Americans don't trust each other anymore
apnews.myway.com
apnews.myway.com
This is sad for more than sentimental reasons, as the article mentions. The "Economics of Trust" is important for easy dealmaking, credit, and other things. More here:
http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/software-programming-...
> The third term is ‘Apexual’. This is a portmanteau of ‘Apex’ and ‘sexual’ and refers to a male-bodied individual who derives its primary identity from its position within a status hierarchy rather then a positive relationship with other male-bodied individuals.
[...]
> In light of that can you actually trust apexuals to have the best interests of the male-bodied at heart even if they are male bodied themselves?
[0]: http://www.genderratic.com/p/1140/patriarchy-1-0-and-the-ape...
How does that not describe...say Italy?
> Rabid consumerism, shows of status, workaholism and an overwhelming feeling of fuck you got mine
I've never lived in a country where I felt like this wasn't true, even Switzerland.
Articles like this make me peevish. I really dislike articles that glorify the 1950s-1990s, in anyway, without acknowledging what a strange time it was. Post-war America deserves far more criticism than it ever receives; I often think this is because boomers have a hard time criticizing the era they grew up in.
Citing a similar poll from the 1970s is a brief glimmer into a period that wasn't actually that long ago. Did people from the 1970s actually trust each other more, or did they just say that they did? What about the 1920s? The 1870s? The 1840s? Did Americans trust each other more then?
Ecclesiastes 7:10
The Extraordinary 30-Year Growth of the U.S. Hispanic Population http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/08/extra...
US ethnic minorities make up 49.9 per cent of under-fives http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
because traditional minorities, ie - slave descended blacks and native americans, make up a smaller portion of the population today than they did in 1960. But the explosive growth in the non-traditional minorities MORE than makes up for the decline. Add in the fact that many of the new arrivals speak english only as a second language... and you would think some degree of mistrust would not be a surprise considering our history.
Yeah, because being inquisitive and asking questions is bad!
Do not say, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
The proverb isn't about squelching inquiry, it's about squelching the belief that the past generation was better than the next. It follows a long litany of proverbs, in context, that describe how to accept the reality that has been given to you.
http://boingboing.net/2013/10/21/the-true-story-about-the-wo...
The media focuses much more on crime and how we hurt each other than on the many more cases in which we cooperate and help one another.
In more recent years, corporations and parts of the military-industrial complex have been poisoning Americans against each other via the Internet by astroturfing comment threads, etc. and spreading general fear, uncertainty and doubt with a nice sprinkling of intolerance and hatred.
The mass media glosses over corporate welfare while focusing like a laser on welfare fraud by the poor, etc. They want us to despise each other to gain by the oldest tactic in the book - divide and conquer.
It's been working.
Yes, but that propaganda was nothing compared to the much more advanced and sophisticated level of indoctrination techniques we have in more modern history via mainstream television and radio.
And, don't forget WWII had wonderful internment camps and plenty of racism towards blacks in America. So it wasn't the most trusting place for everyone.
All across the Internet, people like you and me would post about how incompetent the average American is. We would aspire to be independent, logical thinkers, but unfortunately, this mindset almost requires the distrust of other people.
Now that the Internet has become widely adopted in the mainstream, this type of thinking pervades, and perhaps has penetrated the mainstream attitude.
Americans have just as many social and community interactions as ever -- but a much higher percentage are semi-broadcasts through social media.
Hanging out with your friends at the bowling league, you might be a little bit cautious about expressing political views, and when there is disagreement it will be set aside by the tenth frame. As a result, people learned to trust each other in spite of disagreement. Online, certain views tend to be broadcast, and when there is disagreement it often turns into a quick unfriending and behind-the-back trash talking about what an intolerant jerk the ex-friend is. As a result, people learn that outsiders are bad people who should never ever be trusted.
It seems as if the government makes larger, and riskier mistakes, but it's not as if Vietnam wasn't a similarly large disaster for its time.
The large prison population makes this "African-Americans consistently have expressed far less faith in 'most people' than the white majority does. Racism, discrimination and a high rate of poverty destroy trust." no surprise. But it seems like discrimination and institutionalized hostility toward blacks was at least as bad in the past.
So is it distrust of government? Commerce? One's neighbors? Hard to tell from the article. Some parts of society deserve less trust and we are more aware why this is so.
The article includes some dire warnings about decline of social trust in the United States during the last forty years, and also some ideas about how social trust can increase. "People do get a little more trusting as they age. But beginning with the baby boomers, each generation has started off adulthood less trusting than those who came before them." I daresay it is correct that MOST Americans become more trusting as they age. In my middle age, I feel very comfortable both in the community I live in and as I travel about the United States. (I have been to all of the fifty United States, and to other territories of my country.)
To take the article seriously, and to suggest a possible help that was not suggested in the article, I will propose for your thoughtful discussion (I trust you here on Hacker News) one policy that might help. Let's take care of the economic gap problem mentioned in the article and some other factors that harm social trust by building all of the public school systems in the United States on the foundational principle of family choice. I have seen an example of how this policy could help where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. That reduces the effect of family income differences on the availability of adequately funded schools. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."[1] Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.[2]
The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment[3] and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.[4] And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.[5]
Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices. And I think that builds social trust by making school communities more nearly communities of choice than communities of compulsion.
The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. And the social trust level in Minnesota seems to be above the United States national average, although I'd have to check the National Social Survey data to be sure about that. A good country to compare in this regard to the United States would be the Netherlands, which by its constitution has had pervasive school choice for the last century.
[1] http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...
[2] http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html
[3] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...
[4] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...
[5] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...
In my opinion this is a great example of a misuse of statistics. I'm not saying the article's claims are incorrect, but it did a poor job of convincing me of anything.
People in the suburbs increasingly migrate to cul-de-sac communities, which isolate them from the rest of the world, to make them feel safer, depriving their children of the much-needed contact with a diverse population that builds trust.
Beyond that, the news is more and more pervasive, and more and more sensationalist than it's ever been. Every tragedy is made public, and the more grave and more egregious, the more media coverage it gets. People grow up believing that child abductions are the norm, and even likely, when the reality is that stranger abductions are less likely than they've ever been -- but the Amber Alert system (at least in the DC area here) broadcasts on highways, making it impossible to believe that a kid isn't abducted every two seconds.
Humans are built to be paranoid. Historically, the person who heard a strange noise outside their shelter and didn't react was mauled by a bear, or lion, or what have you, while the more alert human that took to defensive measures was more likely to survive. Having established our positions as apex predators, in cities this is far less likely to be needed, but our brains still seek danger patterns, cling to them, and those instincts aren't able to be quashed by rationality or statistics. We see something like the Newtown shooting and instinctively feel that all our children are in immediate danger, despite its actual unlikeliness. The media catches another school shooting and reinforces it even more in our brains that there is a very real danger, and breeds distrust and paranoia, triggering an instinct to be even more isolationist, and more paranoid, breeding more and more distrust, which further fuels the cycle for the next news article we see reinforcing our beliefs.
This isn't meant to blame the news, or humans, or any particular person at all, but the idea is that we should all at least attempt to be more data-driven, more pragmatic, and to try and find data that doesn't agree with our assumptions. It's harder than it sounds. In most humans, the brain simply rejects data that doesn't agree with its pre-formed hypotheses, but scientists are better equipped here than the average human, as we revel in data, enjoy being proven wrong, and strive towards better results, not just a reinforcement of the bad data we already believe.
Here's another hypothesis - tribal or rural cultures will be more trusting by nature. Human beings are naturally paranoid but NOT of each other. If you are competing with other species and the environment for survival, it doesn't make sense to view your own species as a threat. Indeed, it benefits your family or tribe if you all cooperate. However, in densely populated urban environments, your competition is all human beings. If you are metaphorically eaten or taken advantage of, it will be by another human. It's much less likely in a city that you will die because of exposure, or weather or a wild animal. Thus, because the threat is from people, you must be more wary of people.
I'm not super confident about this of course - it's probably both simplistic and wrong on a few levels, but I think whatever the answer is, it's not just that urban people are trusting and rural people are paranoid.
More traditional gridded suburbs, especially those with large communal parks, probably bely the behavior I described, but I'm mostly speaking intuitively on the matter, as I'm not aware of any studies.
In short, I think we're probably both right. ;-)
That said, despite your low-brow dismissal, I'm not suggesting that cul de sacs are evil. They are very good at building close-knit, but very small communities. Kids that play in cul de sacs generally do so in plain view of everybody else, and with less traffic interruption, encouraging play and discouraging deviant behavior.
Cul de sac kids have a greater sense of trust with those within the immediate community, but at the expense of less trust for those outside that community -- just as isolated communities tend to do.
[1] - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1523709 [2] - http://chd.sagepub.com/content/20/2/229.full.pdf+html
Cul de sacs are insular, and that's considered a selling point of them. I'll grant that they're not quite as extreme as gated communities, but that they exist for the purposes of insulating one from traffic otherwise associated with more frequented byways. That isn't a contrivance, it's their stated purpose. It shouldn't come as a shock that insulation from use as a thoroughfare would extend to insulation from outside contact, as that's the obvious result.
I think the evidence is that more diversity brings less trust.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...
Also interesting is that in Putnam's hypothesis, the last bullet relating to diversity indicates media influence -- "More time spent watching television and more agreement that 'television is my most important form of entertainment'".
I'm interested in Putnam's work though, but I'd like to see if other causes can't be seen as contributing factors. Thanks for the link.
It's nice and hip to just imply people are not worldly but it may be that their distrust is justified.
You said some nice things about science ... But which set of assumptions really need to be examined here?
My thought is that a healthy distrust is perhaps the way to go, but that's a judgement on values, and shouldn't be relied upon as advice.
Evil has taken over America.
How does one reconcile a particular choice if it involves a long commute or relocation? And do families living in close proximity receive priority enrollment over students residing outside of a given district?
I'm most interested in how you can offer people the potential for trust (or to put it in terms of michaelochurch's comment, reduction of "mistrust.") I believe the establishment of reputation around a useful and flexible digital identity will be _the_ way that people combat distrust among each other. Social proof will come in the form of reviews based on past behavior.
There has been such a tiny amount of innovation or success in reputation systems, I believe this is a massive open opportunity.
Distrust is when you don't trust someone. Mistrust is when you trust someone you should not.
For a more serious note, I've noticed this trend as well. One of the reasons I expect Silicon Valley's decline into irrelevance to be even faster than it looks is that it really was the pay-it-forward culture that made something of the place. That's what built it, in the 1970s. Now that it has been replaced by Sean Parker and Snapchat and "fuck you, I've got mine", it has no locational advantage other than history.
I think it's interesting that the word "trustworthy" doesn't appear in the article.
And it only appears in these HN comments once. (well, twice now :)
The innovators and early adopters were motivated by their understanding of the utility in finally achieving a solution to that problem in the context of digital currency (not historically possible for digital currencies till the invention of 1) the Internet and 2) the BitTorrent protocol, so essentially a major breakthrough and first in human history). They provided the critical mass, social proof, and wealth effect that then drove later adoption.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Generals%27_Problem
I think this is horrible for the average person, but would be a great thing to implement for transactions where you would want some form of accountability, like political donations, charities, investments, taxes, etc. If I give my money to some organization, I can use the block chain to see that they're using the money they receive for exactly the purposes I expect them to be using it for.