I remember myself thinking about examples of lack of societal trust in Brazil, where I live, comparing to richer countries. Like european countries (Japan also I guess) where you don't have a barrier entering the subway where it is verified if you paid the ticket. Only randomized sample checking.
Then a relative told me a surreal example from Angola. There, public distribution of electricity is unreliable to say the least. So everyone who can afford has a gas fueled electric generator at home.
But, in any apartment building, instead of having a big generator, at ground level, with all residents sharing the bill (like we have in several upper class buildings here in Brazil); each resident has their own small generator just outside their doors. So there is constant loud noise and constant smoke at the stairs and elevators (and a higher individual cost).
The only reason for this (according to this relative) is lack of trust that everybody would consistently pay their share of the common bill. There is always several people who try to take advantage.
So, I agree with the idea that societal trust is a requirement for economic development.
I grew up in Peru, and throughout my life it was very common to talk about "gringos" as if they were incredibly naive, trusting idiots that could easily be swindled every which way. I swear the national motto could easily have been "el que no es conchudo muere por cojudo" (if you're not trying to take advantage of someone, you'll get punished for being an idiot).
I was intrigued by this because, being pretty bad at haggling and swindling, I thought that trust is what let these "gringos" carry on with their business with a bit more focus, not look behind their backs at all times, trying to haggle everyone lest they get swindled by someone.
Eventually I moved to Canada, and I was sort of validated in terms of things being so much better when ie: you don't have to haggle with every cabbie, or cop. Unfortuantely, in terms of social trust, I cannot really tell whether Peru is becoming more like Canada, or Canada more like Peru.
I have quite good experience with the computer people, but the other locals...
If I go to two dentists and ask what needs to be done, it is ~ 30% risk they both insist on expensive treatments -- but different ones...
If they don't realize I live there, the stores often screw themselves out of a good customer. And so on.
I'd describe it as the locals like more to screw people over than they like to earn money.
I assumed it was some remaining cultural damage from the dictatorship, with short sightedness a good strategy since they couldn't plan? But maybe it is a more general thing?
> If I go to two dentists and ask what needs to be done, it is ~ 30% risk they both insist on expensive treatments -- but different ones...
In India, doctors are mostly eager to perform surgery upon you.
In a case where the symptoms clearly indicated Carpal Tunnel Syndrome [0], the doctor insisted upon a CT scan to be followed by surgery claiming it to be muscle atrophy [1]. (This is from personal experience. A couple of months later, a reputed doctor from one of the best medical institutes in the country confirmed that it was CTS and no surgery was required.)
I've heard of multiple cases where they continued to keep a (dead) patient in ICU so that they could continue to keep billing.
I should explain my reasoning since it went away on racism(!) accusations, even if it is so late no one will read it. :-)
According to what I've read, the biggest difference in social parameters from my native Nordic place and Romania is trust. Trust in other people, in the state, in the police and so on. It is a quite logical result in an ex dictatorship that had a brutal secret police.
I assumed the complete lack of trust in others was a large reason behind the lack of foresight and planning. "A stranger, let's get his money!" But -- it is not everyone that do this.
That said, as long as no money is involved it is like being on Ireland. People are really nice and friendly. Less violence here than in the North. And so on.
That this attitude is international will make me reevaluate my thinking.
(Next time someone implies racism as the basis of something, I'll just call them "pederast" -- with as much support... :-) But I will admit to racism on one point -- I am deeply convinced that people from Hungary and from Asia are all good cooks. :-) )
Capitalism is a system wherein man exploits man. Socialism is vice versa.
However, at least in Europe, the trust seems to be higher and the related benefits of social capital seem to be bigger in countries that have had a working market economy for a longer time: Britain, Germany, Sweden. Not former COMECON countries where much of current population was educated during the era of real socialism.
We talk about a claim that complex social/psychological behaviour is a result of a way to organize a country's economy. This phenomenon is seen in different continents in quite different countries.
So where are you "coming from" where such sweeping claims don't need good support..?
Yes. It would be naive and racist to just assume that people just aren't trusting for some arbitrary reason.
A lot of it is rooted in memory of having experienced exploitation and abuse from "official authorities" that they could not trust, for they were merely the enforcers of plutocrats.
It's not "racist" to recognize failings in cultures.
My dad left Bangladesh because he didn't want to raise kids in a country where he had to pay a bribe just to get a second phone line installed. That cultural trait isn't something us Bangladeshis get to blame on the British or whatever. It's deep-seated and long-standing. And it holds us back as a country and a people.
What we really don't need is people calling any criticism of those cultural traits "racist." It's not healthy for the cultures that need external pressure to overcome these problems, and it undermines the internal reformers trying to move beyond them.
"My dad left Bangladesh because he didn't want to raise kids in a country where he had to pay a bribe just to get a second phone line installed."
In India we had this problem, I have two anecdotes which demonstrate this.
In 1992 we waited for over a year to get a phone line installed at our place. When the 'lineman' came, we offered him lunch, and I'm sure the dad paid him money for the service.
Fast forward 12 years later in 2004. During this time, Indian government liberalized the telecom market and allowed private sector to provide telecom services.
In 2004, my dad got a temporary phone line for the summer vacation so that I can have faster internet. He got it within 2 days of applying for it. Two months later when my dad wanted to cancel it, the telecom company people kept on trying to make him keep the connection. After an hour of negotiations (when they tried to sweeten the deal) they finally agreed to cancel it.
I'm just saying that it was the same town, same group of people, the difference was clearly in the economic system they were following. The culture evolves in response to the systematic pressures. Change the system, and you'd change the culture.
"My dad left Bangladesh because he didn't want to raise kids in a country where he had to pay a bribe just to get a second phone line installed."
That's exactly why my parents left. My dad had a much better life in Bangladesh than he would face coming to the US, but he just wasn't interested in the mental cost of participating in Bangladeshi society.
Race is an ill-defined term coined when science was often quackery. We should really move on.
It's not "mysterious." It's what parents teach their kids and what kids observe growing up. Take, for example, the issue of domestic violence. In the U.S. (at least, outside of certain subcultures), if people find out you're beating you're wife you become a social pariah. In Bangladesh, it's just an "issue" everyone tries to help the couple "overcome." No wonder 87% of women in Bangladesh are victims.
And just so I'm not beating up on Bangladesh--I think Americans' treatment of criminals represents a profound cultural failing. Kids hear jokes about people getting raped in prison or see life sentences for minor crimes as routine. It's a defect in the morals of the people no different than say the muslim world's treatment of homosexuals or the culture of petty bribery endemic in India and Bangladesh. Calling it racist to point those things out elevates cultural sensitivity above justice.
Maybe mysterious was the wrong word. Saying the issue is "cultural" is, imo, a bit of a dog whistle. Conceptually it acts like a black box, and it evokes solutions like "exporting our culture", and ties the bad in their society with their essence rather than their circumstances. This is why I don't like it.
I didn't mean to chastise you, I think you're one of the best posters around here. Insofar society and culture are used interchangeably, there's no issue with anything you said. Insofar "culture" is a polite way of talking about race, it can can be pretty bad.
But it's not a black box — it's a pretty straightforward thing. Of course, it usually has corellation with racial and ethnical groups, so critique of certain culture will always land close to racism. But also, a lot of naive racists just don't think abiut the issue enough to word it right.
Racism is wrong for two very simple reasons: (1) there's no causation between person's ethnicity and moral values, as you yourself mentioned about Korea, and (2) it's something a person cannot change about himself. At the same time, both things are different for cultures.
What you're describing here is called "Social Capital"[0] and can be summed up very neatly with the question posed in that section of that entry [1] "do you trust the others?" which basically gets to the bottom of that issue which is trust.
The "social trust deficit" phenomenon that plagues certain societies is one of those key implicit factors in the lagging economic performance in those societies as it drags and dampens economic activities due to the fact that doing business is all about trust and this prevailing social distrust across classes and communities is one giant road block to that end.
Also, the example you cited about electric generators in Angola is yet another instance of "Conway's Law"[2] in play. Apparently, these people don't talk to each other and even if they do, it doesn't bridge the trust gap to unlock the potential that they might have to improve their standards of living and quality of life.
> Like european countries (Japan also I guess) where you don't have a barrier entering the subway where it is verified if you paid the ticket. Only randomized sample checking.
In the UK, this seems to vary significantly by the area and type of service. The London Underground and most National Rail services have barriers by the entrances to stations, but the DLR doesn't (unless it shares the building with one of the former types). Seems we need them too, since there are quite a few that like trying to get in without paying.
Pretty sure that's the case with a lot of other transport services too, with the exception of buses.
So I don't think it's as much of a societal trust thing. Quite a lot richer countries have stuff like this as well.
There is something similar in Greece, people can not pay their share for filling up common heating oil tank. Lot of houses are not heated in winter (sometimes bellow freezing with snow).
It is not question of trust, but poverty. People are not gaming system to buy new car or TV. Food is more important than electricity or heat.
Yep. It's a question of liquidity, not trust. People are naturally inclined to do the right thing if they have enough to cover their basic needs. At least a vast majority, sufficient to survive free riders.
A good example of this is how people in developing countries very often will.give a huge chunk of their income to close family members in need, something that rarely happens to such an extend in developed countries. The trust is there, but liquidity and enforcement is not possible beyond close family/clan.
I was in Greece recently and I noticed that all the apartment blocks had forests of aerials on top of them - one aerial for each apartment. In the UK, the forest is less dense. People are trusting enough to share their aerials.
> Like european countries (Japan also I guess) where you don't have a barrier entering the subway where it is verified if you paid the ticket. Only randomized sample checking.
Which countries are those? My experience in subways in several European countries and Japan is that you cannot go through the turnstiles unless you have a ticket (well, you can jump over them, but I guess this is not what you meant).
If not subways, then proof of payment systems are definitely the norm for light rail and busses around Europe.
Though whether these systems are based on trust depends on the ticket price and the nature of the checks. My DB train tickets were checked on about 50% of the trips I took in Germany, meaning it was in my economic self-interest to pay the expensive fare every time.
Thanks, it seems it is also the case in Vienna. Maybe it happens in other European countries, but in the cases I remember you need a ticket to enter: Paris, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon.
Ok, but Paris transports way more people that Lille ever will. And if you want to add Lyon, well it's like paris and it's the second/third city in France.
This is correlation, not causation. People living in high standard trust more (because lose of marginal money isn't a live-threat risk) or societies who trusts more becomes more developed? I guess that history backs more the first deduction.
For the Angola example, can't you ask people to pay a little bit ahead of time, then use an apartment-wide generator, but stop the circuit breaker for the apartments that didn't pay?
In some places, people do not trust the administrator of such a program. How will they know that the administrator won't abscond with the funds or toggle off the circuit breaker early?
Trust, at the societal level, can take an extremely long time to build. For it to succeed, a sufficient number of people must transition from "knowing it's going to fail" to "believing it might work".
An anecdote to illustrate the point: A friend served as a Peace Corps teacher in a small town. He was part of an effort to help a community effort to clear and farm a small plot of land. The night before the planned harvest, the fields were harvested by unknown actors, and the produce was available for sale all over town.
Such an event can be both reasonable, "If I don't steal the food before someone else does, I won't get any at all" and patently corrosive to trust, as the event is evidence for the idea that, "collective efforts will always fail".
Trust does succeed, though. It's worth the effort.
Don't know about Angola, but in other developing countries what happens is that they bribe some electrician to put the wiring back. It's cheaper than paying the whole bill. Viewed in the larger context it makes total sense. If you don't have enough to survive you will do anything. Those anti-social behavioral patterns take years or even decades to un-learn, even when economic development has ticked up significantly.
In another developing country where there are frequent power outages, the building decided to get a diesel-powered generator for power backup, with all residents sharing the bill for the diesel.
Residents started running their washing machines only on backup power (so all at the same time), the justification being that they've already paid for the diesel so why should they pay more for the electricity?
I have been in Japan for about 1 year and here it's taken to the extreme.
Japanese people leave the bags and phones unattended on the table to reserve the seat while going to the other floor of the starbucks to order. Being from Spain, this is crazy. But it does encourage better behaviour and positive thinking.
Migration isn't THAT bad. They aren't out to get you. It's a bit paperwork intensive though for sure. We do a lot of business in japan so we just incorporated a subsidiary there. Email's in profile if you're curious.
I was amazed when seeing the same thing in Tokyo. One of our group left their camera on a bench outside of a site we were seeing. It was at least a half hour or more before we realized it, and the camera was still sitting right where the person left it.
Yep, saw that too in Japan. People leaving their cell phones to "reserve" a table, and going to get something to eat. I couldn't believe my eyes. Also, bikes unchained everywhere. Even electric ones.
This reminds me of a strange crime spree that occurred when I was in college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One winter, car batteries began to be stolen, soon many of my friends (I did't own a car) had to chain the hoods of their cars. Apparently, the victims, upon discovering that their car was missing a battery would become the next generation of thieves stealing batteries to fix their own stranded vehicle. I suppose bikes are a bit that way, whereas phones are not; it doesn't make a lot of sense to steal a phone because yours has been stolen, even to someone with questionable morals, because you can't simply pick it up and start to use it. Bikes and batteries on the other hand are easy to steal and use to replace your own bike or battery stolen only a hour ago.
The social consequences of committing a crime are enormous in Japan, and very long-term (like, the rest of your live). It makes answering the "Have you ever been convicted of a felony" section in the US look like a happy joke. That's part of it. The other is that most Japanese people would be really horrified at the idea of stealing someone's stuff, left that way. Finally, no bystander effect there, not for a crime like that.
I think it's more pragmatic. What are you going to do with a stolen phone in a country where everyone already has the exact phone that they want? Bag snatching (ひったくり) used to be a regular enough occurrence that most people would know a friend it had happened to, but the occurrence of that has dropped too (90% since the year 2000 in Osaka [0]).
I would attribute the drop to the fact that most things people carry around now simply aren't worth stealing. Why risk jail over things that you can only flip for a few hundred bucks at most? There is almost no poor underclass here who would do that to survive, a side effect of Japan not being a desirable place for poor people to immigrate to.
That's a good point, but it definitely relates to what I'm saying as well; you're just describing the benefit side of the cost:benefit analysis any criminal has to do. A lot of the cost in Japan, even for the pettiest of crimes, is that you either have to absolutely get away with it, or be branded a criminal.
All of what you said applies too, and it's all connected to the tighter community-oriented culture. There is after all, nothing impractical about choosing not to commit a petty crime, when as you say the benefit is minor and the risks are enormous.
I think you dont really understand the culture in Japan. There is no calculation going on. Stealing would not even cross 99.99% peoples mind in the first place.
Most of the examples of trusting strangers I have seen reduce to some kind of internal notion of tribe and tribal continuity.
Conference goers are a great example population, since they are from everywhere and have no connection other than a shared interest in the conference proceedings, but the degree of trust among them is extremely (if recklessly) high.
Ethnicity, or "race," is a strong indicator of trust, since what is trust but a default line of credit you extend to someone with the belief that it will be reciprocated.
The U.S. has an american tribe, which includes anyone who seems american enough, and it can easily cross ethnic boundaries. A middle class black person, or an ethnic japanese person whose family has been in america for a few generations can become a part of a "white" trust network with only a few words in the right accent, with the right cultural references.
People trust each other based on their shared and demonstrated perceptions of power and authority. Belief in the same god is often enough, but barring that, alignment to the same institutions (rule of law, english "fair play," property, marriage, etc) will make someone initially trustworthy.
Here, being able to code gets you a long way because it has demonstrated a commitment to understanding, work, incremental success, among other things.
Someone who signals alignment to, or directly against those shared perceptions and institutions will make themselves untrustworthy. If you dress like a criminal, people will treat you like one. Similarly, if you dress like an oppressor, people will treat you like one.
There is nothing mysterious about trust. It only becomes complicated when untrustworthy people insist that they deserve your trust and that you are somehow deficient for declining to extend it.
Trust is something that I think is often taken for granted as something that is naturally occurring, but as you say it is based on shared culturual/religious background. The un-pc question, the uncomfortable question, is whether diversity/immigration contributes towards lack of trust and lack of assimilation.
I'd say diversity and immigration are separate things. America does a good job of assimilating immigrants into the american tribe. Diversity tends to mean giving power to people who have for whatever reason identified as outside that tribe, and the results are predictable.
Low trust societies with little immigration could be explained by strong local tribal identities within it, particularly ones which supersede identifying with shared institutions and narratives. Those tribes could be ethnic, class, regional, linguistic, gangs, families, villages, etc.
Village identity in places like Italy and Portugal is often stronger than national identity, mainly because their families are larger and more connected, and their national institutions are fairly recent appearances in those older familial narratives.
Diversity situations where you mix people from different tribes without a convincingly powerful umbrella narrative is when you get situations like Somalia and Mexico. They are power vacuums in which the violence continues because nobody is able to win.
Ironically the colonial history of places like India and South Africa may be what holds them together, as either you have someone take the reins of those colonial institutions and manage a transition to local rule, or fight a bloody semi-permanent conflict to resolve the power vacuum that not having them leaves.
Diversity as we know it today, for all its ostensibly noble goals, is just an attempt at resource redistribution from the tribe who inherited it with the institutions that preserve it, to some people smart enough to make off with it without too much violence. Not sure how people will react when they wake up and notice their stuff is missing and they are now debt slaves, but until then, kum-ba-yah.
It's interesting that you say America has done a good job of assimilating immigrants in light of the popularity of Trump. It seems to me the opposite is true. To me, America is a collection of states that is fairly cohesive, but is quickly ripped apart when politics comes up. Americans can have pleasent conversations over sports, entertainment, and food, but anything beyond that and the debates can get pretty hairy...
Fraud is usually a combination of opportunity, pressure, and rationalization. It sounds like a bad powerpoint slide, but it changed the way I think.
People are untrusting and dishonest partly because they're poor or desperate (pressure). (edit: someone who makes 100K but can't make debt payments is also under high pressure and a fraud risk, as is a CEO who may get fired for missing his numbers). And reputation systems decrease opportunity, making people more honest. And a personal touch (e.g. a walmart greeter) makes it harder to rationalize cheating.
One thing the fraud triangle is missing though is culture/learned behavior. If you're around other people who steal, you're more likely to think stealing is normal. And when you've stolen in the past, your mind has also learned the pattern of stealing and you're more likely to steal in the future.
Reputation systems plant into people's minds the patterns of trust and honesty. Cash registers, credit reports, and star ratings have likely made people more honest.
> Why bother to steal when you are already comfortable?
This is more important than the author makes it to be. If nobody needs to turn to crime to eat and live, then they don't, and slowly everybody let their guard down more and more.
Edit: I should have said theft instead of crime. Need affect theft, theft affect trust.
> If nobody needs to turn to crime to eat and live, then they don't
Are you implying that the majority of the crime committed in the US is due to the perpetrator starving otherwise? Note that this excludes criminal acts intended to procure money for drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes.
If that is what you mean, then that sounds extremely implausible. What makes you think so? What about sexual violence, domestic violence, other crimes where no goods or money change owners, criminal behavior in traffic, tax evasion?
Oh believe me, how often it happens, that well off people just "accidentally" drop some little stuff in their purse.
Really lots of minor crimes, like shoplifting is done by people who do not have the necessity to do so. Not to talk about (nearly) criminal behavior while driving. Might be confirmation bias, but when I do my daily commute, most of the time it is the big car that does 100 in a 60 zone. Or the mothers, driving their kids to school, doing 60 to 70 in our 30 residential zone. Directly next to a school with kids lining the pathways.
For me, these are just anecdotal examples, but I do not believe, that crime happens out of necessity (sure a lot of crime does, or does because it seems to be the easier way). But just making everybody well off will not end criminal behavior.
People are aholes. Imho at least 2 standard deviations (and oftentimes I count myself into this range - but working on myself).
I can't put speeding in the same category as crimes of poverty, so I won't mention it further.
There's dozens of causes to crime - lack of opportunity, not caring of consequences, greed, upbringing, education, peer pressure, depression or other issues (often held up as a cause of affluent shoplifting) and many others. The simple fact remains that poverty or a recession indicates a clear rise.
If you can't put food on the table for the kids, and feel you have no other choices left, you may reach the point that you steal.
Crime often happens without need too. From stealing a little stationery from your well paid job, fiddling expenses (£100k a year MPs have been caught doing this, whilst legislating to send the scum to prison for years for some triviality). They can be because you're pissed at your job. So it goes on for more premeditated and higher value crimes.
Giving folks a decent baseline might end crimes of poverty and necessity, but would have little effect on the rest of the causes.
> Giving folks a decent baseline might end crimes of poverty and necessity, but would have little effect on the rest of the causes.
Exactly what I was implying.
> I can't put speeding in the same category as crimes of poverty, so I won't mention it further.
I didn't put it in the same category. I used both as examples.
For me speeding is way worse then petty theft (out of necessity). And that said by someone who had a break in while sleeping and had to deal with the fear and anxiety for long after that.
Being radically honest now:
For me speeding more then 10km/h above speed limit should be punishable with the equivalent of one years worth of income before taxes. At least. Make it hurt financially and make it hurt very much.
And if an accident happens, with the person speeding should be automatically jailed. For at least 3 years to life (depending on the amount of speeding and the severity of the accident).
For me, if they speed and endanger their fellow citizens they loose every right to be treated as a normal human being. In my mind they are then entering the category of solipsistic arles and should be treated as such.
Your choice to ignore speeding as a crime is interesting. Stealing has much lower risk of killing someone, so in a sense, speeding is much closer to murder.
Only in the context of the OP talking about crimes of necessity.
Speeding may perhaps be a necessity if you're trying to get someone to hospital, but in normal circumstances near a school is plain reckless. Speeding and other motoring offences aren't a necessity in the same way stealing money for food might be. They're not influenced by poverty at all. Some of the other motivations are common though. Hence choosing to ignore in that context.
The correlation between fatality rate and speed of impact is so well established that you should just be doing your own research here and looking it up.
If you can't be bothered, the answer is that it depends on which 5 mph it is. Speeding by 5 mph in the 30 mph school zone mentioned above is substantially increasing risk of fatality of pedestrian hit.
Likewise, the correlation between speed and time to stop is also rather well established.
I wasn't asking for the increased risk of fatality assuming there was a crash.
We are talking about the overall impact of the decision to speed, so we can't assume a specific scenario.
Of course which 5 mph it is also matters, as you've stated. It also matters if it is 2 mph or 10 mph. I still think GP's assertion is ridiculous. Minor speeding, which is what most people do, is not "close to murder" by any reasonable analysis.
Perhaps not, but that's not what I said, either. I said that on the dimension of likelihood of causing death, speeding is closer to murder than theft is.
Let me offer a thought experiment: You're a parent in a nice quiet neighborhood. Scenario One: You come home from work and your front door has been kicked in. Someone stole your laptop. Scenario Two: The neighborhood kids are playing ball in your yard. A car drives down your street at 90 mph. Which scenario makes you more angry?
When someone steals my stuff, I get sad. When someone ignores a stop sign while I'm in the crosswalk, I get angry.
There have been quite a few improvements in car technology since it was released, but the first Google result I could find says that 1 mph increase in average speed results in a 5% increase in injury accidents: http://www.trl.co.uk/online_store/reports_publications/trl_r...
If what you said had been true then such categories of theft as embezzlement did not exist. The view of people following strict moral code and breaking it only to save one's life is very naive, IMHO.
"Airbnb makes personal connections but uses online reviews to keep people honest: after our stay, we reviewed our host and he reviewed us."
The host reviews you after you have reviewed him/her. This is a big disincentive to leave a bad review, especially when you haven't already established a good reputation for yourself.
I've used Airbnb 3 times and, if I were being honest, I wouldn't have given any of them a good review.
I don't know. Any of these peer rating systems seem to devolve to give 5 stars unless they did something horribly bad and wrong.
Back when eBay was more of an online flea market, the culture was certainly that anything other than a glowing A+++++++++ positive was a black mark that people took as indicating you actively swindled someone. And retaliatory low ratings were certainly a thing people discussed.
And, with Uber, I'm acutely aware that even somewhat lower ratings can have a big impact on drivers so I'm not that inclined to give 4 star rather than 5 star ratings even when the service is a little bit subpar.
Yes, maybe instead of a 5 star system we really need:
* exceeds expectations
* met expectations
* did not meet expectations
And then just ding the folks in the last category.
Because what we have right now is really:
* 5 stars == exceeded or met expectations
* < 5 stars == did not meet expectations
However, it still won't address the issue of mutual rating. What you really need to do there is have the ratings hidden from each other until both have been submitted, and, frankly, not to penalize either side for ratings unless they are consistently negative. The latter is the only way to make them constructive rather than destructive.
I imagine the store keeper had enough experience with arab kids breaking stuff that wasn't paid for by their parents. So it's not a call on clumsiness of one set of kids vs another but personal experience on whether their parents can be trusted.
David Graeber in Debt: The First 5000 Years posits that debt and credit appeared before money or barter. These are things that can exist only meaningfully in a society with some degree of trust. I haven't evaluated the truth of this yet, but I'm firmly of the belief that high-trust societies will be economically prosperous and that there is a feedback loop at work here that starts with high trust enabling business and social interactions.
Like other commenters here, I'm from South Asia, and this is one of the most significant differences I've noticed from my home country (India). No-questions-asked return policies make my life so much easier and not having to share the store with too many unethical people makes this possible.
As a social experiment years ago, I interviewed 1000s of NYC taxi passengers. Just zillions really over a few years.
My conclusion, based on my data collection (WASP here).
The most friendliest people on the planet were Pakistani. Number 2? Egyptian.
Always found that kind of interesting for a 5th generation New Yorker. Of course your mileage my vary. But that's what I discovered. As far as I know, no one else has ever conducted that survey, before or since.
This reminds me of my philosophy classes. Rousseau believed all human are fundamentally good vs Machiavelli which thought people will act narcissistically and you need leverage on them to make them behave.
Trust vs non trust. We vs I. The futur vs the present.
> “it would explain basically all the difference between the per capita income of the United States and Somalia”. In other words, without trust — and its vital complement, trustworthiness — there is no prospect of economic development.
Well said. It's the same problem with Bitcoin. While it is cool to think about trustless digital currencies I think what we're seeing over the last 5 years about probably about 20 is establishment of trust in blockchains. It's all a human psychology thing, not about technology. It's not gonna happen overnight. It may also never happen in the same way many countries never have gotten their sh*t together.
Trust might be the cause of societal wealth. But it is also an effect of the system of laws. Americans are not more trusting/trustworthy because they are more cuddly and friendly -- Somalis probably have and deserve more of that kind of trust.
The kind of trust that makes America rich is the kind of trust you place in strangers who know they are doing commerce under the rule of law. The promimse made by Bitcoin and such is to add a new component to that sort of enforcement -- increasing trust.
Trust is also an important component in a labor market: trust that an employer will treat employees fairly, and trust that an employee will meet their obligations.
It depends on how much damage you open yourself to with your trust. People can be counted on to be trustworthy most of the time, but not all of the time.
The last example is absolutely heartbreaking. That someone would be so comfortable being so overtly racist in front of a complete stranger who is also a customer.
She may be racist, but if in the course of her shopkeeping she sees that a much higher portion of kids from certain backgrounds break glasses, what is she to do? She's obviously seen more kids handle sunglasses than you or I ever will, and she can draw whatever conclusions she likes from that sample. She could have phrased her conclusions a little better though.
Of course she could just be a racist with a bias against minorities which she chooses to express through the medium of sunglass handling rules.
It's unfortunate, but if you think it's heartbreaking you're missing the point of the article. Trust structures are highly cultural. E.g. consider the example of Japanese people leaving their cell phones on tables to reserve them and walking away, mentioned above. Obviously there is going to be a lot of friction and resentment when a poorly-assimilated group of immigrants, who don't have that same cultural indoctrination, is introduced into a high-trust society.
I'm Bangladeshi. There are a lot of things I do here in the U.S. that I wouldn't do in Dhaka. Is that racist?
The shopkeeper sounded like the sign arose from previous incidences. Sure, maybe it's wrong to generalize, but I can understand that she wants to protect her wares, and it seems that in her experience, children from different cultures behave in different ways.
> That someone would be so comfortable being so overtly racist in front of a complete stranger who is also a customer.
In the spirit of the article, by being so open, the shopkeeper demonstrated trust in a complete stranger.
>In the spirit of the article, by being so open, the shopkeeper demonstrated trust in a complete stranger.
I disagree. What I found so distressing about this anecdote is that to me it seemed likely that such overt racism could only exist somewhere it was systemic. However I'm now of course judging all of (Munich?) based on this one anecdote so clearly no better than the shopkeeper!
This needs to keep track of every commitment, every promises. It should become important enough that people completely stop lying. After a while, interesting things will happen.
You will be able to let people use your car, use your house, use your tools, use your bathroom, use your money, without having to watch them.
The workforce will become completely liquid, as you will be able to hire people without having to test them. If they're not fit for the job, they will quit on their own.
Sadly, those privacy enthusiasts are making everything they can to prevent that from happening.
Ah yes, our old friend the panopticon. If human beings are watched thoroughly enough, eventually they will internalize the gaze and watch themselves. The perfection of the human condition! What ever happened to those? ;)
That sounds undesirable, unworkable, and easily open to exploitation. Takes all sorts though... Would be interesting to read a worked out example of how such a system might operate.
In that case identity theft will just go up - plus people who are not trustworthy will now have absolutely nothing stopping them from being criminals, since nobody is going to trust them anyway.
It also doesn't deal with the background trust level in society - which is what you consider when you decide whether you should lock your door or not.
Then a relative told me a surreal example from Angola. There, public distribution of electricity is unreliable to say the least. So everyone who can afford has a gas fueled electric generator at home. But, in any apartment building, instead of having a big generator, at ground level, with all residents sharing the bill (like we have in several upper class buildings here in Brazil); each resident has their own small generator just outside their doors. So there is constant loud noise and constant smoke at the stairs and elevators (and a higher individual cost).
The only reason for this (according to this relative) is lack of trust that everybody would consistently pay their share of the common bill. There is always several people who try to take advantage.
So, I agree with the idea that societal trust is a requirement for economic development.