What it measures
The Social Fabric Index asks one question: are American households holding together better or worse than they were? It reads six public series across three layers. The ledger: the share of household wealth held by the bottom half (Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts), the net share of households better off than a year ago, and the expected probability of missing a debt payment (both from the New York Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations). Despair: drug overdose deaths and the suicide rate (CDC). Hope: the general fertility rate (CDC), read as a measure of whether people are willing to make long-horizon commitments. Each component is scored against its own last five years, signed so that higher means stronger, weighted and scaled to 0–100.
Why these components
A social fabric is not one thing, so no single series can carry it. The ledger layer captures whether ordinary households have room to absorb a shock. The despair layer captures the people who have run out of room. The hope layer captures whether people still plan for a future. Every component is a public-domain US government series that updates monthly or quarterly. Annual measures, among them time spent with friends and Gini ratios, are tracked as separate signals in the lattice but kept out of the index, because a once-a-year point would dominate the reading on the day it lands.
How to read it
50 means the six components, taken together, sit at their five-year norms. Above 60 the fabric is strengthening on most fronts at once; below 40 it is fraying on most fronts at once. Because each component is read against its own recent history, the index measures direction relative to the last five years, not an absolute level of social health. A reading above 50 after a bad decade means things are improving, not that they are good. Open the components to see which layer is moving.
What it does not say
The index does not measure happiness, trust or virtue directly, and it does not rank places or groups. Fertility is included as a measure of long-horizon commitment, not as a judgment about any family's choices. The CDC quarterly series carry only about three years of history, so readings before 2024 rest on fewer components and the weights are renormalized across whatever is available. Provisional vital statistics are revised; the most recent quarter is the least certain.