Suspicious Minds – Why No One Trusts People In Authority
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bbc.co.uk
We're subjected to so much marketing and PR spin that we've become immune to it. Look at Twitter and how that's evolved -- one of their big business models is gathering TV viewer sentiment in real-time. I think that we've all been trained to distrust most things communicated in a public setting, because chances are that somebody is selling something.
Why question whether or not our suspicion is greater or less than it was in some bygone era?
It's like saying, "Cancer survival rates are much better now than they were a hundred years ago, so let's question peoples' motivation for continuing to battle cancer."
* By "corrupt" I mean that a system arbitrarily facilitates the self-interest of a small group of people over others. Symmetric starting conditions aren't enough; instability breaks initial symmetries faster than a kid breaks toys.
And don't think you can check it yourself - for 99.9% of people that's impossible. And don't say "so trust that 0.1% of people" because you did nothing except add a layer of indirection.
The problem, as jjoonathan said, is when it does not work. I'd say that it's worse than a corrupt politician, because the politician is much easier to replace (if you are not under a system that makes all of them equally corrupt).
What is different,[2] now is that trust has been eroded in institutions. I think people in my parents generation (born in the early 1950's) still believe that government more or less acts in the best interests of the people.[3] I think that belief is a lot less common in my generation, and I'm quite past the age of generic rebelliousness (born mid 1980's).
What strikes me as interesting are two related facts:
1) Those who are the most distrustful of government tend to skew libertarian; but
2) Many of the biggest changes in the U.S. since 1970 have been in the direction of deregulation, increased emphasis on markets, and smaller government.[4]
Measures that should be increasing trust in the system are having the opposite effect. In the 1970's, it was considered reasonable for government to outright set prices and rates. Today, even subsidies draw strong attack.
To be fair, I agree with much of the agenda of deregulation since the 1970's, so this isn't a criticism of that trend. But I also believe a nation can't do great things if people don't have faith in its basic institutions. It is, to me, one of the most striking differences between the West and the East, and I don't think it's coincidental that societal prosperity is highly correlated with the amount of faith people have in their basic institutions.
[1] Without resorting to the facile false equivalency between campaign donations and outright bribery.
[2] Although not new--it has been described elsewhere that these moods are cyclic.
[3] It can be argued that the government really does act in the interests of upper middle class baby boomers (like my parents).
[4] People will contest this, but it's hard to argue with the facts. From 1970 to 2002, federal spending exclusive of interest, social security, and medicare dropped from 15% of GDP to 10% of GDP. It spiked during the recession, but is trending back towards hitting 10% by early in the next decade. Deregulation has moved similarly. We might complain about lack of competition in telecom today, but in 1970 AT&T was still a sanctioned, national monopoly.
I think the problem is there is a ton of rhetoric about deregulation and smaller government but in practice if you look very close government is mostly much bigger and a lot of the things that have been "deregulated" aren't subject to the competition that deregulation implies because of the nature of the industries involved.
Sure you can deregulate electric rates but you still don't have a choice in who carries that power to your house. On the other hand look at an industry like car dealerships where deregulating would actually improve things and people fight tooth and nail to keep it because they know there is no natural barrier to protect their profits.
Interesting question, though, is if this logic applies to things like medicine: there isn't any barrier to entry other than buying a scalpel and a stethoscope, and yet I'd much rather have some degree of regulation there.
I don't understand your question. I don't think you can put practicing medicine in the "unregulated" column.
For medicine, there are low barriers to entry--recall that barbers used to be surgeons. Our heuristic would suggest that medicine shouldn't be regulated--but that's nuts.
http://swampland.time.com/2013/07/29/the-secretive-group-beh...
Actually, its just Medicare (the confusion may be because the governing entity is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but Medicaid is a state-federal partnership program where reimbursement is generally driven by state policy; the committee at issue [1] is related to Medicare specifically.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialty_Society_Relative_Valu...
At roughly the same time in the US, the current mania about socialized medicine equaling death panels and communism got started with spin doctors hired by the doctor's unions. In fact Wikipedia tells me that the actual phrase "socialized medicine" was "first widely used in the United States by advocates of the American Medical Association in opposition to President Harry S. Truman's 1947 health-care initiative."
The article "The Lie Factory: How politics became a business" gives some interesting historical insight into this:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/24/120924fa_fact_...
They continue to lobby against these reforms to this day, more from Wikipedia:
"The AMA has one of the largest political lobbying budgets of any organization in the United States.[6] Its political positions throughout its history have often been controversial. In the 1930s, the AMA attempted to prohibit its members from working for the then-primitive health maintenance organizations that had sprung up during the Great Depression, which violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and resulted in a conviction ultimately affirmed by the US Supreme Court.[7] The AMA's vehement campaign against Medicare in the 1950s and 1960s included the Operation Coffee Cup supported by Ronald Reagan. Since the enactment of Medicare, the AMA reversed its position and now opposes any "cut to Medicare funding or shift [of] increased costs to beneficiaries at the expense of the quality or accessibility of care". However, the AMA remains opposed to any single-payer health care plan that might enact a National Health Service in the United States, such as the United States National Health Care Act. In the 1990s, the organization was part of the coalition that defeated the health care reform advanced by Hillary and Bill Clinton."
They also to fight to protect their status, and prevent nurses, pharmacists and other less-credentialled healthcare workers from performing roles that they could do just as well (if not better) and at cheaper cost. Relevantly for the tech-nerd contingent here (if raising the cost and reducing the quality of health care wasn't already relevant enough), they're probably going to fight expert systems that threaten their turf too (if they haven't already started to) just like car dealers vs Tesla motors.
Here's randomly Googled article on them fighting against an expanded role for Nurses:
http://takingnote.tcf.org/2010/04/the-battle-over-letting-nu...
"The American Medical Association (AMA) represents many members of the old guard, and is intent on protecting the guild. In some statehouses, the Associated Press (AP) reports: “Doctors have shown up in white coats to testify against nurse practitioner bills. The AMA, which supported the national health care overhaul, says that a doctor should supervise an NP at all times and in all settings. Just because there is a doctor shortage, the AMA argues, is no reason to put nurses in charge and endanger patients.”
But others argue that Nurse Practitioners have the needed training and that, in fact, doctors who have gone through the full medical school curriculum are over-qualified for a job that, today, is more about coordinating care than medical science."
Assertions to the effect of "the government is bigger than ever" are just unsubstantiated hand-waving. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP, excluding interest, social security, and medicare, is down from 15% to 10%. That reflects a real and dramatic shrinking of the scope of government.
You can argue that deregulation hasn't had the same impact proponents suggested, but it's all relative. Industries with economics of scale tend towards monopoly or duopoly in the absence of regulation. The fact that deregulated industries still often exhibit oligopolies isn't proof that deregulation was just rhetoric. Search, desktop operating systems, consumer microprocessors, and package delivery have all trended towards having one or two dominant players, yet those industries never had regulated monopoly incumbents.
Excluding my fat, belly, and arse, I've actually lost weight...
Look at it this way. Say a very small, Milton Friedman-ish society institutes a basic income, funded by a tax. It might have spending as a percentage of GDP of 30%, but would you say it necessarily has a "big government?"
The things you're excluding (though defense wasn't mentioned), are the main/majority expenditure categories of government. There's even good reason to believe that shrinkage in other areas merely come in some part from natural accounting of a substitution effect as expenditure has been transferred to these areas. I can accept that you're excluding them from analysis because they're not what the man on the street thinks of as "government overhead", but whatever is left over can no longer really be said to be representative of the government we actually have or the role it actually plays in our lives and society.
I can comment on a $500 billion "simple transfer" separate from a bureaucracy, government, population and politics of sufficient size and complexity to actually achieve it in the same way that I can comment on how the extra mass of Santa's obesity is hindering him from delivering his presents efficiently at Christmas each year...
Which is to say, forming a serious opinion on it implies ignorance about the true nature of what it is we are discussing (a fantastical non-existent entity and an inherently impossible state of affairs).
Or at the very least it requires a willing suspension of disbelief purely for the purposes of entertainment...
Government has a $10 trillion+ impact on the economy by enforcing property rights, and likely a similarly large one by restricting immigration. Neither of those appear in a "budget". So you really have to be extremely careful about what you mean by "government" and "size".
That said, yes, you still have as big[1] a government. Your people will still have to pay the same 30% of the GDP in taxes, and their products will still get more expensive by the same amount.
[1] I'm not sure 30% of the GDP constitutes a big government. In fact, I'm quite certain that number is meaningless without context, but well, I'd love to be proved wrong on that.
Is that the measure? That politicians have to be openly on the take for the modern citizen to be justified in distrusting authority? As with most of society, the corruption has better marketing today vs 80 or 90 years ago. Why take an open bribe when it's so easy to funnel money to family and contributors through the passing of bills that include earmarks for them?
now is that trust has been eroded in institutions
We've had the better part of a century to watch as one big program after another has been implemented, limped along sucking more and more money, and now is doomed to failure unless yet more money is thrown after them: Medicare, Social Security, etc.
We've watched the government go to war against poverty and drugs yet fail to move the needle.
We've watched as everything the government gets involved in: public school, health care, student loans, home loans, etc. fails in fundamental ways without ever being scrapped or replaced with something better.
Today, even subsidies draw strong attack
... but then nothing really ever happens about them, or they're shuffled around.
[4] People will contest this, but
Government expenditures != amount and effect of regulation.
They grew up in the old Chicago machine, and it was well-known that you could take your grievances (as well as perhaps a contribution) to your alderman to get things like potholes fixed or what have you.
I think that the problem isn't necessarily corruption per se, but that it is out of reach of the community members who would benefit most from it.
Pretty much every single libertarian I talk to would vehemently disagree here. Drug laws, war on terror, militarization of police, copyright and patent expansion, the massive and growing number of prisoners (more in absolute numbers than China!), money transmitter laws, safety regulations, the NSA, the perpetually growing number of federal and state regulations per year, etc are usually cited (also, many libertarians throw in growing welfare spending, which I'm obliged to include even though I personally find it vastly less offensive than something like throwing black people in jail for a parking ticket). There is actually a good theory that explains the disparity between this and the high-profile deregulation cases: in the case of laws that substantially harm very specific and powerful groups, there is a strong and concentrated interest in repealing them, so they get repealed. On the other hand, in the case of micro-nuisances targeting small entrepreneurs fighting against the law a public goods problem, where each individual person has insufficient incentive to do anything about it.
In almost every measure of quality of life the US ranks low to middling compared to generally less-wealthy industrialized nations. We score #12 in the human development index, and all our #1s are in bad things like surveillance, military spending, prison population, etc. We don't inherently suck, we just spend vastly more on cops, prosecutors, prisons, soldiers, and surveillance.
The surveillance state does more than delegitimize as discredit the government, it takes vast resources away from providing the good things government can do. Trading individually corrupt and brutal police for militarized and insanely armed police only enables us to say "Tut, tut, but that use of force was legal." That's not an improvement. It just costs more.
I'm not saying that there isn't, or that criticism isn't valid. I'm pointing out the interesting phenomenon that trust in institutions has eroded even as the institutions have, by objective measures, decreased their intervention into society.
Mass surveillance is a massive and foul intervention into society. That's a paperless Stasi.
Please, can a moderator correct this? Thanks.
And these are just the facts. I haven't even gone into any extremely plausible "conspiracy" theories.
I'm Canadian and find that often Canadians believe our government is doing fine and is trustworthy, simply because of Canada's supposed reputation.
Today the establishment (a term invented in the 1950s) can read the mass psychology's wants (via technological means) and fulfil them (directly, in order to remedy popular discontent) instead of engaging in old-school frame-up tactics.
Note that the article doesn't disclaim continued use of these tactics though, so it's not really drawing any particularly informative or useful conclusions.
I do find authority to be inherently suspicious, because it substitutes use of force for the use of rationality, and usually only for the sake of the authority-haver's personal convenience.
If you are correct, and can prove it, no authority is required. Otherwise the authority, if available, is inevitably used to win by rhetorical distraction rather than by the strength of the reasoning. And a swat on the noggin with a baton is very distracting indeed. As they say, you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.
That's not to say authority is useless. It is often the only way to achieve timely results. But is is no less suspicious, and should always be ratified by a deliberative, non-authoritative process.