Hacker News Reader

Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think a high trust society is compatible with modernity. In my opinion, a high trust society comes from a relative naivety in most of the population that just sort of did what their grandparents did without thinking too much about it. In an “information” inundated populace, it becomes very hard to have a common culture which is the absolute basis for a high trust society. Maintaining a common culture isn’t easy either, it takes generations of shibboleth building, universal thought termination phrases and a brutal society-wide suppression of the “other”.

View on HN

A datapoint that points to the contrary:

- Singapore pre-1965 was a low trust, racist society. The tensions were so bad that in 1964 there were racial riots.

- Today, after a lot of immigration, within 1-2 generations, Singapore became a high-trust society.

Similar stories in South Korea and Taiwan. In all 3 cases, the trust came recently, within 1-2 generations, and from different approaches of the state. They combine high institutional trust and the economic prosperity with medium-low interpersonal trust.

Singapore isn't high trust. It's brutal authoritarianism that squashes anything that looks remotely disharmonious between groups. High trust doesn't need a government boot stomping in the face of anyone who steps out of line.

singapore is an authoritarian state (ie. trust is forced) that presents a homogenous population, where after 2 generations of immigration, over three quarters of singapores populace are still ethnic chinese. let us now examine london's population and how it changed within 1 generation. london consisted of 90% ethnic english in the 1990s, nowadays this figure sits around 50%. concurrently, london's trust level and prosperity have become a shadow of their former selves. perhaps this occurred because england was not authoritarian enough?

"Ethnic Chinese" is a term covering 1.45 billion people. I don't even know where one would find a definition for "ethnic English", but if you take the NHS' "ethnic British" which ridiculously excludes even Irish heritage, I can see how you'd come to 50%.

A reasonable comparison would be to look at "Ethnic European", covering roughly 1.2 billion people.

> london's trust level and prosperity have become a shadow of their former selves

As someone who traveled the world a bit and lived for a decade in London, I'd beg to differ without further elaboration.

> it becomes very hard to have a common culture which is the absolute basis for a high trust society.

I think a large set of problems have come from this statement. We have, over time, become more intolerant of other cultures which is directly related to trust. Excluding the other isn't the path we need to take. We need to get back on the path where we can include other cultures.

> it becomes very hard to have a common culture

Counter point: culture has been compressed, not widened, in the last 60 years.

Accents have gone away, we listen to the same music, food has homogenized. By almost any measure, culture across the US has become a monoculture compared to any time in its history.

I don't think your point is necessarily wrong, but how do you square the above?

Accents have gone away?

The University of Georgia did a study and came to the conclusion that the Southern accent is fading. Less formally, a word game website did a survey that found the standard New York accent is fadingas well.

The Georgia study largely attributed it to migration and people moving more than they used to, with a focus on growing metro areas in the south. Though apparently some younger generations are trying to shed their accents to sound more professional, and the internet is creating a sort of average American accent.

Though nobody is worried they'll disappear entirely at the moment that I can find.

> https://news.uga.edu/classic-georgia-accent-fading-fast/

Fascinating! Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com