The high price of mistrust | Hacker News Reader

The high price of mistrust

fs.blog

351 pointsgalfarragem269 comments

I appreciate the author's framing of "transaction costs." These costs are often hidden.

It seems that as systems scale (in size) they tend to become inherently lower-trust. Consider a physician who makes house calls (not uncommon as recently as a few generations ago, and certainly not incompatible with modern medicine) and a large medical system such as Kaiser Permanente or NHS.

The economic benefits of the larger-scale system are obvious, and are directly measured, but the economic detriment due to increased transaction costs (derived from decreased trust) are neither obvious nor readily measurable.

Upsides of systems at scale can still outweigh downsides, and often do, but I suspect many industrial systems have a maximum scale above which efficiency gains lose out to, in this author's framing, transaction costs.

This abuts certain natural "borders" for system growth, such as national (or in the case of EU, common market) boundaries.

> It seems that as systems scale (in size) they tend to become inherently lower-trust.

I think the commodity markets (grains, coal, oil, steel, etc) are a significant counterexample: they do use spot checks but by and large run pretty lean on mechanism and rely on trust.

Another one is customs enforcement.

I'll agree, but also note that commodities are fungible.

Sorry, that was precisely my point. Commodities depend on their fungibility: that wheat is all durum and has an impurity level below X; the sulphur level of that crude oil is between Y and Z, and so on. Plus that the seller will deliver per the contract

There's a game theory argument that the system is somewhat self-managing; though you could defect in any single transaction your reputation would suffer and it wouldn't be worth it.

Perhaps it's a good counterexample because of its size: everybody purchasing directly in the commodities market (i.e. people who take delivery) can afford to have one bad batch because their volume is so high. But still, that depends on some degree of gatekeeping on the input side.

Indeed, and good food for thought. The fungibility is a feature both of these products being commodities in general, and of their quality being measurable. When measuring quality is cheap and easy, the risks for a defector are high.

When measuring quality is expensive and/or difficult, the risks for a defector are lower, and the defector's incentives may therefore be comparably greater.

I've spent a few years in a couple of bulk commodities, and I'm sorry, but your thought about commodity markets is simply not true in my experience. There are entire webs of institutions and mechanisms that make sure people do not defraud each other.

Some keywords - look into Letters of Credit, Bills of Lading, Certificates of Origin, INCOTERMS, and the requirements to make these work (such as inspection certificates from independent third-party organisations like SGS or CIQ). Bulk commodities can be sampled, tested and certified as many as 4-8 times in between buyer and seller, on a dozen different criteria.

Bulk commodity trading happens in an intrinsically low trust environment - it is frequently arms-length, cross-border, multiparty, for millions of dollars per transaction, and with a crazy number of different risks that have to be mitigated. The incentives to defect and come away millions richer are huge. And much of the system was developed for a time before the Internet.

While this is a noble sentiment, the structure and transaction costs are absolutely essential for the whole thing to work.

Thanks for the info based on actual experience!

Large systems aren’t inherently low-trust though. For example dealing with the same point of contact. Like your local GP in the NHS. I definitely remember home visits from our GP as a kid. So within a generation. Or with our kids family nurse that did all the pre and post checkups for both children.

AKA the "Algerian Resistance" model.

Everyone works with the same or slowly changing set of subordinates below them (patients in the case of an NHS physician) and same handler above them so despite the organization being big and faceless everyone has a long term high trust relationship with the people directly above and below them.

This sounds interesting and Google is not coming up with useful leads - would you be able to point me to more information on the "Algerian Resistance" model you describe?

Read up on the ANLF. The ANLF structured their organization such that nobody had good knowledge of the organization except the portion of the org chart immediately above and below them. This annoyed the French because they would capture the grunts and it was a hell of a lot of work to work their way up to knowing who the leaders were since you'd need an unbroken chain of N people willing to narc on their boss. This is made harder because people are more likely to narc on their boss's boss who they don't really know vs their boss who they have a hack of a working relationship with but that depends on knowing who your boss's boss is. Be advised that I glossed over some details in my original comment.

This is why I've never much loved blockchain on a conceptual level.

Even if you can make existing transactions trustless, you need more and more new transactions to negotiate the boundary between the physical world and the data on the blockchain.

One thing I took away from the beginning of Matt Ridley's book Rational Optimism is that with trust, commerce is unlimited.

And here we are stuck in this world where the computer in your pocket is untrustworthy, and you can't tell a useful benign app from an app trying to upload your life.

and it's a shame.

> you can't tell a useful benign app from an app trying to upload your life.

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but it appears only 32% [0] of people care enough about privacy to switch to a service that preserves it.

I suspect an even lower percentage know that apps on their phones might even be trying to upload their lives.

This is not the source of "mistrust".

[0]: https://hbr.org/2020/01/do-you-care-about-privacy-as-much-as...

I strongly disagree with your take on that survey. For one, it only mentions switching, not removing something (like social media) from your life. I have not switched providers because I found one that was more private. I have deleted facebook.

To be fair on those 68% who "don't care" they can't tell if they are using something that cares about their privacy or not.

Imagine two options of (1) an organisation who claims to do the right things and (2) an organisation who makes no claims. Picking either option could be a rational response for someone who cares about privacy. Any strategy has to account for the existence of liers/incompetents who claim to do something then don't.

To make privacy conscious decisions requires monitoring many information channels and having a nuanced understanding of the history and motivations of the people involved. That is too hard to do for most rational people. They need clearer support outlining what they are meant to be doing than what they get.

32% of a sample size of 2601.

Your is probably an unpopular one, but I'd guess because of questions like "Who are these people that cared about privacy, were willing to switch and did actually switch, but don't realize that their phones might even be trying to upload their lives?" Unless you meant that the results of that survey showing 32% of people cared enough that they actually did something about it, in which case, that's not really an opinion. Just a fact that a very small survey (out of the people who use services/companies that can be switched from, if they cared enough to do so) includes a segment that seems to represent "people [that] care enough about privacy to switch to a service that preserves it."

What this survey does not try to establish is what percent of people "cared" and are "willing", but found it not worthwhile to switch, for reasons such as "this is how I communicate with my friends and I cannot convince them to switch" or decided it just wasn't worth it due to other costs.

For me, WhatsApp comes to mind, but I'm guessing it's a somewhat common problem. I personally do NOT want to use WhatsApp, but I have a group of friends that will not switch and especially with Covid, I do not want to lose those connections. Replace "group of friends" with <community> and WhatsApp with <whatever app>.

Not sure what you even meant by "This is not the source of mistrust". m463 pointed out a couple of things, neither of which was a _source_ of mistrust.

> only 32% [0] of people care enough about privacy to switch to a service that preserves it

This statistic reflects my unscientific view also.

I am very privacy conscious (I still have a gmail account but that's for job hunting only!) but I know few others that are, however, if these others experienced something detrimental as a result of giving away their privacy then I suspect that 32% figure would increase... but until that happens, people won't care.

Protecting your privacy online these days is time-consuming and, if I'm honest, exhausting: it's a constant arms race between stopping evermore intrusive code from data mining the hell out of me and just being able to use things without constantly analysing them to ensure they're legit.

In fact, yesterday I went to the eff site [0] to see how much data my browser was giving away and even though I have it locked down (I still have js) I was unique anyway...

I've asked myself in the days when I feel like just giving in "what is the danger from <shady company> knowing all this stuff about me?"... And, in all honesty, I haven't come up with an answer that would satisfy that 68%.

[0] - https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

One thing of note is that communities that can rely on trust and thus have lower transactional cost overhead should be able to out-compete those that can't rely on trust. An example of this is with the Hasidic jews in NY's diamond district. This is something that Thomas Sowell touches on in a few of his books.

EDIT: Found my note

> What economist William Easterly has called “the radius of trust” varies greatly from group to group and from country to country. Within groups like the Marwaris of India, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, or Hasidic Jews in New York’s diamond industry, transactions involving substantial sums of money can take place without written agreements or recourse to the legal system, giving these groups competitive advantage over other members of their respective societies who cannot safely engage in similar low-cost ways of doing business. Whole nations likewise differ in the levels of honesty. Bicycles can be left parked without locks in Tokyo but doing so in many other countries would be a virtual guarantee that they would be stolen. [1]

[1] "Economic Facts and Fallacies" Thomas Sowell

This applies to the workplace too, not just society at large. That's why if I'm ever at a company where I feel like I am mistrusted, or I mistrust the people I work with, I do what I can to leave. Not only is it an unpleasant environment to work in, but it feels predictive of failure.

Right, you can't directly measure productivity in many jobs, so proxies for productivity are used, and in low trust environments, those proxies are the sole source of truth, which makes gaming them more important than actually being productive.

> those proxies are the sole source of truth, which makes gaming them more important than actually being productive.

Reminds me of a short story I read, which I can't find now. The gist of it was about this person reading a memo or something at work on their computer, and the person wasn't actually reading it, they were just scrolling down the page and occasionally scrolling back up to pretend to re-read paragraphs because they knew the monitoring software flags such behavior as a positive indicator that the reader has increased comprehension of the memo.

1984?

You may also be thinking of Snow Crash. Creepy stuff!

It's not a short story, but maybe you're remembering a bit from "Snow Crash"?

> Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes... Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of. I didn't know it was part of a book, I think I originally read this paragraph on someone's blog. Thanks for sharing the original source!

It'll get harder when the computers add eye tracking and one has to fake looking at the text too :)

I'm reading this article while waiting for one of the two people with write access to run my db migration, as developers don't get write access to the database in this company. Is this common?

Many companies do not provide read access to application databases either, without explicit consent via well-defined process. There are many compliance-related reasons why this is implemented, one of which may be the protection of your customers' financial performance data.

The better way is for nobody to have direct write access to the database, but instead for automated tools to do things like that, using reviewed code and config and writing an audit log of actions taken. The trust thing is part of the reason this is a good idea, but it's mostly a good idea to avoid good-faith accidents. I think it is common for companies that haven't yet had time to build those automated tools to delegate their work to senior, very trusted, engineers. But that's not a good solution, it's just more expedient, and a bit better than the database being world-writable, which is a bad solution.

I'm in a small company in that position, what's also helped is wrapping UPDATE statements in a transaction with a verification SELECT statement to make sure everything worked ok, then committing the transaction.

Saved my bacon more than once!

Why is this not automated?

Yes, it's pretty common not to provide direct access to production data in general.

In my experience, migrations are usually part of the code base, evaluated as such with PR and whatnot, and run automatically when deploying.

It depends on the size and context of the company, but I would not necessarily see this as a lack of trust.

Anyone who removes the "you break it, you bought it" scenario by denying you access to production is actually doing you a huge favor.

Excluding sole traders and cooperatives (and sometimes even including those, as the easiest way to lose friends is said to be to go into business together), it is entirely natural for the company and coworkers not to trust each other, not fully, as the goals and incentives of the company are not the same as goals and incentives of the employees. Your goal isn't likely to be to subordinate your life entirely to what the company wants, in a cult-like manner, with no regard for any other priorities like family, friends or personal growth - thus at the very least the kernel of mistrust always remains.

Some companies just manage to mask it better or tone it down to a level that if felt to be acceptable.

While true for many (the majority, even), it's not impossible for company-employee relationships to be symbiotic as well, not every company is like you describe.

I've spent a lot of years overseas, in third-world or developing countries, often torn by tribal or civil war, or other natural and man-made disasters. I have come to realize how foundational trust is in a functioning economy and self-governing society. We in G8 nations often don't see it, like fish not thinking about water. I've been extremely concerned with the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust. It's like watching people, on a boat at sea, tear up the hull for firewood... The irony is that the basic nature of people (the world over) really hasn't changed: people are msotly good and want to live in a healthy community. But culture, context, and experience can overrule those tendencies.

> I've been extremely concerned with the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust.

I assume you're referring to the neocons who lied us into the war in Iraq (and keep us there to this day), the Wall Street bankers & executives who created the 2008 financial crisis and the politicians who bailed them out at the people's expense, the military/intelligence and tech industry figures who set up a vast domestic mass spying infrastructure and then hounded the people who leaked it into hiding or prison, and the media apparatus which has run cover for all these sorts of things, right?

To me it often looks like a lot of what is described as "attacking trust" is actually just pointing out that it's already been worn down to a nub. We wouldn't have to deal with the emperor being naked if those darn troublemakers would just stop pointing out he's not wearing any clothes.

No, actually I'm referring to groups on the left _and_ right. While popularizing the attacking of shared society and our systems foundations did start with the counter-culture left in the 60s, it has certainly become a bipartisan effort in recent decades.

All the things I mentioned were entirely bipartisan affairs. In fact, we just witnessed the president who initiated the Iraq War feted and lauded by the press for his appearance at the inauguration of a new president from the "opposing" party who enthusiastically endorsed that war as a Senator.

The counterculture left is a very broad category, with some legitimate and organic elements mixed up with some very confused, self-indulgent, or aimlessly subversive ones. But it didn't fire the first shots in the attack on trust, not by a long shot.

Not sure about your timeline; the 60s were predated by the McCarthy era.

It would be a lot harder to attack them if they didn't provide such a basis for it.

There was a time when journalists at least attempted to be independent:

https://conversationswithslava.substack.com/p/coming-soon

Glenn Greenwald:

https://reason.com/2021/01/23/journalists-are-authoritarians...

> Did you vote for Donald Trump in the last election?

> I didn't vote. It's ironic: That's the one old journalism trope that I agree with, which is that if you vote, you psychologically become too connected to a politician. I prefer to just keep my distance.

They're a dying breed.

And it was never the case that journalists were 100% objective and unbiased. That's impossible. But there was a point in time when they at least made the attempt. Avoided the appearance of impropriety.

If you want people to trust you, try being trustworthy.

Glenn Greenwald's personal issues with (1) what he considers the appropriate relationship between journalism and "objectivity" and (2) his ability to maintain that relationship if he votes are not my problem.

There are dozens/hundreds/thousands of journalists around the world who are perfectly capable of reporting in a way that is useful, insightful, factual, while still voting in elections. I don't want journalists that I read to avoid the appearance of impropriety, I want them to tell me about the world in ways that I can't find out for myself. And I want them to vote.

I'm actually generally disgusted by meeting journalists who claim to not have opinions about the things they report on. I would hope that their opinions would be complex, because when you know enough about most things in the world, you realize that most things are pretty complicated and there generally aren't simple answers. But this BS of "I just try to report on what I find out, I don't really have an opinion" is, for me, a shorthand for "I'm too afraid of drawing conclusions about anything, which means I can't help my readers to do that either".

It's helpful to distinguish between journalists and historians.

Historians have the time and context to make judgments and draw conclusions.

Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour. The story may still be happening by the time the piece is published. You don't have all the information, so any opinion will inherently be misinformed.

Report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else.

It's possible that what we really need is a separate class of people in between the two. Reporters who provide facts on things that are actively happening, and commentators who provide opinion on things that have finished happening, e.g. a month later once the facts are better established and there has been time to do a thorough investigation, but not years or decades after the fact.

The problem is how to prevent the two from merging together and creating what we have now.

There are many, many journalists who work on stories that do not have "hour from now" deadlines.

People reporting on, for example: the move towards renewable energy supplies, the redistricting/closure of Chicago public schools over the last decade, gerrymandering processes in a half-dozen states ... in fact, I'd wager than the majority of things that journalists write about are not "hot news" at all.

You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.

> There are many, many journalists who work on stories that do not have "hour from now" deadlines.

But now it sounds like you're agreeing with me. So the ones who are reporting on stories that are still actively happening should hold off on the opinion, right?

> You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.

"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.

I'm not agreeing with you.

>Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour.

This is not the definition of a journalist.

>"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.

This is written as if reduction of journalistic opinion is the goal. I don't agree this is a goal. I'm not interested in a reduction of subjectivity in journalism. I'm interested in an increase in factual, expansive, multi-viewpoint reporting and analysis. If that comes with 3% journalistic opinion (whatever that means) or 83%, I'm fine with it.

What's not ok is journalistic subjectivity filling in for factual, expansive, multi-viewpoint reporting. However, there are plenty of journalists who are clearly capable of avoiding this issue.

>Report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else.

Exactly. But that doesn't mean that journalists (or anyone else, as that's important in many non-journalistic contexts) don't or shouldn't have opinions.

Rather the goal should be to report the facts without bias.

That may sound like hair-splitting, but it isn't. We're humans and we all have opinions, biases and ideas of our own.

But when it comes to reporting news or just facts/results (e.g., revenue figures, safety/efficacy testing results, etc.) the idea is to consciously set aside those biases.

Some do that better than others, which prsents an arbitrage opportunity that allows those with no desire or intention to report honestly/factually to insert blatantly false and/or misleading information.

Quality reporting of news and fact doesn't require a lack of opinion or bias about the subject at hand. Rather it requires the desire, willingness and ability to set aside those things in support of trustworthy reporting.

There are many reasons why that arbitrage opportunity exists, but the existence of opinions on the part of those reporting isn't a major contributor, IMHO.

As the old saw goes, "opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one."

When things are going well, you can stand by and observe. We're in a death spiral and need as many hands on the tiller as possible.

The death spiral is caused by journalists putting their hands on the tiller.

If people are running around lying with partisan motivations, the most important thing you can have is a source of information trusted to be at least mostly objective. Someone to take the time to do the investigation and tell you what really happened in any given case, and carry good faith arguments from each side, not institutions that pick a side and defend them no matter what.

Because people lose trust in institutions with an obvious bias. And then what do you have? Twitter?

Go head and spin this however you want, but I was strictly talking about a persons responsibility to vote and perform their civic duties.

Journalists lying to viewers faces about peaceful protests while streets burned in the background has helped the death spiral more than you can imagine.

Glenn Greenwald is used to claim that point-of-view journalism is perfectly fine, as long as the point of view is factually grounded. He said it on multiple occasions. If you look at his work and tweet feed, it is strongly point of view driven and at times emotional (the prevailing emotion and perpetual outrage). He does not seem to like concrete politician, but it very very clear who his enemies are. Glenn Greenwald is not an example of someone who is not psychologically connected or avoids the appearance of impropriety.

Glenn Greenwald on Trump during Biden inauguration: "Trump left the White House about as weak, cucked, and submissive as it’s possible for a grown adult to scamper away." I really dont know what he wanted Trump to do, he was way more critical of Biden and democrats then of Trump last months. Leaving during innaguration without causing issues sounds like exactly what is expected.

But the very same day, he called the "chills" tween inappropriate, claimed that such tweet is overly emotional and equated that tweet with being on public tv. Glenn Greenwald is last person that has any grounds to pontificate about objectivity and bias.

Sustainable trust is earned, not blindly given.

It is the responsibility of each participant to criticize the status quo and those who have taken up responsibility and power, or else they keep building on brittle, hierarchical foundations until everything crashes down.

Yes, there are populists who spread political lies, insecure managers who default to micro-management, bureaucratic systems that slow everything down and disillusioned workers. Their common trait is mistrust: They often have been hurt by those that they should be trusting, they are not being heard and sometimes they see through the bullshit. The best case is that there is simply a lack of real communication, education and direct involvement, because that problem is solvable.

It is very simple: for trust to grow and stabilize, both parties need to care and invest in each other. There is no shortcut, no trick and no amount of marketing, propaganda or talk will get either side out of this. That means both sides need to admit their mistakes, be vulnerable, caring, hopeful and most importantly honest and transparent.

Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population.

(What is a non-special interest? Business interests.)

It is completely illogical to immediately conclude that people who are complaining and pointing out that things are not right are necessarily themselves the cause of all that strife. Maybe they were responding to antecedent causes?

> What is a non-special interest? Business interests.

Ironically, business interests are the original special interests that Adam Smith warned about: “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 9)

> Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population.

The problem is with the rhetoric. You don't need to daemonize the system to reform it. For example, AFAIU the Women's Suffrage movement didn't take that course. Nor did the early mid-century Civil Rights movement. Later in the century (e.g. with the Vietnam War protests) radical Leftist academic discourse went mainstream. Conservative academics and pundits started adopting similar rhetoric not long after (consider Reagan's anti-government slogan), which really went mainstream in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s with Gingrich's Republican Revolution campaigning strategies.

The rhetoric has essentially become nihilistic. People like Chomsky are as much to blame as anyone else. But you don't become someone as famous as Chomsky without radical, absolutist rhetoric. In that sense academia in general is to blame. Though, there were other dynamics, e.g. opinion journalism, that brought the academic discourse into the popular discourse.

So you’re just going to whine about tone? Not even try to argue for or against what I have put forth?

I've seen an argument made that people fundamentally need to be able to trust that their government officials are honest (read: acting in good faith) and fundamentally competent. For a certain generation of people, Watergate eliminated any notion of the first, and the Iran-Contra affair blew away the second.

The real problem is that both of those needs are self-fulfilling: if people expect their politicians to be tacitly dishonest and incompetent, they're fine with electing openly dishonest and incompetent politicians because "at least they're open about it".

> I assume you're referring to the neocons who ...

Could you expand upon why? You mentioned your own perceptions on "attacking trust", but I didn't find much of that (or any assignment of blame to anyone) expressed in the parent comment.

The parent mentions "the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust" so it seems pretty clear to me there's an assignment of blame to someone there. There's a bit of sarcasm in my reply in that, usually, when I see people doing that in regards to this topic, they're not referring to the sort ruinous, trust-eviscerating projects I cited, but rather to things like "misinformation" or "divisive rhetoric" which, when properly viewed in context, are more symptoms than causes.

Spying is something nearly every single person I know can get behind, on the left or right. I’ve never seen it bleed into real life lack of trust.

Everything else on the other hand: https://news.yahoo.com/ex-gop-pollster-frank-luntz-172755768...

> “Bret, I couldn't control them. They just started yelling at each other, and it would take me two minutes to say to them, 'stop' - to put my hand up to the camera like I did right there for them to get control of themselves," Luntz said

Heh, thanks for the link, there's a certain dark enjoyment in seeing Luntz reap what he has sown.

> I assume you're referring to the neocons who lied us into the war in Iraq (and keep us there to this day), the Wall Street bankers & executives who created the 2008...

Really? Why reach back, in the case of neocons, to the early aughts? We need somebody that many people trusted who abused that trust, or someone attacking the trustworthiness of trustworthy people. I'm pretty sure you can find examples just in the last year. These are probably the ones the OP had in mind.

This is what I've found incredibly healthy and liberating about less developed countries. Nobody believes politicians or assumes that government has their best interests in mind. That level of trust appears as a toxic mythology from my perspective.

Instead they look for their own solutions.

So your assessment of the benefits of several hundred years of continuous political culture, along with a semi-continuous chain of protest movements, in "developed" countries is ... "meh" ??

Cynicism at this level does nothing but ensure that your worst take on government is what we actually get.

I thought that the parent made an interesting observation.

It's not cynicism, it a simple fact, backed up by history, of what happens when nobody trusts their government, when a the government of a people deviate too much from the interests of those people and making their lives more difficult instead of less, when all of that goes too far.

This can lead to reform. It can also lead to instability. It doesn't matter whether a country is "developed" or not. Developed countries can still have corrupt governments that are not responsive to their people, civil wars, etc. It can happen quick, or take a long time.

The stakes are high. Can enough of us agree on how to fix our problems? I don't know. I think that removing corporate and union money from politics would be a good first step, which is what most other countries already have done. Beyond that I wonder if we've grown our federal government too far past it's design specifications, expecting whoever is president this year to fix all our problems, leaving the other 49% of people very upset.

Perhaps it would help if I elaborated. I feel that you're filling in the blanks with some of your own projections.

The locals here openly accept money for voting. Politicians and bureaucrats are widely regarded as liars and cheats. The government's authority is checked by continuous protests. Government officials don't want to rock the boat or create further instability.

Similarly, the people have very little interest in politics. There's not constant bickering or hyperbolic demonization. Political fights don't permeate every sphere of life.

Everyone mostly stays in their own lane.

Yes, corruption is a problem here. Corruption is also a problem in the US. However the barrier to entry is higher. K street lobbyists don't come cheaply.

Yes, the government is ineffective. The question is, do the people want it to be effective? Even the private sphere is similarly ineffective. That's just a cultural norm, separate from the relationship to government.

Yet they are still developing countries. Maybe being a low trust environment isn't actually working in their favor and having a government you can trust to solve problems is good. A corollary: maybe working to sow distrust in the government doesn't promote the general welfare.

You're being downvoted, but you hit the nail on the head.

I feel like for people of my vintage (born in the early 80s) the whole war on terror was extremely caustic to my generational cohort. It was a weird environment where every trusted institution in society lined-up in support of both wars, and then actively worked to sideline any debate and discussion. The Dixie Chicks got infamously cancelled for saying something completely milquetoast against the Bush and the war.

And just as we thought we were turning a corner on the War on Terror the financial crash of 2008 hit. Here, it was another highly regarded institution: finance. Young people might not remember this, but finance used to be the industry you would track into if you were a high achieving member of the intelligentsia. The industry was viewed as being staffed to the gills with the best-and-brightest and was afforded anodyne coverage from the establishment media. So naturally, when they imploded the country and then went on TV and blamed it on losers with mortgages[1], and proceeded to face zero real consequences because the justice system never bothered putting laws in place to protect regular people and felt such actions would "punish people for taking risks" (which as an aside: if you are just externalizing risk to 3rd parties you aren't actually "encouraging people to take risks")

It's a trope, but social trust has been eroded because people feel like there's basically "meritocratic" caste system in this country: if you go to the right school, get into the right industry, and make enough money you are granted a measure of impunity when you externalize harm that you quite frankly shouldn't have.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-Jw-5Kx8k

"Young people might not remember this, but finance used to be the industry you would track into if you were a high achieving member of the intelligentsia. The industry was viewed as being staffed to the gills with the best-and-brightest and was afforded anodyne coverage from the establishment media."

Speaking as someone who was born before the 80s, my perception is that you have misread this situation. The rise of finance was a consequence of the "greed is good" 80s, which meant that disproportionate rewards went to financial industries, which was both a cause and a consequence of the collapse of every other career open to the intelligentsia.

You see a similar situation on a smaller scale in the rise of Silicon Valley's start up culture, where that is seen as the most valid or only career choice in spite of asymptotically levelling benefits.

The demonstration that "the best and brightest" operating open loop without regulation leads to spectacular busts is left as an exercise to the reader.

You are correct, grab any of the excellent financial history books written by Frederick Lewis Allen. People assume things that have not existed very long have always existed.

Could it have been the other way around, where the rise of finance industries caused the "greed is good" 80s?

I've assume that Nixon taking the U.S. off the gold standard precipitated the growth in the finance industry, the government needs banks to grow money supply and debt, right?

"Greed is good" may have just been an add campaign designed to justify what was already happening, a frenzy of finance, consumerism, and debt that has not stopped yet.

>there's basically "meritocratic" caste system in this country: if you go to the right school, get into the right industry, and make enough money you are [ ... ]

This is a description of the absolute opposite of what "meritocratic" means.

> This is a description of the absolute opposite of what “meritocratic” means.

Well, its actually exactly what the use that brought “meritocracy” into the common lexicon was referring to, though that use was satirical.

No, "meritocracy" was brought into the common lexicon in the 1960s, specifically as an alternative to existing forms of social structure. A system where it did not matter which school you went to, in particular.

I do not read the GP as being satirical in their use, although the use of quotes makes it somewhat unclear.

Well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy absolutely is satire (or rather, satire used to serious effect). But it's true that this was very quickly forgotten.

No. dragonwriter is referencing the original history of the word. The author Michael Young who coined the word in 1958 was using it in his book to show everything wrong with a “merit” based system, as he explains here: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

This gives a good background:

https://kottke.org/17/03/the-satirical-origins-of-the-merito...

"Michael Young popularised but did not coin the term “meritocracy”. That came in 1956, two years before his book, when in the magazine Socialist Commentary (to which Young contributed) the industrial sociologist Alan Fox put the word in quotation marks and defined it as “the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure”.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/21/michael-youn...

“Michael Young adapted his 1955 Ph.D. thesis into a dystopian novel” - https://discoversociety.org/2018/10/02/the-birth-of-meritocr...

“When the word meritocracy made its first recorded appearance, in 1956 in the obscure British journal Socialist Commentary, it was a term of abuse, describing a ludicrously unequal state that surely no one would want to live in. Why, mused the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, would you want to give more prizes to the already prodigiously gifted? Instead, he argued, we should think about “cross-grading”: how to give those doing difficult or unattractive jobs more leisure time, and share out wealth more equitably so we all have a better quality of life and a happier society.” - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/merito...

“Jean Floud, Alan Fox, and Michael Young had a number of commonalities. Jean Floud taught at the London School of Economics while Michael Young was pursuing his PhD. Alan Fox was a member of that 1950s circle of left-leaning thinkers that included Jean Froud and Michael Young. Since all three are now dead, it's tough to say which amongst those three coined the word "meritocracy". Michael Young had already been evincing thoughts along the lines that led to his publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy since 1951. Most references go with Michael Young as the originator of the word. One last thing is certain: The term as coined by one of those three was anything but complimentary. It was instead quite derogatory.” - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/34390/did-the-t...

“the magazine Socialist Commentary (to which Young contributed) the industrial sociologist Alan Fox put the word in quotation marks and defined it as ‘the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure’.”.

1. Young says he created the word, and we have no reason to doubt that (as per Guardian link).

2. It was used in a negative sense in 1956

I think you are cherry-picking. If you wish to disagree with the generally held beliefs, then I think you should pick a better reference than one comment on an Internet page.

It's weird. You're right, but those are still seen as "meritocratic", and one could argue were meritocratic historically, at least in some degree, because in theory you get into the right school by scholastic merit, you get into the right industry by merit of your learned and demonstrated skillset and willingness to work in that industry, and you have money by merit of having created value from your hard work in industry.

In practice you get into the right schools because you belong to the right social circles, you get into the right industry because you come from the right schools, or are in the right social circles, and you make enough money because you got into the right schools and industry or inherited by virtue of being born into the right social circles...

When meritocracy was being pushed as a social goal in the 1960s, it related more to the question of who end up in positions of power, positions where they could make decisions that would affect society.

It was not necessarily about who was going to get rich. It was about no longer picking decision makers from the children of the existing decision makers.

It ran into two problems. The first was that we didn't really think through how we were going to establish merit in the first place. What's happened there is that we've adopted a bunch of stupid shorthand ("they graduated Harvard") that essentially is undifferentiated from what we were doing before we tried to build a meritocracy. We never found (maybe never tried to find) any way of establishing that a kid with a degree from a public university in Kansas was actually going to be better at national infrastructure planning than the one from Harvard (or not, for that matter).

The second problem is that the people who benefited from the meritocratic goal (I am one of them) have worked quite hard to pull up the ladders behind them (us). We've erected all sorts of barriers (but mostly cost) to ensure that only our descendants and direct beneficiaries get access to the social institutions that are now used to define "merit".

It's in air quotes for a reason - we label it meritocracy but there are clearly structural issues in place that preventing our society from being such a thing.

War on Drugs started it, but the War on Terror accelerated it. The GOP misinformation campaign is finishing it off...

Realistically, this is just a reversion to things in the early 20th century. The system of trust we've built up is only about 50 or 60 years old, and it's decayed as people took it for granted. Hopefully we're noticing it now.

Finance was slimy as hell long before 2008.

People like to think they live in unique times, but they don’t.

As someone who grew up in very low trust country, I have to point out in response to several other comments that trust is also not natural. Trust needs to be fostered and guarded, and one sure-fire way in which it erodes in people is if they see norms being violated with impunity. That both makes it more acceptable for people to violate norms (like that riot paper I can't find now, where they found each person would throw a rock if they saw N people around them throwing rocks, so it's a cascade of higher and higher Ns); but also more importantly creates a cynical attitude in those who won't violate the norms that their chief goal is to protect their own well-being from bad/stupid people, the rest be damned (the bad and stupid people might as well suffer, and the others, well I guess they should just also fend for themselves).

This applies on all levels from govt corruption, to e.g. neighborhood care. Russian cities are full of shabby-looking flats ("condos") with cars parked on the lawn, the playgrounds that are lightly vandalized, and dirty unmaintained common areas; however, many of the cars are luxury and if you visit someone you'd see they have a nice (if small) pad even by Western standards. And probably a steel door. That is because you see people treating common areas like crap, so at worst you also treat them like crap ("everyone parks on the lawn!"), and at best you retreat into your own little world and make it perfect, outside and everyone else be damned, and traversing from your flat to your car becomes sort of a tolerable necessary evil, who cares what it looks like.

I've been thinking about this a lot given the recent deterioration of the West coast cities. I've definitely become much more lower trust than I used to be, and I realized another reason I don't like houses is that you cannot just put a steel door in and be mostly safe from crime - too many entry points :)

I offer this feedback with the utmost respect for Farnam Street and Shane Parrish:

1. Loss is mentioned a lot but not mentioned is linking the asymmetric movement of trust to the cognitive bias of loss aversion.

2. Aside from Putnam, another take worth mentioning is Steven M. R. Covey's The Speed of Trust which speaks to the link of trust to performance within organizations.

3. The interface, boundary or contract is a common method of encapsulating trust. For example, since ancient times people have used "silent trade" in which trade goods are placed in the open and left behind. This requires a significant but finite amount of trust, minimal amount of social cohesion and provides a great deal of communication.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36076.The_Speed_of_Trust

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade

Silent trade: "Group A would leave trade goods in a prominent position and signal, by gong, fire, or drum for example, that they had left goods. Group B would then arrive at the spot, examine the goods and deposit their trade goods or money that they wanted to exchange and withdraw. Group A would then return and either accept the trade by taking the goods from Group B or withdraw again leaving Group B to add to or change out items to create an equal value. The trade ends when Group A accepts Group B's offer and removes the offered goods leaving Group B to remove the original goods."

Generally the farther east you go in the countries of the former Soviet block, the less trust there is. Poland has low trust, but it's a lot lower in Russia and if you smile to strangers you may get sullen glances or insults.

When I had a sprained ankle and was walking to the doctor with walking sticks, a car stopped by and I was asked if I want a ride. The question was in English. It's a moment like that when you realize no one else offered help.

It's worst when governments demonize journalists and media. One youtube talk I watched listed that as a sure sign democracy is under attack in a country.

> One youtube talk I watched listed that as a sure sign democracy is under attack in a country.

How does that have any legitimacy? There's no bar as to who can post on youtube.

I trust the investigative journalist Tomasz Piątek, educated at Milan University, with awards and boks more than a rando in a HN comment.

You didn't link the video or reference the speaker. You just wrote:

> One youtube talk I watched listed that as a sure sign democracy is under attack in a country.

From everyone elses perspective, you are the rando in a HN comment.

Fair point. I don't remember which one exactly it was (they are 2 hour long) but it was from the series "Dochodzenie Prawdy" on the channel "Reset Obywatelski". The episode number was between 1 and 8. The talks are in Polish language only.

>It's worst when governments demonize journalists and media. One youtube talk I watched listed that as a sure sign democracy is under attack in a country.

I don't understand your response to this. A democracy is the will of the people. In general it is not ok when politicians collude to marginalize or silence the free speech of the people they are supposed to represent. This is what totalitarian regimes do.

It would be better to talk to people and attempt to really understand them rather than demonize them.

> Generally the farther east you go in the countries of the former Soviet block, the less trust there is. Poland has low trust, but it's a lot lower in Russia and if you smile to strangers you may get sullen glances or insults.

This has absolutely not been my experience living for the past 1.5 years in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and most recently Russia (but Siberia). Almost everyone I meet is still friendly once speaking, although I think in Russia the willingness to talk to strangers is much less than the other countries.

I'm guessing most of the experiences you're actually noticing that trust is lower in cities than in rural areas: the two major "European" Russian cities are both over 5 times larger than Poland's largest city.

This rings extremely true for me. I live in Norway, which in my experience is significantly more trusting than most other places, and it's wonderful. We do have other transaction costs though, like a fear of "bothering" each other. Different problem, similar effect.

At a much smaller scale, though. After living most of my life in Brazil, I still bristle at how stuff happens here in the US, with much less papertrail than I'm used to because people often trust the systems and people in place.

When I bought a home I just wired the down payment, didn't get anything other than the bank statement saying I had wired the money. In Brazil I'd get a paper proving they got it and stuff.

So while the fear of "bothering" is real, the fear of losing a considerable amount of money because the person on the other side is not trustworthy (and I'd say Brazilians in general assume no one is trustworthy) is worse in a much bigger scale. I'm not sure I'll ever be as carefree as americans but not having to care as much as I used to back in Brazil has been a huge boost for my mental health.

I’m feeling it in the other direction. I’ve been lucky to live a relatively carefree and unproblematic life in the US middle-class, until the last few years where I’ve attracted a well funded legal team to stalk everything I do and find faults. Now, I think living in a low trust society sounds great because the Boomers and other optimists in my life are starting to leave me alone. They don’t doubt my story, but it’s also beyond what they can process as real—former inmates and first generation Latin and Afro folk who I work with can fully comprehend the situation of being terrorized by lawyers and their “investigators.” Suddenly I am forced to be a low-trust person, and it’s not natural or pleasant... I’m mostly Scandinavian by blood, with a little of everything mixed in.

I see what you mean, and when it comes to institutions and government, we are also very trusting.

That is, we trust institutions because we trust that the government has our backs if they screw us.

I'm curious, do you think that a high-trust culture tends to be more conformist? I wonder if the two go together.

Hopefully this isn't too much of derailing the conversation:

This was something that surprised me about China when I visited, although maybe it shouldn't have.

The level of community and how close people are seemed unreal, coming from the US.

Maybe part of it is the "forced" community - city/urban blocks gated off with single entrance/exit ways, in some cases. I'm not sure.

But the dancing every night in the street in big cities, the elderly gathering to play Mahjongg in dedicated buildings, and other things, really opened my eyes about how far apart we are.

The level of community and how close people are seemed unreal

All of that exists in Christian churches and their deep (but often quiet) influence over many social efforts and programs across the United States. Have you visited one recently?

Rally is also a pretty tight community as well, everyone is always there to help you press on regardless, whether its a tow out of a ditch on stage or lending a spare for a blown fuse in service.

What is "Rally"?

Stage Rally!

All very true! That's why I don't think Christianity is a terrible thing, despite not being a believer.

Regarding Rally - yeah I know - I drive stage. I've had my fellow competitors help me fix my car between stages, there is no family like the rally community.

EDIT: By the way, China has these things too. I was thinking of the things I wish we had.

Putnam also recently published "The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again" which takes the ideas of "Bowling Alone" and applies them to the Progress Studies related history/analysis.

My professor once talked about a Canadian small town he worked in for a while where people where people generally left their keys in the ignition when they went to the store.

I actually remember the weird feeling I got when I moved from my parents home (where we didn't lock our doors at night) to my first apartment (where I definitely did).

I remember when I lived in Barcelona and filled up my motorbike at a gas station. I went inside to pay and the lady was shocked that I left my helmet on the bike's seat for the 30 seconds I'd be away from it, and urged me to go get it lest it be snatched. Real eye-opener as well. Back in Switzerland I'd never give that another thought.

The breakdown of trust in a society is a vicious cycle that seems hard to break.

When a mistrust dynamic sets in, how can it be reversed?

IMO trust is associated with a certain social interaction. Once it's broken, one common way (the most? not sure) of re-establishing trust is to establish new social interactions, probably more personal and less complex. The example I'm thinking of is the emergence of organised crime in Sicily out of informal relationships between citizens who can't count on the state for protection or justice. Or the emergence of feudal contracts between a leader and his subordinates, where the old Roman system of tax collection and provincial administration had broken down (in some cases long after Rome had left the area - polities like Soissons ran the Roman administrative model into the ground until the high-personal-trust structure of early feudalism came along and overtook them).

We're kind of barreling toward this reality in pockets of the western world. Where I live in the US (wealthy blue state, not rural Alabama, don't get your hopes up) you pretty much can't do fair business at a fair price without a personal reference or prior business relationship. And in some of the smaller wealthier towns you can see this kind of behavior start to creep into local government. Of course this is a far cry from not being able to rely on the police but it's definitely movement in that direction.

? Where I live in the US (wealthy blue state, not rural Alabama, don't get your hopes up) you pretty much can't do fair business at a fair price without a personal reference or prior business relationship.

Are you able to share an anecdote on this?

Sounds overly-simplistic but the solution is to build trust again.

Unfortunately, the incentives that rule our society are pushing us away from this. We need to align incentives properly if we're going to have any hope of building trust again. ex:

1. The internet, as a technology, is amazing but functions as a possible bullhorn for everyone, without filter. It does not reward the best possible or most positive idea, only the one that grabs the most attention.

2. Shock and outrage drive the clicks/views/attention and everyone gets paid on these metrics.

3. Social media companies thrive on and optimize for attention metrics. The longer you use them, at the expense of things like participating in your community and building relationships, the more "successful" they are and the more $$$ they get

4. Society has moved towards more specialized play and communities. We participate in fewer and fewer activities where we just randomly encounter strangers.

5. Our current election system rewards divisiveness because it drives turnout. The candidate that can do the best job doesn't win-the candidate that can get the most votes does.

Possibly unpopular view: Encouraging religious participation would go a long way to help. Whether you believe or do not, religion helps align society away from purely individualistic pursuits and more towards a "corporate good".

> Possibly unpopular view: Encouraging religious participation would go a long way to help. Whether you believe or do not, religion helps align society away from purely individualistic pursuits and more towards a "corporate good".

How does that work out in 3rd world countries where there's high levels of religious membership and high levels of angry young men

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...

"Is religion important in your daily life"

There seems to be a correlation between countries with corrupt/untrusted governments and high religious importance.

Compare the Corruption Perceptions Index 2019 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index] with importance of religion [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...]

And you don't get an exact line, but there's certainly a trend there.

Those with high corruption and relatively low religion are ex Soviet/Commumist (Azerbajan, Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Hungary, Belarus, Cuba have <50% religion and >50 corrupt)

There's always outliers, like Singapore (70% religious but only 15 corrupt / 85 notcorrupt), but there's a trend

https://i.imgur.com/oFiAbAN.png

> There seems to be a correlation between countries with corrupt untrusted governments and high religious importance.

Yes, when the system is very corrupt, you need to have some alternative way to build community, cohesion, and stability.

In communist Poland, the Church has been the center of the opposition to the communist system. The system has been very corrupt, but people found solace, community and the support in the Church. When John Paul II was elected the Pope, the Polish people were reinvigorated, and rallied around him, creating Solidarity movement etc. The communist system has recognized the power of Church, and fought it viciously: for example, it murdered Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest famous for his association with Solidarity. This made Polish people rally around the Church even more.

After the fall of communism, the Church no longer needed to provide this form of support, and over time, as the civil society has improved, the Church has used the legitimacy and respect it has built during communism to push its own agenda, which in past years has been rather divisive instead of uniting. Religion is not universal social good: its value depends on both the historical circumstance, and the actual content of practice and attitudes of leadership. It can be extremely beneficial, uniting society in ways impossible otherwise, but it can also be extremely damaging, to a deadly degree.

It's not hard to imagine confounding variables that could be influencing both, instead of a direct causal relationship.

Not all religions are created equal, but yes, the trend is prominent.

There is some insight here if you dig deeper into the data.

1. https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-07-17/these-are-most-religi...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

3. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/12/how-do-amer...

Just as capitalism is an amazing "technology" to maximize monetary value creation, organized religion is quite possibly the best technology ever created for achieving things like person-to-person engagement, building trusted communities, and creating a shared value systems. There are others (community groups, bowling leagues, etc) but none have been as durable and successful.

Like other technologies, it can be used for both good and evil and will be very effective doing so.

Just throwing this out there: I'm a believer in Christianity and love to connect w/ people about this kinda stuff. If anyone wants to talk more, email is in profile.

The first thing that comes to mind is, if you don't have a high level of trust in the society, the trust fostered by being the same religion is all the more valuable. If you think you can go out into a high-trust society and do just fine, then leaving that religious community your parents raised you in seems low-cost.

Also, if high trust drives economic growth, and wealthier societies become less religious, you would get that same pattern. I think to determine which is driving which, you would need to look at the relation between religion now and trust levels in the past, and vice versa.

I'm not sure religious participation is the answer. Organized religion is responsible for plenty of misinformation. In the recent pandemic, there have been multiple superspreader events at unauthorized religious gatherings.

Maybe sports leagues or mandatory national (or state) service?

I think you're spot on about a lot of these points. On your last "unpopular view" about religion, religious groups can be like any other group of people in that each group falls somewhere on a spectrum between warm and welcoming vs. aggressively tribal. I think the sentiment is right, though – maybe "civic engagement" is what we're after here.

Whatever the answer, I'm convinced it will take nearly constant vigilance to prevent it from eventually being corrupted to serve the very evil it was meant to eradicate. This seems to be one of the few constants throughout human history.

A method to address mistrust is to initiate "virtue circles": do people unrequested favors, without expectation of any return. Just do it; it actually feels good. And it is infectious. Others start doing it too, and double so when you subtly exhibit the joy of helping others without any expectations. Once more than 3 people in any social circle start this type of positive interaction, a positive culture shift occurs in the social group. It is quite amazing how fast this transition happens, as if people are waiting for an excuse to be better with others.

And make sure there is space for people to do this, and reward it where possible.

Companies are moving more and more towards metrics, which means the nice guy that helps everyone out but isn't as great with his metrics gets screwed, vs. the asshole who optimizes only for the metrics while screwing everyone over gets ahead. Once the nice guy has seen this happen over and over, even the nicest person breaks, gives in, and starts playing by the rules of the system, which by design incentivize working towards the measurable goals.

"It's all about the incentives" - Steven D. Levitt

Very much this. I would amplify it a bit and say talk to real humans in real life (not through a screen). Be a good neighbor, smile and greet people, help strangers. It sounds trite, but I think its the best path. A persons physical community is more important that twitter (or HN for that matter). Culture is made from the choices and shared knowledge of individuals. Being open to others is a prerequisite to influencing change. Accepting imperfections and poor decissions in others is a prerequisite to improving things. I don't see a magical switch that can be flipped to suddenly change a culture, nor do I see secret cabals controling us from the shadows, so no help from the illuminati or whatever.. It's the choices we make and the views we hold about our fellow citizens, and those are better in real-life than on-screen.

Putting in extra effort to actively demonstrate trustworthiness.

That means when leaders are speaking, they need to monitor how their words are perceived, and resolve misunderstandings quickly.

Also, overcommunicate and share evidence, and be honest and direct.

Seeing 1950's America is heartbreaking for me. I grew up in the 90s, and I never saw a trusted society.

https://www.radiogunk.com/forums/index.php?threads/1950s-ame...

Where's the broken glass? The needles, the poop? The stumbling drunks harassing the young women? The masses of tents where children used to play?

What the fuck has happened to us?

yeah... the 50s only look good if you ignore the massive racial, gender and environmental problems. US economy was great with the post-war boom, but there's a reason why there are so many TV shows about the rotten foundations of 50s glam.

As opposed to the massive racial, gender and environmental problems we are currently facing, with a additional pyramidion of used needles and feces?

In 1954, the Arkansas National Guard occupied a high school in Little Rock to prevent black children from entering it.

The President, and elements of the 101st Airborne Division had to be involved.

Those massive problems are significantly less massive than they were then.

Bro, America was legally segregated then. Give me a break.

No, there are TV shows about that because those who control the media want to make us think the 50's, which by all accounts were comparatively really good, really weren't good at all due to some hidden darkness below the surface. Because otherwise we might start to think double-plus bad thoughts about why so many things have turned to shit.

And I mean good for all races - in terms of real-world material and communal circumstances - as opposed to abstract "rights" (other peoples obligations) that mostly benefit a small upper middle class.

"In the six decades from 1950 to 2010, the U.S. population had increased from 157.8 million to 312.2 million"

And it was 132.1 million in 1940.

Yeah, that was a hypothetical question, but thanks... there's no going back it seems :D

I'm sure they still have this environment in some countries where no one wants to visit.

> Seeing 1950's America is heartbreaking for me.

> https://www.radiogunk.com/forums/index.php?threads/1950s-ame...

Except for the clothes (which aren't very different), that could be a picture of downtown Placerville today (well, not today because of the weather, but…) Or a million other places in today's USA.

> Where’s the broken glass? The needles, the poop?

The same place as the non-white people, who are disproportionately also the people cleaning up the places where the white people live without it.

> The stumbling drunks harassing the young women?

Most everywhere, including indoors. That was normal, accepted, unremarkable behavior.

Less censorship in the media. All that stuff was there in the 1950s as much as it is now, but you didn't see it anywhere in the media because it was not allowed by fiat of central authorities (from the Hayes office to the boardrooms of various publisher and broadcast networks). Heroin was not introduced in the 21st century and needles are not new but there are far fewer cigarette butts everywhere today. Cities stank of stale cigarettes and urine and car exhaust and if you were anywhere near water, dead fish.

A few photos that do not show the winos or the dog crap on every sidewalk do not prove there wasn't any. It just proves the existence of a few photos. Nobody, for example, picked up someone else's poop off the streets and brought it home in a little bag like they do today, and there were just as many dog owners in Manhattan in the 1950s as there are now. The signs required you to 'curb your dog' which meant leave it in the gutter, but it usually ended up on the sidewalk with all the gum, spit, old newspapers, and pigeon droppings. People went to jail for being homosexual or using birth control. Credit cards and consumer loans were illegal in the US until the 1960s so everything was cash-only and muggings were a real and present threat. Racism was overt, explicit, widespread, and rampant.

I think what you see of the 1950s is selection bias. Times are good now. Better than the 1950s because we stopped hiding stuff and lying to ourselves and have tried to make things better instead.

I would add that photography was quite expensive back then so I bet no one was wasting his film on making photos of awful places.

It would be like judging current reality by Instagram photos, so must be that everyone is fit and travels to beautiful destinations ... well homeless people don't put their photos on Instagram.

> Less censorship in the media.

This is a surprising hot take in these times. I wholeheartedly disagree.

I understand what you're saying and yes I believe obviously we have more pictures/proof of existence (connected world) and yes there are a lot of areas where we have made progress but is "trust" in general better ?

I don't want to make this political but it is the elephant in the room right now. There is a whole side of a political party + media completely dismissing and grouping the whole other side in simplistic and alienating ways.

I'm not for either political side and I'm not a trump supporter. (Sadly I have to add this disclaimer, it's incredibly saddening)

I think someone else in this thread mentioned China as a high-trustful society. I think that goes to show that we're not talking about overall "better" and overall "accepting" but specifically "trust".

Maybe we find out that trust is in conflict with the other values we hold ? but to say that general trust is high now seems really naive.

I know it's an outlier but you don't need media selectiveness to show you San Fransico's homelessness problem , in fact I see more of that from word of mouth/first hand experience. I personally have seen signs of deteriorating trust in my "neighborhood". I don't want to put up strawmen but maybe it depends on how much your view is based on media vs what you see ? in which case where you live would probably have a huge impact in what your views on this are ?

I hate using that because I don't want to say that some people are too privileged to see this, imo obvious, change. As someone who was raised in a rough neighborhood (poor/high crime rate) and then moved out to a better place, I was shocked how my world view changed and I really thought the whole world had moved to a better place until I went back and realized there are still people in that "old world". It was incredibly shocking that I believed some of these things and now I'm vigilant and accepting that my world view (large part to where I live) tints the world.

I obviously don't know the solution and maybe "trust" is a value we have to lose to have some of our more progressive values or maybe it's just harder to incorporate those other values with trust.

I think it's fair to say that in the 50's communities were more trusting (for some, racism/monoculture related I'm sure). Not better but more trusting (huge emphasis on for some).

Unfortunately most research on social capital and mistrust has been desk-drawered or heavily self censored due to the political implications.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/robert-putnam-and-the-ethi...

https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The first link seems to heavily imply so, but that's not obvious to me.

> Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.

That seems incredibly naive. If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be different?

Well, academics routinely do disseminate such knowledge. Not least, to appeal to the community to find such a solution.

It is highly unlikely a researcher in "finding X" is an expert in "solving X" or otherwise has the capacity to do so.

The "head in the sand" approach here doesn't "ease community tensions" it does precisely the opposite: prolong them for fear open investigation "goes against the consensus".

> If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be different?

Well, that metaphor doesn't apply here. The research shows that something we're already doing is potentially harmful. A more accurate metaphor would be discovering milk is actually poisonous as currently processed, and withholding the research for fear of disrupting the dairy industry (which the researcher happens to be a member of).

Your mistake is in presupposing the goodness of the thing the research is revealing to be potentially harmful. Hiding science that disagrees with your preconceived ideas is a dangerous path to take. You strengthen your position by whittling away the pieces that disagree with reality and updating your approach, not by denying reality and insisting you were right all along.

These links cover one person's research, the same person as the parent article, via press releases seeking controversy and attention for his commercial work.

His work doesn't appear to have been desk-drawered or self-censored.

He delayed publication for years (in the proverbial desk drawer) while he attempted to develop a positive and politically acceptable spin on the results (self censorship). He is also probably one of the top ten most prestiguous living social scientists. Consider the incentives of researchers with less accumulated social capital who are far easier to attack for their findings.

Holding on to publishing the results because you don't like the political consequences sounds like self-censorship to me

It's "self-censorship" no more than I am self-censoring myself right now, in this comment.

Reinvigorating your old work for publication, once you have a commercially viable avenue to promote it, is pretty average capitalism.

Plenty of work that is politically awkward is published under a strict pseudonym. This wasn't - and the author's position is that it was their choice not to publish.

Although mistrust can sometimes be warranted, as a way to prevent others from poisoning your life, I agree that it's also something to be careful about.

This reminds me of a quote from EM Forster's novel Howard's End:

> “You remember ‘rent’? It was one of father’s words— Rent to the ideal, to his own faith in human nature. You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, ‘It’s better to befooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”

This quote links back to this article and mentions the cost of closing yourself off and growing distrustful, which is really losing faith in human nature and kindness.

Interesting read!

Reading this article reminds me of an econ classes I took in college, developmental economics, where we studied what metrics are correlated with long-term economic growth. Of course we looked at things like education rates and technological advances, but surprisingly we looked at trust as well. Interestingly sociological measures of trust had a tighter correlation with long-term economic growth than anything else we looked at. If contracts are not trusted to be honored or enforced then business activity breaks down.

I'm sure most of you have observed this, but there's a game theory answer to the question of trust: https://ncase.me/trust/

In practice, distrusting is a matter of worrying about the minority. If you lock anything, you're worried about 1% or 0.1%, maybe less, who will legitimately do something bad. But, the consequences are so heavy that people apply that distrust to everyone.

This is right, there's now a certain % of people that just can't be trusted in the US, it's easier to trust no one.

This article made me think immediately about a lot of discussions regarding blockchain suitability for a given use case.

I realized solving for a « no trust » environment is extremely expensive (even purely computationally if you look at proof of work as a solution).

Most of the times, deciding to start putting a little trust in the design saves a lot of complexity...

Check out Polkadot! All the 'Powerhouse' Players came together to start a semi-trustless system of governance that's pretty interesting.

Not sure if you've read up on recent developments in Ethereum, but in case you haven't, check out proof of stake [1]. Basically, POS lets people put their money on the line for consensus rather than let people only participate in consensus by solving hard computation problems.

[1] https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/

With more trust, there is less profit the corporations can make, and less tax income. There are many reasons for the decline of trust in the community. I think that one of them is marketing that exploits fears of strangers or peddles weird apps that replace parts of human interaction.

> Even if we’re not engaged with other people on a social or civic level, we still have to transact with them on an economic one. We still have to walk along the same streets, send our children to the same schools, and spend afternoons in the same parks.

No we don't. Kids are driven everywhere, meaning that there is a (locked) door between them and The Others, the richer the neighborhood the richer the schools and the less you have to put them together with poor kids.

With distance learning you don't even have to worry about the other kids in the class, or the commute.

Meetup is a pretty good alternative to bowling now in days.

That and alumni groups, back in 2019 this was a part of my strictly offline dating strategy. Worked ridiculously well, I never encountered even any rudeness from anyone and I had a few great partners. Aside from that I really do enjoy going to tech talks and stuff, talking about array functions and all that good stuff.

What I have noticed, and I completely blame the social media age for this is how rare it is for spontaneous conversations to happen. I was elated when a young man saw me writing python on my computer and asked what I was working on, a few years back. And I gave him some career advice he was a recent graduate.

A chance encounter like that can give him his first job. I hope when Corona ends we become disinterested in these supercomputers we carry around all day, and start living in the now.

>Our connections to other people require and encourage us to behave in ways that maintain those connections.

I think the sums up why the internet is so absurdly mean. if I go and say something horribly racist or misogynistic in the real world, I can expect consequences. I can expect no longer be welcomed in certain spaces, or get kicked out of my favorite bar or whatever. Online I can say whatever horrible things I can come up with, often just a mess of people and get a new username the next day.

This article seems like "it was better back then". Well in my opinion we don't have communities like we used to have with deep trust, even the families are not the same anymore.

On the other hand I am not afraid to go to neighboring city (or when I was a kid it could be even other part of the city) so someone would come up with "hey you are not from around here, what are you looking for a trouble here son?".

We traded deep trust for broad trust. This way price of transactions on bigger scale went down a lot, even if they went up on personal or local level.

In the end broad trust is more useful for people because it enables mobility. One can move to a big city and won't be instantly scammed. If we would value deep trust only, there would be no way for people to move out from "dead end" places.

One could live his whole life in one place and have his deep trust network but that is less and less possible in the current world. That is why we need broad societal trust.

"Bowling alone" - bowling leagues and PTAs, if someone lives 2 years in one place on average he is not going to be there long enough to be accepted in his local group.

The gig economy exploits the efficiencies of a trusting society masterfully. It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that we'd let total strangers drive us home from bars and use our houses like hotels. But it turns out that with only a little oversight, we can trust our fellow citizens just as well as an employee of a professional company.

Systems of maintaining trust are very important, but having a trustworthy culture and populace is just as important. In the words of William Easterly, these systems can either be virtuous cycles or vicious cycles. Either trust flourishes or mistrust flourishes and going from one to the other is challenging because of its game-theoretical properties.

Contrary to what might be the common understanding in SV, we've actually had cabs before we had Uber. They also involved total strangers driving us home from bars. We've also had people rent their private homes as lodging: that's how I vacationed with my parents in Eastern Europe in early 1990s. Even today, if you go to any town on Baltic Sea, you'll find plenty of "Rooms" signs (in local language) on private homes; many of them have been up for decades.

All of what Uber and Airbnb do, had most definitely existed before. What Uber and Airbnb brought was making it much more efficient, convenient and safe. Uber and Airbnb use some level of social trust, but they also provide extra trust on their own, which comes from the rating function they provide. Before Uber and Airbnb, if you had bad experience in a cab or a rented lodging, there was little recourse, and the service provides had little incentive to behave well. Now, they can easily get kicked off the platform after too many complaints.

Uber and AirBnB actually burned extreme amounts of trust. Blatantly illegal business practices and general sociopathy of the former, facilitating destruction of local neighbourhoods in case of the latter - adding an app on top of existing practices doesn't pay back for what it cost to get there.

> Blatantly illegal business practices and general sociopathy of the former,

Trust, morality and legality are not the same thing. Sure, Uber was operating illegally in many places, but millions of people used these illegal services and saw nothing wrong with it. They didn’t see using an unlicensed cab company as anything bad.

Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it morally wrong, or socially destructive. There have been plenty of cases where it’s the laws that are morally wrong and socially destructive. If you want to argue that Uber destroyed trust, you can’t simply say it broke the law and call it a day, you need also to argue that the law they broke was good and desirable.

So, what was the evil and socially destructive thing that Uber actually did?

> Trust, morality and legality are not the same thing. Sure, Uber was operating illegally in many places, but millions of people used these illegal services and saw nothing wrong with it. They didn’t see using an unlicensed cab company as anything bad.

People baited into purchasing new cars and screwed over car insurance sure did. But more importantly, everyone saw that the legal system in cities around the world isn't powerful enough to deal with direct offense. We saw you can build a multi-billion dollar megacorp not on just regulatory arbitrage, but plainly illegal business - and nobody got hold accountable (except for an off driver caught without proper insurance). All of this fundamentally erodes the trust in the rule of law - the trust on which modern society stands.

> Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it morally wrong

It doesn't, but it was illegal and greedy and exploitative, and dragged people into gig economy which arguably is itself morally questionable.

> If you want to argue that Uber destroyed trust, you can’t simply say it broke the law and call it a day, you need also to argue that the law they broke was good and desirable.

Taxi laws differ by the city. "Taxi mafia" was mostly a phenomenon of some places in the US; in many cities, taxis worked just well. Uber violated law almost everywhere they got, without any care for whether the law was useful or justifiable. It wasn't some act of civil disobedience - they did it for pure profit, to undercut competition and dominate the local markets they entered.

> So, what was the evil and socially destructive thing that Uber actually did?

Now, that's actually a topic much bigger than what I outlined above. The mischief of Uber's sociopathic management has been well publicized and well documented over the past 5+ years. It was a recurring topic on HN for a long time, too. I suggest starting with these two links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber#Criticism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber#Controversies

(Though they do seem to downplay the insurance issues and threats against journalists.)

> But more importantly, everyone saw that the legal system in cities around the world isn't powerful enough to deal with direct offense. We saw you can build a multi-billion dollar megacorp not on just regulatory arbitrage, but plainly illegal business - and nobody got hold accountable (except for an off driver caught without proper insurance). All of this fundamentally erodes the trust in the rule of law - the trust on which modern society stands.

It's not that it wasn't powerful enough. The governments could fight Uber just fine, and they in fact did in many places. What actually happened was instead the government in most places have figured that the customers liked the illegal service so much, that if they do fight it, they will actually reduce, instead of increasing their legitimacy. Imagine the government tomorrow decides to ban shaking hands. Would prosecuting the hand-shakers increase the trust in government and its legitimacy? No: people would rightly conclude that it's the government that's wrong, and it doesn't deserve trust or charity here. This is the case with many aspects of the regulatory state: its legitimacy depends on people being unaware of how crippling and authoritarian it is in many situations. Making stupid laws and keeping people unaware of their stupidity is no way to build trust.

> It doesn't, but it was illegal and greedy and exploitative, and dragged people into gig economy which arguably is itself morally questionable.

Taxis have always been "gig economy". Even before Uber, few taxi drivers were salaried employees. Most of them were independent operators, or working on commission.

> Taxi laws differ by the city. "Taxi mafia" was mostly a phenomenon of some places in the US; in many cities, taxis worked just well.

Which cities were these? In every city I am aware off, on both sides of the pond, traditional taxis have not been able to compete very well with Uber. Sure, in some places the taxis were less bad than in others, but almost everywhere they were overpriced and untrustworthy. Have you tried paying with card in a taxi in Poland before Uber came up? Somehow, despite MasterCard sticker on the window, the payment terminal always happened to be broken... Also, try taking a non-Uber cab from the airport in Warsaw or Krakow.

> What actually happened was instead the government in most places have figured that the customers liked the illegal service so much, that if they do fight it, they will actually reduce, instead of increasing their legitimacy.

I don't think it's that, unless you think the dissatisfaction expressed by officials is just posturing. I believe that it's just because bureaucracy moves slowly - and the core of Uber's strategy was to corner the market and gain sympathy of the riders before local regulators could gear up - at which point they'd be fighting their own citizen. Basically, pitting people against their local governments.

> Imagine the government tomorrow decides to ban shaking hands. Would prosecuting the hand-shakers increase the trust in government and its legitimacy? No: people would rightly conclude that it's the government that's wrong, and it doesn't deserve trust or charity here.

I get your example and it's a fair point - but I must say we generally did just that in 2020 with COVID restrictions :). That itself initially impacted the trust positively, but I guess it's easier to imagine the threat of a pandemic than a threat of an underpaid and uninsured driver operating an illegal cab having an accident.

> In every city I am aware off, on both sides of the pond, traditional taxis have not been able to compete very well with Uber. Sure, in some places the taxis were less bad than in others, but almost everywhere they were overpriced and untrustworthy.

I'm not saying they weren't in need of some competitive pressure, but generally, taxis weren't able to compete very well with Uber because it's really hard to compete with an international corporation that just ignores the law, while subsidizing its offerings from practically infinite VC budget. Whether the existing taxi services in any given city were good or bad or in between, it didn't matter - they didn't stand a chance.

> Have you tried paying with card in a taxi in Poland before Uber came up? Somehow, despite MasterCard sticker on the window, the payment terminal always happened to be broken... Also, try taking a non-Uber cab from the airport in Warsaw or Krakow.

I am from Kraków, I was born there, and I moved out only ~3 years ago. I've been riding taxis ever since childhood. From my perspective, network taxis weren't all that bad (it was common knowledge you don't use the "entrepreneurs" that park outside airports and railway stations, you probably even remember a TV show that revealed how they scam you if they think you're a tourist). Uber itself didn't introduce anything substantial over what iCar did a decade before. And while iCar was also playing a bit loose with the regulations, and there were some conflict with the local taxi networks (I recall articles about some tire slashing), they've ultimately managed to settle it through courts and iCar could deliver its value proposition completely legally. Uber didn't even bother.

> I don't think it's that, unless you think the dissatisfaction expressed by officials is just posturing. I believe that it's just because bureaucracy moves slowly - and the core of Uber's strategy was to corner the market and gain sympathy of the riders before local regulators could gear up - at which point they'd be fighting their own citizen. Basically, pitting people against their local governments.

And what's the problem with that? The government is meant to serve people, not to rule over them. If the governments can't push their power, because the people will hate it and won't allow it, that's good: that's why we have representative democracy in the first place. If one can improve the lives of the people and make them happier by subverting the law, this is really damning for the government.

> That itself initially impacted the trust positively

Yes, and then people saw the government restrictions mostly for what they were: a safety theater.

> but I guess it's easier to imagine the threat of a pandemic than a threat of an underpaid and uninsured driver operating an illegal cab having an accident.

I don't think that risk of car accident is something so completely foreign that people entering a cab don't know what they are getting into. More importantly, even if you grant the government the authority to take away people's freedom to do things the government considers too risky, purely out of paternalism, the fact is that the government had no reason whatsoever to believe that Uber cabs are less safe: if you want to argue that the government is better informed about the risks of riding a regular cab vs. Uber than a regular person, it had better actually be better informed.

> I'm not saying they weren't in need of some competitive pressure, but generally, taxis weren't able to compete very well with Uber because it's really hard to compete with an international corporation that just ignores the law,

If the law is so onerous, and Uber violating it results in its repeal (or at least ceasing enforcement), then instead of complaining, the taxi companies should rejoice, and thank Uber for the great service it provided.

This is of course ridiculous, because the reason traditional taxi companies are unhappy about Uber breaking the laws precisely because the laws help protect their business and extract rent at the expense of the consumers. Fighting against rent-seekers is a good thing, and rent-seeking is another reason why not all laws governments pass are good, and why it's not always morally wrong to violate them.

> while subsidizing its offerings from practically infinite VC budget. Whether the existing taxi services in any given city were good or bad or in between, it didn't matter - they didn't stand a chance.

Weren't you just a moment ago saying that the drivers were "underpaid"? If it ain't the drivers who are subsidized, then who is, exactly?

> From my perspective, network taxis weren't all that bad (it was common knowledge you don't use the "entrepreneurs" that park outside airports and railway stations, you probably even remember a TV show that revealed how they scam you if they think you're a tourist).

They were expensive, they didn't always arrive when called, you had to always be on the lookout to not be scammed, the vehicles were old, often dirty, the drivers were rude, the payment was cash only, and many more. I remember that, and Uber was improvement on every single metric. Cabs are much better now, precisely because Uber forces them to behave better or die.

> Uber itself didn't introduce anything substantial over what iCar did a decade before.

If so, how did Uber gain any foothold at all? If it's all VC subsidies, they'll run out, and in the meantime, the customers keep benefitting from subsidized rides.

> If one can improve the lives of the people and make them happier by subverting the law, this is really damning for the government.

People run to below-costs services like cats to catnip. You can make anyone happy by selling them $10 bills for $1. The problem is, what happens when all the competitors are gone, and the reason for below-cost offering ends?

> More importantly, even if you grant the government the authority to take away people's freedom to do things the government considers too risky, purely out of paternalism, the fact is that the government had no reason whatsoever to believe that Uber cabs are less safe

Of course they had, and we grant such authorities all the time. There's a special type of insurance covering commercial transport of people, it's illegal to engage in commercial transport of people without such insurance (and for good reason, if accident happens, then both the driver and the passengers are screwed); the problem, in Uber's case, was too little enforcement, and Uber shielding itself behind "independent contractor" veil and pretending they didn't encourage it.

> the reason traditional taxi companies are unhappy about Uber breaking the laws precisely because the laws help protect their business and extract rent at the expense of the consumers

These laws didn't came out of the blue and weren't just instances of random regulatory capture. The laws creating barriers to entry and (in some places) granting taxi companies limited monopoly are the flip side of the legal requirements that come with the taxi service being treated as a part of public transport infrastructure. Things like the legal requirement for taking passengers in unprofitable locations, or having cars in the fleet adapted for the needs of people with limited mobility. Things Uber did not do, because it didn't have to (and couldn't, really, with their "just a platform" business setup). Instead, Uber offered subsidized rides for able-bodied people in city centres, and no rides at all for elderly or disabled or people living further away.

> Weren't you just a moment ago saying that the drivers were "underpaid"? If it ain't the drivers who are subsidized, then who is, exactly?

The rides were. The prices you paid for a ride were sometimes less than the driver would get from Uber, but Uber wasn't going to pay the drivers more than they needed to (at least not until some follow-up competition came).

> If it's all VC subsidies, they'll run out

That's why Uber is betting so hard on self-driving. They've been operating on a loss for many years now, and they know they can't sustain it.

> and in the meantime, the customers keep benefitting from subsidized rides.

The meantime always ends, eventually. Leaving behind a thoroughly destroyed market. C.f. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/

> It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that we'd let total strangers drive us home from bars and use our houses like hotels.

Well, unfortunately it's still unthinkable in a lot of third-world countries nowadays, and it's precisely because of lack of trust.

A lot of things were unthinkable 20Y ago that were perfectly normal for the century leading up to the mid-1960s.

Pretty much everything you list was, at one time, somewhere between commonplace and not-infrequent. It was the commercialization that brought with it the divide.

> A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. If we don’t have to balance every exchange instantly, we can get a lot more accomplished. Trustworthiness lubricates social life.

I see bureaucracy as a technology we use to replace trust, but most times it just results in an unnecessary waste of resources.

this reminds me about a civic trust study that was done globally: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/70

Just like the election integrity debate that was almost entirely erased from social media, Romney said “an audit won’t satisfy them, only telling them the truth will”, which is terrifying because he doesn’t know the truth either, because nobody looked.

When it comes to a democracy we shouldn’t be required to just trust the officials, we should be allowed to question them, but we shouldn’t have to trust them. What I mean is the system needs to work in such a way that trust isn’t required.

They are still stonewalling the audits in places like Arizona, last I heard the Senate is recalling the election board for ignoring their orders to provide access for inspections.

>nobody looked

Numerous lawsuits were filed, all failed. Or are you suggesting the courts are corrupt as well?

If society can't respect diversity it results in https://archive.is/mPsqz

I say this is mostly the automobile and suburbanization catching up with with the US. You can physically disaggregate society and then not expect social disaggregation.

I really hope that people who appreciate this article will take a look at the work of Jonathan Haidt such as The Righteous Mind.

Well I did, and I'm a big fan of Haidt.

Anyone knows of research that compares trust across companies? (Perhaps it's more interesting to look at trust separately for between-peers, and employee-manager; as well as at different seniority levels; but I suppose it would be too hard to collect such detailed data.)

Across countries? (Similarly, some breakdown would be quite interesting.)

> compares trust across companies

Did you mean different companies trusting each other, and thus being "hyper productive" if getting things done together? In a way that lasts also after the individuals (executives, managers, people at the companies) who initially created that high trust, have left?

It sounded more as if you had in mind to compare the "trust level" inside different companies, with each other? Maybe plotted against profitability?

In any case, sounds like interesting topics to me.

> Across countries

Did you mean how much people in different countries, trust others in the same country as themselves?

Or if nearby countries can "lift each other up" by people and politicians there, trusting the people & politicians in the other nearby countries

I can't put the article better than it puts itself. I'd recommend everyone read it top to bottom. tl;dr If everyone's playing tug of war, everyone has to spend all this effort pulling just to stay where we are.

What I'll add is how this seems to show up in HN discussions. A frequent trope here is an article about someone or some company doing something that pisses people off, then the comments debating whether it's the incentive-maker's fault and it's not wrong for people to maximize according to the incentives provided. The whole thing is a microcosm of this lack of trust.

It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's lost isn't the decision to trust, it's the whole framing. In a perfect trust society, taking the compete option in a prisoner's dilemma would be seen as immoral. In a zero trust society, the whole choice reduces to analyzing the payoff matrix. That's what's lost. It's the change from a framing around 'cooperation is the moral action' towards a framing around payoff matrices.

I'd argue that on HN, the general sentiment is on the payoff matrix end of the spectrum.

"One key lesson we can derive from Bowling Alone is that the less we trust each other—something which is both a cause and consequence of declining community engagement—the more it costs us. Mistrust is expensive."

The upside of mistrust is an increase in intelligence gathering and seeking. Evolution favors those that can figure out motivation. Gossip while hugely inefficient plays a huge part of everyday life and motivation.

Mistrust is getting an undeserved bad rap. It is unpopular but it is an adaptation to widespread lack of trustworthiness. The lack of popularity has some motivated reasoning elements - it isn't reassuring to believe that mistrust is the right option, it isn't conceived of as "how it should be". It feels better to say "You should be able to trust the people around you." even if they really aren't. As an idea it is "uncuddley". Not all mistrust is correct nor rational of course.

Is this true? We are getting into cars with perfect strangers and allowing strangers to live in our houses?

I feel Clubhouse is the first app that is reversing this trend. Only talk and connecting strangers.

It seems like every social media platform / message board had high levels of trust initially, when the user base was smallish and naive. Maybe it's because they all grew on the backs of teenagers/college kids who are more trusting, or it's just the early days of the platform are more exciting and that seems to naturally build trust among users.

I really like the paper that shows that higher density of associations (the way Putnam measures "social capital") was associated with higher support for the Nazi party in Germany[^1]. Things are not as simple as "trust=good".

[1]:https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/690949?jou...

The importance of social trust has had a major impact on my belief in the importance of government-guaranteed tax-funded universal healthcare. Before about 2015, I thought it was nice, but not a pressing crisis, but around then, I started to notice things like signs saying "why does my insulin cost more than methadone?" and "why is medical marijuana cheaper than my heart disease medication?". These situations might have simple economic explanations in terms of supply-side dynamics, but they are morally infuriating to the same chunk of the electorate who self-identify as conservative capitalists. Not long after, Martin Shkreli appeared.

There seems to be a powerful, possibly instinctive, connection between A: being able to turn to someone for help when you're in need and B: considering that someone to be trustworthy. In 2020, we saw this writ large, when the United States became the global epicenter of conspiracy theories about SARS-CoV-2. The general population's trust in the medical system and the government is a huge unaccounted-for externality that can have serious effects on our economic and political stability.

Furthermore, one of the most lamented, supposedly idiosyncratic, problems with the US medical system is the sheer amount of paperwork required to do almost anything. It seems like an excellent example of this:

>We need to trust the people around us in order to live happy, productive lives. If we don’t trust them, we end up having to find costly ways to formalize our relationships.

(Opponents of guaranteed universal healthcare in the United States will generally agree that we do not have a "free" market in healthcare, but it is usually harder to convince them it will never be politically possible in light of the above.)

Czech doctors tend to complain about tons of paperwork, too. We have a public healthcare system with almost universal coverage.

There must be an element of "cover your ass" in there. Usually, excess of papers indicates someone's wariness of possible averse consequences down the line.

I agree with you on calling out the moral absurdities in our health care system, and how that is a reflection on our level of social trust. I'd like to see changes, also.

Cynically I would say that politically we have optimized for profit and bureaucracy. Would I be wrong? I'd say that this is because our democracy is imperfect - money, corporations, and corruption are driving too much of our politics.

It's always bothered me that so many people would presume to fix health care at the federal level. For a while Congress has been one of the least trusted institutions in the country. Why do we expect them to fix anything? The Affordable Care Act was anything but that, it did nothing to control costs or fix all the pricing transparency problems. Poor folks get a free yearly visit and screenings but have to pay a few thousand dollar deductible when they are sick (money they typically don't have) before they get any covered care, while the government subsidized insurance premiums go right past the recipients directly into the pockets of the insurance companies.

I'd be more comfortable seeing something like many of the countries in Europe have, price controls on drugs and simple standards set at a national level, with implementation details, tax collection, and administrative details left to the states or provinces.

The states were just starting to innovate before the ACA. Vermont tried single payer. Massachusetts had Romneycare. NY and California we making plans, etc. With the ACA the feds commandeered the whole thing, and didn't do so great a job with it.

I think that the states are in a much better position to fix this, but that the insurance companies and other related incumbents would rather have this controlled from a federal level where they can most easily influence the outcome to be in their favor.

The framing of this piece itself is a symptom of the problem. Everything, including our social relationships apparently have to be "capital" that make us "productive." This amoral, economistic view of human life is what got us into this mess in the first place. Why would people trust each other in a system that essentially rewards sociopathy, avarice, greed, and deception? It's telling that they can't provide a better prescription than "we should just trust each other more."

> This amoral, economistic view of human life is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Which mess are you referring to?

The lack of trust and community participation described in the article.

I wonder if you're unfairly conflating the term "social capital" with the general caustic meanness of economic "capitalism". Putnam is a political scientist, not an economist.

I honestly think that most of the relentless unpleasantness of capitalism doesn't come from capital itself, it comes from competition and conflict over scarce resources. It's this conflict between different pools of capital which makes capitalism relentless and exhausting, and the fact that such conflicts are often won by the side which starts with more for unrelated reasons which makes capitalism unfair and often of very questionable morality. I think it's relevant to the article to point out that I this model, all of these conflicts are essentially low trust environments since the actors have by definition opposing goals.

But "social capital" doesn't have to be about conflict. Let's say I am fortunate enough to have a friendly relationship with my next door neighbors. To give a cliched example, let's say I want to bake a cake and am running low on sugar. Being able to ask them allows me to finish my task without stopping everything to run to the store. Likewise, if they need to leave town for an emergency, they can call me to check on their place or walk their dog.

These examples don't involve any conflict, so it's not clear who's losing out on any of them*? The social capital of our friendship definitely made us more productive, but who wouldn't want that? This isn't about pleasing some kind of corporate manager and churning out more widgets, it's just about personal quality of life, so what's left for there to be a problem with the idea of social capital?

* I suppose if we're being extreme then we could say that the sugar providers and grocery store lost in the first exchange by my ability to avoid buying another bag. I'm not sure this is entirely true, though, since I'm very likely to buy more sugar on my next trip anyhow. They've lost out on the urgency perhaps, but as a side note I believe that urgency is the core of the other worst aspects and cruelty of commercial capitalism; urgency sometimes forces incredibly wasteful behavior in the name of "winning the race" against a competitor or many other kinds of artificial deadlines, etc. (Anyhow I digress...)

David Gerard made this point a few years ago interviewing with the Financial Times on his book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain:

Decentralisation is the paramount feature in bitcoin, but it turns out that that's a bad idea that's really, really expensive, because it turns out that a tiny bit of trust saves you a fortune.

"Decentralised" isn't a useful buzzword in a lot of ways, because it turns out that you want to be a part of society.

https://soundcloud.com/user-544122300/gerardpod

Thought's ocurred to me that advances in communications technologies serve to undermine social trust mechanisms.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi...

Others as well:

https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/medium-and-the-reason-you-can...

(https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/71xbx2/sean_bl...)

And the late David Cornwell, a/k/a John le Carre:

the veterans of the S.I.S. [the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6] think, which is yes, kompromat was done on him. Of course, kompromat is done on everyone. So they end up, the theory goes, with this compromising bit of material and then they begin to release parts of it. They set up an ex-MI6 guy, Chris Steele, who is a patsy, effectively, and they feed him some stuff that's true, and some stuff that isn't true, and some stuff that is demonstrably wrong. Which means that Trump can then stand up and deny it, while knowing that the essence of it is true. And then he has a stone in his shoe for the rest of his administration.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x8tns/control...

When the poors see their standard of living decline (exporting jobs, expensive real estate, shitty schools, ineffective government) all while the rich get richer, yeah, the basic social contract between the classes evaporates.

You may trust your neighbor, but that has zero bearing on society at large. Society only works if the different classes trust each other not to screw each other out of existence.

We're seeing this in all the rich countries now- a generation of youngsters are realizing that a middle class existence may not exist for them. Even in Europe, which is more egalitarian, things aren't looking as rosy as they used to be. And of course in poorer countries with high birth rates, we already see turmoil as young angry men realize they are destined for a life of poverty while their government enriches itself.

EDIT: I think the guy who started Huawei said something to the effect of when you are a millionaire, you only care about yourself, but when you are a billionaire, you are all the sudden responsible for a lot of people. I wish that attitude permeated our business schools and boardrooms. The amount of people from top business schools who parrot "Always do the right thing" and then proceed to sell their own grandmother down the street blows my mind.

> EDIT: I think the guy who started Huawei said something to the effect of when you are a millionaire, you only care about yourself, but when you are a billionaire, you are all the sudden responsible for a lot of people. I wish that attitude permeated our business schools and boardrooms.

That’s what the poors need; noblesse oblige oligarchy.

We already have an oligarchy. They control the government, and can get laws passed the poors cannot.

What purpose should they serve, ideally? - focus just on investment and profit - improve society ie noblesse oblige - compete for public honor, ie holding high office

I'm not suggesting their is one answer, but given the rich hold such sway over government, I definitely don't think they can sit back and enjoy their high tariff burgundy while we have riots in the streets, first from the left and now the right.

You went from Eugene Debbs to fairytale-spinning court jester in the span of four paragraphs. That’s impressive.

So taxes basically. Or should this group be trusted to act out of the goodness of their hearts?

"You may trust your neighbor, but that has zero bearing on society at large."

On the contrary, if you don't trust your neighbor, you have no basis for trusting anyone. It's the foundation for any other trust relationships. As for the relationships between classes, that also relies on trust in things larger than classes: trust in the legal and social framework.

Measuring trust requires a threat model of sorts.

I trust my neighbors not to steal my stuff. I don't trust them not to narc on me. If they do narc on my I trust the city to realize that's a dumb use of resources. But I don't trust the state to be so smart.

How often have you heard something along the lines of "I'm not worried my kids will be kidnapped, I'm worried some jerk will call the cops if I let them walk to the park on their own"?

Do you have any evidence to back up your claims?

I don't believe we have more inequality now than 100 years ago, or anything before that.

Look back 50 years, not 100 years. We're facing a situation where the standard of living is dropping for the young generation.

- huge increase in labor supply: outsourcing, women entering workforce in large numbers

- productivity wage-gap: http://www.oecd.org/economy/decoupling-of-wages-from-product...

- savings gap between millenials and previous generations: https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-saving-habits-le...

- white american men's life expectancy dropping, for first time ever: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/life-expectancy-for-american-me...

- cost of housing in major cities increasing dramatically

- opioid epidemic

- obesity epidemic

- unemployment among the young in Europe is stubbornly high.

Qualitatively, you can see nihilism on the rise among the young: https://jeromysonne.com/the-nihilism-of-r-wallstreetbets/

> Look back 50 years, not 100 years.

This observation is often trotted out, but I'm not sure it's fair. 50 years ago was no picnic, either. We were mired in the Cold War (Vietnam, no less). Nixon was in the White House. There was tons of social unrest (Nixon wrote in his memoirs about the thousands of bomb threats and attempted bombings). Civil rights / racial tensions were extremely high (MLK was assassinated in '68). The 70's were an absolutely terrible economic decade - oil shock and stagflation, anyone?

> huge increase in labor supply: outsourcing, women entering workforce in large numbers

I recall watching a presentation a few years back on this, but sadly I can't find the link. This appears to be a follow-up on the research, though. (From the Brookings Institute -https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

In 1970, women entered the workforce, so you would have expected productivity to double, so GDP would have doubled, and thusly everyone's standard of living, right?

Instead what happened is all that extra capital drove up costs in housing and healthcare. Credit cards were introduced and the savings rate plummetted. Instead of having tons of extra money, everyone actually wound up in debt instead. (Please note: I'm not blaming women entering the workforce for this phenomenon; it was totally our surrounding economic system)

My high level point is that I think young people back then had a lot of reason to feel precarious and not trust in their institutions to act in their interests. We probably suffered a lot for it then, but we did eventually build our way out of it, for at least a short while, even if it feels like we're essentially further down the economic path now.

Edit: cleaned up typo and link, sorry

I'm going to take the risk of saying "This time it's different!"

- There is no such thing as lifetime employment for most fields.

- Outsourcing wiped out a lot of decent jobs in the US. - Automation is wiping out a bunch more.

- College debt is thing, though I fully expect this administration to forgive it.

- Housing is significantly more expensive**.

- All the rich countries are ageing fast.

- Men are going to college much less, and trend is accelerating***.

* Lawyers are a good example. Search engines have wiped out a whole class of entry-level legal work. We certainly don't need as many as we have now, but what well-paying jobs are going to replace them? Finance is going through a similar transition where you just don't need as many people to conduct trades. I feel like I was reading FT a few months ago and several of the major Ibanks were saying they expect to need a third as many employees in the next decade.

**Taipei is a prime example. Taiwanese salaries are super low, yet property is super expensive. Last time I looked, around $100/sqft for condos. People buying investment properties are the obvious culprit, but I don't think there is political will to deprive the government of property taxes and wipe out the savings of older voters, in order to save the young. And lo and behold the birthrate is 0.9 there.

***I think this was on HN a few days ago: https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-.... You can argue college is a waste of time, and I'm inclined to agree, but I think we can make up a narrative where young men feel there is no hope.

There's other possible possible confounding factors, like the rise of mass media and the internet, leaving the gold standard and the growth of the finance, increased beaucratization and corporatization of everything, etc. Hard to know sometimes how all this stuff is related.

But I think it is valid that the parent pointed out that younger generations today feel screwed, that they won't be able to do as well economically or socially as their parents. Many are lonely on the internet, trapped in student loans, and searching for decent jobs. On average they are having to postpone leaving their parents houses, getting married, having kids and buying a house, waiting to do these things until significantly later in life than their parents and grandparents. They've heard about the American Dream and don't feel like they'll have it. And there's a lot of them.

I know that this is not true for everybody, lots of things are better, and it's relative - other people have it worse, etc. But this sentiment is still a thing - a lot of young people feel like they have it worse than their parents and grandparents.

I don't know that debating the details will change their minds.

Women entering workforce did raised standard for a lot of them. The domestic violence and abuse rates against women are down by a lot. And yes, they go up and down with female employment too, employment affects how she can manage her status in family, how much is husband resentful over her being at home and crucially, how much she is locked. (I don't know male abuse stats and the whole topic is less talked about)

> opioid epidemic, obesity epidemic

Alcohol consumption is down against 1971. The heroin, cocain etc problems are smaller then they used to be. People are less violent overall.

People still live longer. And while they are obese, their life expectancy went up against that time. And some of it is that historical diseases from various malnutritions are down.

Economic standards are dropping for new graduates. But, it is not all bleak everything is worst situation.

Cost to whom? Imagine all the lost revenue if people would have a rational basis to trust each other more. Less transactions due to more informal exchanges must mean lost revenue to someone.

I guess it means less work for lawyers. The sarcastic reply is that lawyers don't need more money. The more serious reply is that the work a lawyer does doesn't increase the "value output" (I don't know the formal term) the same way that an engineer or researcher or teacher does. A lawyer, like an economist, helps grease the transactions of a society, but if society is already greased, the lawyer could be doing something directly "useful".

Inefficiencies present a net cost to society. In low trust environments, you see more generalism (fewer people to trust) and more nepotism (there's a social cost to cheating family members, so family members can be more trusted).

That's an interesting question, which is similar to the broken window fallacy : https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fa...

To make it short : Money and time lost due this lack of trust could be allocated to more valuable endeavor, such as pretty much anything.

Therefore it is better for society to solve this issue, even if it means some specific people that were making money out of it beforehand will not be able to anymore.

I think one (of many) factors propelling this trend is income inequality. Imagine you're in the grocery store checkout line with luxury foods and how uncomfortable it might be to make conversation with the clerk who may be working three jobs and trying to parent two children.

So we invented apps. Now we don't have to look up to hail a cab, we can look down at our phone. We don't even THINK about riding the bus (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/14/surprise-elon-musk-is...). We don't have to go into the store, we can have an Instacart employee leave them at our house without a trace that someone existed at all. We're stratifying into the Eloi and the Morlocks, but separated by the glass screen of a phone instead of layers of earth.

Income inequality isn't quite the spring-of-all-evils that it's being touted as. Although I think you are touching on some pressures and problems. Yes, it can be one of the factors in "othering" and can discourage commitment to a shared, common system, but I've been in lots of countries with low "inequality" that were far less trusting. True, it's apples/oranges comparison, but I'm not convinced that inequality is the source of our woes, but very likely amplifies it.

There's also room for causality the other way, here. If feel you have a lot in common with your compatriots, and generally trust them, then you are (I claim) more likely to support paying taxes to support those who are having a rough time. High trust can lead to lower inequality.

Conversely, if you already feel you have nothing in common with others, then why not vote (if you have everything) to give them nothing, or (if you have nothing) why not vote to seize their property and distribute it?

> True, it's apples/oranges comparison, but I'm not convinced that inequality is the source of our woes, but very likely amplifies it.

It’s not income inequality, it’s opportunity inequality. Which manifests itself as income (/wealth) inequality, so that’s the proxy most people use.

Once you lose the feeling of others being in your tribe and that they might also be interested in looking out for you, it’s very, very difficult to regain that. Even worse is once members of the tribe start assuming others are part of an enemy tribe.

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