When you grow up you’ll want to move to the country and live in a Village.

I have.

Life is better, there’s me at the village fete, winning a cup for Dad sports. Drinking with the plumber, the builder and the bloke who fixes my car in the pub. Everybody knows everybody else. Everybody helps out. There’s no vandalism, litter, no crime. There is a social currency that glues our little community together.
This idea of social currency is not new, it’s been used since the early 1900’s with the emergence of socialism and ideas about the welfare state. My version comes from Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital a 1995 essay by Robert D. Putnam. He proposes that because we no longer join clubs and societies, the glue that keeps our society together is failing. We don’t cooperate to fight crime for instance
He used an example of a bowling cub where a socially diverse group of people get together to enjoy themselves; police officers, tradesmen, professionals, blue and white collar workers. His rose tinted view of essentially 1950’s America is widely discredited, but I like him, because he sounds like a Cohen brothers film.
Ironically he blamed “technological “individualizing” of our leisure time via television, Internet and eventually “virtual reality helmets” for the death of his bowling club.