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Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

The US is slowly (rapidly?) devolving into a low-trust society. What used to be pockets of low-trust are spreading rapidly by my estimation.

It's been sad to watch it slowly get worse every year.

It goes for all things, not just petty/street crime though. Everything from business owners not prioritizing doing good work and building local reputation, employees slacking off as much as possible, investors demanding extreme profits at the expense of everyone else, corporations shipping out entire towns worth of industry to foreign countries, on down to actual crime itself.

It certainly wasn't all roses in the past - but it's a marked change from even my youth. Civic engagement is easy for anyone to see, and that would also be such a symptom.

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The U.S. is an extremely litigious society. Even when Lincoln was a young professional, he had the frontier job of… attorney. So there’s something to that which bares examining when discussing how trust gets built and reinforced in American culture. (Probably something about settler culture and property rights and the only way to resolve disagreements about it via the law.)

One wonders how much of the high trust was a product of the immense prosperity unlocked by industrialization, some ameliorating reforms during the Progressive Era that mitigated the excesses of the Gilded Era, the New Deal, and postwar victory.

America has always been a low trust society when it came to “others”. Jim Crow was the law when my still living parents were growing up.

They literally didn’t trust people to drink from the same water fountain

My also still living father born in 1945 in the south didn’t live under this after the 60s or so. So how do you explain the gap for the last 65 years?

Have you also noticed all the recalls on pretty much everything we eat? Huge sign that people are not working.

People not working? WTF? It's the direct result of deregulation/self-regulation of the food chain. When the inspectors work for the food processing company, they don't have an incentive to find problems.

You'd think companies would value not killing their customers and market forces would take care of the problem, but, empirically, that's not how it has turned out. Customers are too far from the source; the incentives for fucking off are too high, and too frequently the food processors get away with it. Big-L Libertarianism is not compatible with safe food and medication.

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