At the corner of LaSalle and Adams streets in downtown Chicago, the City National Bank and Trust Co. building rises like an elegant monument to the past. Its Doric columns, carved rosettes, and lion’s heads evoke the Classical Revival style popular a century ago. But it’s a deceptive facade.

The bank, whose name still adorns the front, disappeared in a merger 60 years ago. The building now houses two hotels, offices for professionals and a host of nonprofits, and a British men’s clothing store. And after a city competition to reimagine its financial district, the building will soon change again. The offices will give way to 280 residences – studios, one- and two-bedroom apartments, and amenities like a fitness center and even a private dog run.

It’s a small and lonely light in the real estate equivalent of a perfect storm.

With fewer workers going to the office, office vacancy rates stand at a 30-year high. Lease revenue is falling, especially in older buildings, and owners are seeing the value of their properties plunge. Since the pandemic, some $500 billion in value has already been wiped off the books, according to a study released this week.

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Chicago’s Classical Revival office building at 208 S. LaSalle St. is being converted to residences with 280 planned apartments in the heart of the city’s financial district.

Developers could upgrade their buildings or convert them to other uses, but in many cases the costs are prohibitive. And a slowing economy, rising interest rates, and tighter lending standards make those conversions even harder. Hanging over them is a cloud of uncertainty: Is the work-from-home movement a permanent change, or just a temporary post-pandemic phenomenon?

Despite this murky outlook, some cities are charging forward with conversion plans and subsidies. With fewer workers to keep their central business districts vibrant, these cities are hoping to replace them with apartment-dwellers and kick-start a transformation of their downtowns.

By helping developers convert offices to living units, the mayor of Washington, D.C., hopes to add 15,000 people to the 25,000 or so residents already living downtown. Pittsburgh has cobbled together some $6 million in state and federal funds for its downtown conversion program. Seattle last month put out a “call for ideas,” inviting building owners and architects to come up with new solutions for struggling office buildings.

Chicago is one of the leaders of the adaptive reuse movement. In March, the city selected the City National Bank building and two other nearby buildings for its LaSalle Street Reimagined project, which aims to revitalize the financial district. Last week, the city chose two more buildings for conversions, which will receive city help and subsidies. In all, the projects will mean more than 1,600 new downtown living apartments in what the city calls one of the largest office-to-residential conversions in the nation.

“It’s important for the resiliency of downtown,” says Cindy Chan Roubik, deputy commissioner of the city’s planning and development department. “It’s important to have people at different hours of the day and with different uses. You’ll have more people here on the weekends, after work hours, and that provides a vitality. That’s why we’re encouraging the mix of use and it’s really something that will benefit the central business district for years and years to come.” 

Bebeto Matthews/AP

Joey Chilelli (right) and Malek Hajar, of the real estate firm Vanbarton Group, show the kitchen in a model apartment inside a high rise at 160 Water St. in Manhattan's financial district, undergoing conversion to residences, April 11, 2023.

The logic for such conversions makes sense – to a point. Last year, the vacancy rate for the nation’s apartment buildings briefly fell to a record low of 2.4% before bouncing back a bit, while the office vacancy rate rose from a pre-pandemic low of 12.2% to above 17%, according to CBRE Group, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm, based in Dallas. Since the end of 2019, apartment rents have soared around the country while office leasing revenue has slumped by nearly a fifth after adjusting for inflation, according to researchers at New York and Columbia universities. 

Also, these averages mask considerable variation. Top-rated office space is holding its own, perhaps because companies want the best amenities to lure their workers back to the office. Less desirable and older office space is seeing much higher vacancy rates. And it is precisely these older, smaller office towers that make the best candidates for conversion to apartments. They’re typically easier to reconfigure to meet city codes, such as rules requiring every apartment to have windows. Then there’s the history and architecture, a big draw for some city-dwellers.

The problems are scale and cost. Even with their recent uptick, the rate of conversions is far too low to solve cities’ office vacancy problem, CBRE says. And the economics are problematic. In a report last month, Moody’s Analytics found that only 35 of the nearly 1,100 office buildings it tracks in the New York City metro area were suitable for conversion. The rest of the buildings are too expensive to make conversions viable, which means either government subsidies or a big drop in office values and rents would be needed.

Such a drop is precisely what has happened, according to the New York and Columbia researchers. In their analysis of the New York office market, they calculated that the actual value of the city’s office buildings had already fallen by 46% since the pandemic and would edge down to more than 50% by 2029 if the work-from-home trend persists. Those averages include top-rated office space; without that space in the calculation, the declines would be even worse.

Such projected losses spell trouble not only for developers but also for shaky regional banks that hold many of the loans on those buildings, as well as the cities that depend on commercial real estate for tax revenue. The researchers warn of a potential “urban doom spiral,” where reduced revenue would mean cities spend less on amenities, which could lead to a population exodus and even lower tax revenue. 

“We are just at the brink,” says Vrinda Mittal, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University’s business school and co-author of the study. “All this is yet to play out.”

Bebeto Matthews/AP

A pedestrian is silhouetted against a high rise at 160 Water St. in Manhattan's financial district, as the building is undergoing a conversion to residential apartments, April 11, 2023.

At the same time, some of the cities are using their downtown revitalization plans to address another urban need: affordable housing. In Chicago, for example, the winning developers will have to offer 30% of their units at lower-than-market levels. But it’s an expensive way to create more affordable housing, and the reduced revenue makes downtown conversions harder. Affordable-housing advocates and many others are skeptical.

“The unit costs are so high,” says Dennis McClendon, a Chicago historian and geographer. For “half the cost, you could adapt and build the unit in a walk-up building in an outlying neighborhood.”

On the brighter side of the ledger, America’s cities have shown remarkable resilience and creativity in keeping up with the times. 

Central business districts have had “a series of crises and troubles over the last 100 years, whether it be the decline of factories, the rise of the suburban office park, suburbanization [generally], white flight,” says Aaron Shkuda, an urban historian at Princeton University and author of “The Lofts of SoHo,” a 2016 history on the residential conversion of the iconic New York neighborhood. 

“Cities like Chicago and New York have done quite well, reinventing themselves as command centers for the globalized, financialized economy,” he says. “Now, we’re kind of moving into another period where the city and its workers may have their [same] functions, but it’s just a question of how many workers literally need to go to the office every day.”

Mike Blake/Reuters

A group of migrants gather between the primary and secondary border fences between the United States and Mexico.

The topography could hardly be more different: nearly 2,000 miles of cityscape and desert separate the United States from Mexico, while Britain’s southern coast, famed for its White Cliffs of Dover, is washed by the chilly, choppy waters of the English Channel.

Yet both the U.S. and Britain are at the eye of similar political storms: about how to establish control over a surge in migrants ready to risk imprisonment, deportation, violence, even their lives, to escape the lands of their birth.

That control could prove doable, if difficult. But the scramble for short-term policy fixes is masking a pair of deeper, long-term challenges facing the U.S., Britain, and other European nations.

Two challenges, with a clear policy message: Border control is only part of the answer.

Challenge number one is that the “migrant issue” is not a short-term problem. At the turn of the millennium, some 175 million people worldwide were living outside their native countries. That figure is now nearing 300 million. It is a tide swollen by wars, persecution, autocrats’ brutality, dysfunctional or collapsed states, the intensifying effects of climate change – and, quite simply, a lack of basic economic opportunities across much of the world.

Challenge number two is that the developed countries are aging. Their economies need workers in a range of services and industries – a need that is also feeding inflation and pushing up interest rates. And a 21st-century economy, in which innovation is critical, also benefits from immigrant researchers and entrepreneurs with a track record of contributing disproportionately to their new countries’ achievements.

Tackling those twin challenges, too, could prove doable, if difficult.

Gareth Fuller/PA/AP

A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dungeness, England, following a small boat incident in the English Channel.

The problem isn’t policy. There is a broad center-ground consensus on what’s needed: immigration policies that welcome newcomers with the skills beneficial, and necessary, for their new host nations; a policy toward migrants that combines strong border security with an effective system for considering their cases; and initiatives to improve conditions in the countries they are fleeing.

What is holding back such an approach is politics: An increasingly partisan, populist, nationalist tone now colors the immigration debate in the U.S., Britain, and other Western democracies.

It is manifested in some politicians’ talk of a migrant “invasion,” a term British Home Secretary Suella Braverman used last year. And while many people are indeed worried by the changing ethnic mix of their communities, these concerns are sharpened by conspiracy theories such as the so-called Great Replacement, the notion of a shadowy international scheme to replace white, Christian natives with interlopers of different colors and faiths.

The result? A hardening of attitudes not just toward migrants arriving by rubber dinghy on the south coast of England, or crossing the Sonoran Desert on foot, but toward immigrants more generally.

In Britain last week, Ms. Braverman, who is Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s chief law-and-order minister, pressed him not just to make good on his vow to “stop the boats” carrying desperate migrants to British shores, but to cut back sharply on all immigration.

Net migration into the U.K. reached a record high of around half a million last year, and it’s still rising. Ms. Braverman wants at least to bring it in line with her Conservative Party’s election pledge of four years ago, around 270,000 a year.

That presents a daunting problem for Mr. Sunak. A key selling point for Brexit, when Britons voted to leave the European Union, was that London would be able to keep out the East European plumbers, construction workers, and seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers who, as EU citizens, had enjoyed the right to work in Britain.

The new, non-EU influx – mostly from India, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe – has simply reflected market realities. These jobs still need doing, and Britons either can’t or won’t do them.

PA Images/Reuters

People take part in a protest in the town center of Lincoln, England, against the British government's plan to house migrants at a nearby military base.

In America, too, the partisan debate over the southern border has undercut prospects for consensus on wider immigration issues.

Former President Donald Trump rode tough talk on border security to victory in 2016. His closest Republican Party challenger for the 2024 nomination, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, is staking out an equally hard line. Speaking last weekend, Mr. DeSantis said he would “shut the border down immediately.”

Still, real-life pressures are likely – eventually – to prod politicians toward a policy mixing a better-funded, better-organized system to control migration, with an economically targeted welcome for immigrant workers.

In Britain, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt has been pushing back against Ms. Braverman’s call for a wholesale reduction of immigration, arguing that this would damage economic growth. In fact, he said this week, he was open to expanding the list of “shortage occupations” – jobs where business is pressing for greater numbers of immigrant workers.

But in the U.S., the increasingly charged partisan divide seems likely to frustrate any bipartisan immigration breakthrough, at least for now. That last happened in 1986, under then-President Ronald Reagan: a crackdown on illegal immigration paired with an amnesty for tens of thousands of immigrants already in America.

In his final remarks as president, Mr. Reagan chose immigration as his theme. Calling it the “great life force of each generation of new Americans,” he said America’s strength rested on drawing in people “from every country and every corner of the world.”

“If we ever closed the door to new Americans,” he warned, “our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

Mr. Reagan’s legislative success provides a possible template – but also a reminder of how dramatically U.S. politics, and his own Republican Party, have changed over the past 40 years.

Down a hiking path and through the woods, giggles and chatter echo from a clearing where elementary students have just finished constructing makeshift shelters.

The challenge blended environment with engineering, hence this visit to the Runge Nature Center from third, fourth, and fifth graders. They’re part of a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) club at nearby Thorpe Gordon Elementary in Jefferson City, Missouri.

“Do you guys feel ready to spend the night in the woods?” their outdoor instructor asks.

The children scream “yes” in unison, steps away from their tiny dwellings made from branches. A boy announces he saw a turkey, while another student proclaims “teamwork” her favorite part. The scene portrays what conservation leaders and educators in Missouri are hoping to instill in the state’s youngest residents: an appreciation for the outdoors, a new experience, and some learning along the way.

“I think it’s so important,” says Melanie Thompson, a librarian from the elementary school who’s leading the STEM group on this day. “Kids don’t spend enough time playing outside.”

Nature Knights

In Missouri, efforts to connect children with nature date back to 1939. That’s when the Nature Knights program launched, giving children recognition for conservation practices. Three years earlier, the state’s residents approved an amendment that created an apolitical conservation agency.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

The future Boone County Nature School will serve 12,000 to 13,000 students a year. Above, Brian Flowers, of the Missouri Department of Conservation, holds an architectural rendering of the school.

Today, terms such as nature education, outdoor learning, and environmental education refer to instruction that, in many ways, takes students out of traditional classroom settings. Subtle nuances exist, though, depending on the location and programming. The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental education as a type of learning that allows people to “explore environmental issues, engage in problem solving, and take action to improve the environment” – while also not advocating a particular viewpoint.

The Missouri Department of Conservation, meanwhile, sees nature education as a way to “inspire and educate individuals about nature so they appreciate and ultimately protect our resources and wild places,” says Brian Flowers, a regional supervisor for the agency’s education branch. And agency leaders say it’s becoming an increasing focus given benefits that exist for both the land and students themselves.

“You introduce them to it,” says Mr. Flowers, referring to conservation, natural resources, and wildlife. “You show them why it’s important, and, eventually, that leads to that they care about it. They protect it.”

A study called “The Nature of Americans,” conducted in 2015 and 2016, found that more than 80% of children surveyed said time in nature made them feel creative, happy, healthy, and smarter.

Screen time among children under 18 jumped 84 minutes, or 52%, during the pandemic, according to a study published late last year in JAMA Pediatrics. That further underscores the need for exposure to the outdoors, says Megan Willig, a program coordinator for the National Environmental Education Foundation.

“Once they’re there, there’s so much that happens – curiosity and creativity and just enjoyment of being outside,” she says. It can also introduce students to career pathways in the natural resource, conservation, and STEM fields.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Girls from Thorpe Gordon Elementary in Jefferson City, Missouri, enjoy a shelter they made as part of an educational activity at the Runge Conservation Nature Center on April 26, 2023.

An Ozark paradise built for fifth graders

In a grassy field not far from an elderberry patch, a sustainably designed building with large windows and a gently sloping roofline is under construction. It’s the future Boone County Nature School, which occupies land in the Three Creeks Conservation Area and will welcome a rotating cast of 12,000 to 13,000 students each year, says Mr. Flowers.

The project represents a partnership among the Missouri Department of Conservation, Columbia Public Schools, community organizations, and other school districts in Boone County.

Columbia Public Schools has hired a teacher to lead instructional efforts at the Boone County Nature School, which fits into the district’s overall mission to pour more resources into place-based learning, says Michelle Baumstark, the chief communications officer. About half of the district’s students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.“These may not be experiences that they would have any other way and when you can create an access to an enriching opportunity, that can change the trajectory of a kid,” she says.

The land surrounding the nature school will feature a food forest, pollinator plots, a prairie restoration area, trails, a pavilion, and a council house with three tiers of stadium seating. The karst topography of the conservation area – caves, springs, and hills – is typically only found in southern Missouri near the Ozarks, making it an ideal exploration area for local children, Mr. Flowers says.

“If this wasn’t preserved in some fashion, this would just be subdivisions,” Mr. Flowers says, gesturing to the growing area that sits between Jefferson City and Columbia. “I always say there would be $500,000, $600,000 houses in here, and then that would be it.”

Though open to students of all ages, the main programming will be for fifth graders, who will visit several times over the course of a school year. The nature school building is expected to be complete by June 2024.

The Missouri Department of Conservation also operates programs that teach students archery and how to fish, among other things. And, in St. Louis, pavement will be removed and replaced with a green schoolyard at Froebel Literacy Academy. Picture a park-like setting with trees and wildflowers, where students can play and learn through STEM activities.

The schoolyard project represents a step toward outdoor equity for children who grow up in urban areas that have more concrete and asphalt than lush, green recreation space, says Aaron Jeffries, deputy director of the Missouri Department of Conservation.

“They don’t have the opportunity to go 30 minutes to their family farm,” he says. “Their conservation world might be a tree in their front yard and that’s all they have – if they even have that.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

A flowering dogwood at the Runge Conservation Nature Center in Jefferson City, Missouri, on April 26, 2023. Missouri’s efforts to connect schoolchildren to nature go back to 1939.

There’s no national standard for outdoor learning or environmental education, says Ms. Willig of NEEF, which was congressionally chartered in 1990 to complement the work of the EPA. So efforts differ by state and local jurisdiction, though she has seen more interest in making it a formal part of the curriculum.

If barriers such as time or transportation exist, Ms. Willig recommends that school systems seek community partnerships. For instance, a local nonprofit that supports watershed health, she says, may be keen on helping with programming.

“The school doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch,” she says.

In Nevada, a bill wending its way through the Legislature would take an initial step toward folding outdoor education into public school curriculum. The legislation, sponsored by Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager, would establish an Outdoor Education Advisory Working Group to study approaches over the next two years. If approved, the group’s goal would be to submit recommendations and draft legislation before the next legislative session in 2025.

Mr. Yeager says the proposal builds on previous efforts to get children outside, including free passes to state parks for fifth graders and a microgrant program for schools run through the Division of Outdoor Recreation.

An outdoor enthusiast himself, the assemblyman says children’s reliance on technology, which accelerated during the pandemic, makes the need for outdoor education all the more vital.

“If you can combine education and the outdoors,” he says, “those are lessons I think that will stick a lot more than lessons that you’re going to get in the classroom.”

In early April 1975, after the final U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, Chase Manhattan Bank senior executives asked Ralph White, a Bangkok-based junior officer, to accept a daunting mission: serving as the exit strategy for the Saigon branch’s 53 Vietnamese employees. As the subtitle of Mr. White’s recently published book promises, he succeeded. What it doesn’t give away are the overwhelming barriers he faced and the smart, often heart-stopping ways he overcame them. Recently Mr. White chatted with Monitor contributor Erin Douglass. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

The success of your mission seemed to hinge on several key behaviors, including taking responsibility. Does that ring true to you – and what were some others?

I guess so. I often hear “tenacity,” and I think that played a role. I was only 10 years out of high school and, I think, immature for my age. I was knocking around in Southeast Asia when, all of a sudden, history started happening. I was a bit awed by it. 

I think the foreign service officers who sided with me – Shep Lowman, the political officer in the U.S. Embassy [in Saigon], and Ken Moorefield, who was operating as the ambassador’s aid at the Evacuation Control Center, the two of them were absolutely vital to my success. Along with Col. [William] Madison at the Defense Attaché Office, I would say they were really the key success factors.

As far as my own qualities, there’s a term: willful. When somebody tries to keep me from doing something that I think I ought to be able to do, I get very obsessive about finding a way around them. I just kept poking away at the embassy and the Defense Attaché. The other factor was just sheer luck. Twice in the book, I mention how many places things could have gone differently, starting at the beginning when they picked me instead of the guy who they originally offered the assignment to, who very likely would’ve evacuated the four [bank] officers and considered it a job well done.

Portrait by P. Decker

"Getting out of Saigon: How a 27-Year-Old Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians," by Ralph White, Simon & Schuster, 320 pages.

Another stand-out quality in the book is your sharp observation. Would you share the story about the dust cloud in Saigon?

I had worked in Vietnam four years earlier as a civilian with American Express, but up in the central highlands. I had visited Saigon a few times, and even though a lot of the streets were paved, there was always this deep cloud of dust hanging over the streets. When I returned four years later, and this was 18 months or so after the Paris Peace Accords had been signed and American troops had been withdrawn, that cloud of dust had gone down [to ankle level]. For me, this was the dog that didn’t bark. There was a detail here that was missing. Of course, it was the U.S. military presence. 

You developed an interesting partnership with Nga, a teenage girl working in the sex industry whose brother was connected to the North Vietnamese. What stood out about Nga?

The way we met was so tragic; I felt very sorry for her. I had a bit of history here: I would pay women who were in the sex industry to teach me the language. I did it in Thailand, I did it in Vietnam, and I’ve done it in other places. (I’ve never paid for sex.) It’s a relatively inexpensive language lesson. That was my original attraction. I started realizing she was quite bright and quite sweet behind the tougher facade.

At one point in Saigon, you get a ride with the embassy’s commercial attaché in his impressive new Lincoln Continental. Your observations about how cut off you feel riding in it are quite telling. Would you share that experience?

If you walk, you pick up a lot of detail. If you ride a bicycle, you lose a little detail. Then in a car you’re a bit more shut off, but you still have good vision, and you can roll down the windows. But when you’re in a tank of a car – armored, bulletproof glass, air-conditioned – you have no idea what’s going on out there. It’s sound-deadened; your thoughts are more inward than outward. 

I put it together later that [the Continental] maybe did have something to do with the U.S. being out of touch, certainly the ambassador being out of touch because he always traveled like that. If you have servants serve you your food and cultivate your garden and take care of your grandkids and walk your dog and do all of this stuff and then you ride around in a Continental and always stay in luxury suites, you really don’t have a feel for what’s going on. I think some ambassadors would wander in to the lowest-ranking office and say, “What’s going on today?” but that wouldn’t be [Ambassador] Martin’s style.

It’s been almost 50 years since the evacuation. Of the hundred-plus Vietnamese civilians you helped (and who helped you), whom do you still keep in touch with? 

When I finished the manuscript, it was probably early 2020, I hadn’t made any contact with any of the Vietnamese [colleagues]. I had made great efforts – and there was just nothing. 

Then I started becoming willful! I found six Vietnamese American associations in America. They each have newsletters, and they’re all hungry for content, so I sent them text saying that Ralph White, formerly with the Chase Manhattan Bank in Saigon, is looking for his former colleagues. I got a phone call from the president of the New Jersey Vietnamese American association, Tony Nguyen. And he said, “Look, Ralph, I know what you did. My father was caught in Saigon after the fall, and the Communists put him in a forced labor camp in the jungle for 10 years. That would’ve happened to all of your people ... but you saved them. What I’d like to do is invite you to our association’s Lunar New Year Tet Gala.” 

My girlfriend and I showed up; it was basically a gymnasium attached to a community center in Piscataway, New Jersey. As far as I recall, we were the only Caucasians there. A woman sat next to me and said, “What are you doing here? Are you in the right room?” And I just rolled my eyeballs at the stupidity of what I was about to say. “I’m trying to find former employees of the Chase Manhattan Bank in Saigon.” And she said, “Oh, I know somebody who worked at Chase Saigon ... my best friend!” The news went out that Ralph White had surfaced, so I was getting calls from Orlando and Houston and San Francisco ... all these people I knew. 

Any final thoughts?

Something that isn’t in the book, and [Ken Moorefield] doesn’t know yet, is that I’ve proposed him for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This is for his valor as head of the Evacuation Control Center getting my 113 people out – and, I think, a couple thousand unauthorized people. He went on to become an ambassador in Africa. 

Have you visited Vietnam since the evacuation?

I am planning to go back. Later this year, I’ll pick a time between the rainy season and the hot season and see if I can go around and explore my old haunts. 

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian volunteers with the American charity World Central Kitchen hand out meals in Sviatohirsk, a town once occupied by Russian troops, April 23.

Since the social justice protests that fanned around the world three years ago, businesses, institutions, and public services have made strides to become more inclusive. More than a hundred colleges in the United States, for example, now offer programs or degrees in diversity studies.

The trend reflects earnest attempts to grapple with difference – to close gaps in opportunity and wages and to see and value the breadth of human experience. Against that background, the insights of a new study on communal sharing and “reciprocal altruism” are almost radical in their simplicity. The study found that kindness is so omnipresent in daily human affairs that it virtually erases the dividing lines of identity.

“When we zoom in on the micro level of social interaction, cultural difference mostly goes away, and our species’ tendency to give help when needed becomes universally visible,” says the study’s lead author, Giovanni Rossi, a sociology professor from the University of California, Los Angeles, in a press release. 

The study, published last month in Scientific Reports, examined the way people help each other in eight distinct cultures on five continents. At the level of daily human activity, it found little variance from one community to the next in the consistency or constancy of acts of kindness. Strikingly, that generosity and selflessness is unaffected by bias. People are as apt to offer directions to a stranger as help a family member prepare a meal.

The value that people put on kindness is measurable. A recent Pew study found that 81% of American parents said it was extremely important or very important that their children grow up to be “someone who helps others in need” without regard to the other person’s identity.

Some helping gestures are more visible than others. International volunteers have flown into war zones like Ukraine to help distribute food in disrupted communities. In Texas, some people have responded to the influx of migrants at the border by opening their homes to stranded families. Under a pilot project funded by a nonprofit organization, police officers in eight towns in the state of Washington now carry prepaid debit cards they can use at their discretion to help people they encounter on their beats. That might be a meal, an item of clothing, or even auto repairs.

The cards, Wenatchee Police Chief Rick Johnson wrote in a recent blog, enable officers to build trust through empathy and have tapped into “an amazing outpouring of support from the community in the form of donations to our program.”

The study by Professor Rossi and his international colleagues concluded that while most acts of kindness play out in small or incidental exchanges, in their sheer volume they add up. “Large-scale social realities are built out of small-scale moments,” they wrote. In its diversity, humanity is and, the research implies, always has been bound together by the universality of innate generosity.