The 2016 election cycle revealed a deeply unsettled spirit in many Americans. Job and wage numbers are often cited as the cause of such anxieties, but it’s more than just economics.

The 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity, released today by The Heritage Foundation, provides a more holistic survey, reviewing trends in factors contributing to—or holding back—opportunity in America. The Index tracks 31 economic and cultural indicators over a 10-year trend line, providing commentaries from Heritage scholars, academics, journalists, and community leaders to explain how each factor relates to Americans’ opportunity to achieve upward mobility and prosperity. 

Some of the more troubling 10-year trends reported in this year’s Index include an increase in teen drug use, a continued decline in the marriage rate, and a declining employment-to-population ratio showing many jobless individuals have stopped looking for work. But there are promising improvements—such as an increased teen abstinence rate as well as a continuation of the decades-long trend of declines in the abortion rate.

“Most conversations about opportunity focus on economic indicators such as unemployment and job creation. But opportunity springs from much more than that,” says Jennifer Marshall, Index Editor and Vice President of Heritage’s Institute of Family, Community, and Opportunity.

“Family and community are powerful in shaping the opportunities Americans have to advance in this nation.”

Contributing to this year’s Index is best-selling author J.D. Vance, who notes that much of the conversation about opportunity has failed to appreciate the cultural dynamics contributing to it.

“Too rigid a focus on the material permits us to divorce concerns about opportunity from those about culture,” Vance, who wrote the highly acclaimed “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” notes in the introduction of the new Index.

Other authors include U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio); syndicated columnist Cal Thomas; Jennifer Lahl, president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network; Jeanne Allen, founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform; and Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund.    

The full report is available at http://www.heritage.org/culture.