This is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Low-trust societies are filled with weak, corrupted, lazy and stupid leaders.
I’d rather pay double for an honest mechanic. Asymmetric information requires a ton of resources to protect against, or you can just know the person you’re dealing with is honest.
The dishonest mechanic is incentivized to make you think they are honest. The honest mechanic appears honest. Knights and knaves problem.
The problem with government institutions in the USA isn’t MBAs. It’s that sources of corruption / bias were identified and counteracted with rules. And rules. And rules. And rules. And many of those rules appear to counter the common sense of the average person. So the average person believes the institutions don’t hold value. That and politics meant that lots of the laws that govern those institutions assume that no citizen is an honest mechanic and they all need to constantly prove to Vogons that they aren’t dishonest.
A great dive into the last park was done by Jen Pahlka in _Recoding America_.
The systems and concepts, like the Nolan Principles, are nothing more than words -- but if the majority agree to them, then the minority who violate them should be prevented from growing their influence.
In the US, it seems that despite having strong public institutions, the leadership of the country has reached a tipping point where those institutions are no longer valued.