in primary school drop out before finishing. About 123 million youth aged 15 to 24 years lack basic reading and writing skills.

Poorer nations need high quality education, said Professor S Sitaraman, senior vice-president of India’s Amity University, but MOOC offerings should be marketed and vetted cautiously

“There are a lot of students [in India] who are hungry for knowledge but don’t have access to knowledge,” he said at the United Nations event. “We welcome new things, as long as it serves a purpose.”

The larger MOOCs platforms – edX, Coursera and Udacity, for example – have made inroads in nearly every country and are experimenting with ways to help students in places without advanced infrastructure or technology.

“It doesn’t replace other kinds of education,” she said during the forum. “We’re clearly filling some need here. I think it adds value and doesn’t replace.”

At their best, MOOCs complement existing educational institutions around the world, said Barbara Kahn, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business who teaches classes on Coursera.

MOOCs “are being adopted and not adapted”, added Altbach.

Agarwal cautioned against worrying too much about those issues. He noted that a 10% completion rate in a course with more than 100,000 students means 10,000 students finished the class.