The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You(yourbrainonmoney.substack.com) |
The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You(yourbrainonmoney.substack.com) |
Basically with trust, trade is unfettered.
We trade productively with trust and we all prosper.
I see this in my life. I have good trust in costco, and I buy there with very little friction/mistrust. I know a bunch of things - they give me a decent price without trickery (unless you count giving my money back as rebates), they vet the products they sell, and they have a great return policy if I don't like the purchase for any reason.
meanwhile buying an airplane ticket, making a hotel reservation or getting a tow truck. That is a low-trust high-nonsense situation that makes me unhappy from reservation to checkout, almost to the point I dread travel. I do travel less, and I'm less spontaneous.
Good companies take care of their employees and customers.
The credentials enable trust at scale.
You're pointing at people leaning on reputations for trust. What happens when the most reputable institutional credentials no longer represent the quality they once did?
Just one more unsettling thing to think about
I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians. Now, cheating is pervasive. Game theory in action
It's sad to learn this attitude has begun to permeate our own students. People want to take short-cuts and skip the work necessary to get to the goal and miss out on the learning aspect. Maybe they expect "A.I" to do the thinking for them --but then what will they have to offer a prospective emplyer?
Capitalism, at least its currently flavor, seems to increasingly favor short term rewards.
Nothing is planned and built for the long term. Companies have no interest in selling you a product that lasts forever. Planned obsolescence and things built to fail are commonplace. In fact they would rather not sell you products, but that you rent them instead.
Governments operate on short term election cycles. Corporations operate in quarterly reports. If something makes sense for the long term but is bad on the short term, it is scraped.
From my personal experience I can say that the majority of E-Mails is spam and the majority of phone calls is fraud.
Amazon solved trust. Credit cards did too. Guaranteed reliable help when things do go wrong is one way to do it.
Cross border commerce makes trust worse because you can never get justice for being wronged.
- ads everywhere trying to push low quality product
- fake/bought product reviews
- commingled inventory (up until recently, still I would never buy food items, drugs or other health sensitive items like air filters or sunscreen there)
Before that it was merely single low trust events. Scandals type. Lead in paint style.
Sovereigns would debase coins routinely. Scammers would sell snake oil medicine in every village, then disappear. The Church would sell absolutions. All sorts of fake goods flooded the markets, from wine to guano. Bubbles like the South Sea Bubble devastated entire economies. Arguably the Ancient Régime in France was fatally weakened by too many such scandals on its watch.
Quite a lot of the current regulatory framework is a reaction to the ubiquity of scams in history.
In the Early Modern Ages, powerful people wove endless plots against one another, the Borgias held papacy, poisoning was a common way to solve disputes, all sorts of offices were sold openly...
... and in the middle of this, the Huguenots and Calvinists built huge business empires by being known as honest and reliable.
Maybe there is some space to repeat this by just avoiding the entshittification trap. I can see this happening in some corners of the IT world already. For example, Cloudflare has a good reputation in almost all regards. Linux has also held and expanded its market share by not being scammy and sleazy.
In all western countries, if you dig a little, you will find scandals after scandals from the ruling parties or the so called elite.
Why should a lambda citizen believe that there is any sense of trust anymore when those who are at the top clearly have no problem lying to get in or stay in power?
It's the same problem with the media biases. Newspapers and news organizations have completely stopped providing information and started pushing propaganda. Nothing more.
Then we lament the loss of confidence and the demise of democracy in the west.
Prior to the Internet, it was much harder to keep up with all the dirty details of whatever was happening in your parliament/Congress/government/town hall. Most people defaulted to a certain degree of trust by being happily ignorant.
There is a common note among the old political journalists (I mean 100+ years ago) saying that the practical execution of power was extremely dirty and that blessed is anyone who does not know.
Well, now we all know.
This does assume the current crisis is successfully resolved as it was for the Civil War and Great Depression/WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Turning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Turning_Is_Here
They've only recently started directly lying.
There is a difference and conflating the two is a large part of the problem.
You can find examples of them lying in history, but those were huge scandals that brought down governments. Lying had consequences. That's what we've lost
2. Most societies are low trust societies, with certain exceptions usually based on draconian law enforcement.
I don't trust a lot of thought was put into this article
I will just say this: "Christians" is not a wholly uniform population.
They are saying, ironically, that claimed membership of that group or belief isn't actually a high trust signal.