Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The first link seems to heavily imply so, but that's not obvious to me.
> Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.
That seems incredibly naive. If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be different?
Well, academics routinely do disseminate such knowledge. Not least, to appeal to the community to find such a solution.
It is highly unlikely a researcher in "finding X" is an expert in "solving X" or otherwise has the capacity to do so.
The "head in the sand" approach here doesn't "ease community tensions" it does precisely the opposite: prolong them for fear open investigation "goes against the consensus".
> If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be different?
Well, that metaphor doesn't apply here. The research shows that something we're already doing is potentially harmful. A more accurate metaphor would be discovering milk is actually poisonous as currently processed, and withholding the research for fear of disrupting the dairy industry (which the researcher happens to be a member of).
Your mistake is in presupposing the goodness of the thing the research is revealing to be potentially harmful. Hiding science that disagrees with your preconceived ideas is a dangerous path to take. You strengthen your position by whittling away the pieces that disagree with reality and updating your approach, not by denying reality and insisting you were right all along.
for one, editorializing by using an emotionally-charged term like "massively", which indicates bias, and incidentally lowers trust.
in any case, it's not ethnic diversity that impacts social trust but (sub-)cultural friction, which can happen between subsets ('tribes") of the same ethnicity (which is mostly a superfluous distinction anyway). tabs vs spaces, for instance.
we like to imagine mountains out of molehills and then point to our mounded constructions to prove how we're so irreconcileably different, but it's often a thin veil over an insecure assertion of authority and superiority.
To be fair, the author of the findings was trying to avoid such things happening, which were obvious to him. From the first link, it appears those efforts did not pay off.
Any kind of diversity that is seen as novel reduces trust, among other social consequences. (I note that the US has just elected it's second Papist president in 240ish years.)
Those consequences can be reduced; the question is, can they be reduced faster than forcing a new generation grow up under the diversity?
Self-censorship is not a bad response, given that the immediate and obvious problem is that conservatives will latch onto this and see "See? That's why we need to close the borders and deport all brown people!" That's a preposterous conclusion not supported by the actual evidence, but you'll wind up giving people like them ammunition. Remember: they won't listen to you a week later when you publish follow-up studies, or suggest possible remedies for the problem. Because they're not interested in the actual scientific truth, they just want to have an excuse to engage in the exact kinds of social distrust the study is trying to measure.
These links cover one person's research, the same person as the parent article, via press releases seeking controversy and attention for his commercial work.
His work doesn't appear to have been desk-drawered or self-censored.
He delayed publication for years (in the proverbial desk drawer) while he attempted to develop a positive and politically acceptable spin on the results (self censorship). He is also probably one of the top ten most prestiguous living social scientists. Consider the incentives of researchers with less accumulated social capital who are far easier to attack for their findings.
It's "self-censorship" no more than I am self-censoring myself right now, in this comment.
Reinvigorating your old work for publication, once you have a commercially viable avenue to promote it, is pretty average capitalism.
Plenty of work that is politically awkward is published under a strict pseudonym. This wasn't - and the author's position is that it was their choice not to publish.
I appreciate the author's framing of "transaction costs." These costs are often hidden.
It seems that as systems scale (in size) they tend to become inherently lower-trust. Consider a physician who makes house calls (not uncommon as recently as a few generations ago, and certainly not incompatible with modern medicine) and a large medical system such as Kaiser Permanente or NHS.
The economic benefits of the larger-scale system are obvious, and are directly measured, but the economic detriment due to increased transaction costs (derived from decreased trust) are neither obvious nor readily measurable.
Upsides of systems at scale can still outweigh downsides, and often do, but I suspect many industrial systems have a maximum scale above which efficiency gains lose out to, in this author's framing, transaction costs.
This abuts certain natural "borders" for system growth, such as national (or in the case of EU, common market) boundaries.
> It seems that as systems scale (in size) they tend to become inherently lower-trust.
I think the commodity markets (grains, coal, oil, steel, etc) are a significant counterexample: they do use spot checks but by and large run pretty lean on mechanism and rely on trust.
Isn’t broken trust due to low quality Chinese steel and Chinese counterfeits eroding the international order?
Those seem like a weird example to hold up as a success — that high trust spot checking system is failing in the face of trying to integrate with a low trust actor and is tearing down international trade with it.
Sorry, that was precisely my point. Commodities depend on their fungibility: that wheat is all durum and has an impurity level below X; the sulphur level of that crude oil is between Y and Z, and so on. Plus that the seller will deliver per the contract
There's a game theory argument that the system is somewhat self-managing; though you could defect in any single transaction your reputation would suffer and it wouldn't be worth it.
Perhaps it's a good counterexample because of its size: everybody purchasing directly in the commodities market (i.e. people who take delivery) can afford to have one bad batch because their volume is so high. But still, that depends on some degree of gatekeeping on the input side.
Indeed, and good food for thought. The fungibility is a feature both of these products being commodities in general, and of their quality being measurable. When measuring quality is cheap and easy, the risks for a defector are high.
When measuring quality is expensive and/or difficult, the risks for a defector are lower, and the defector's incentives may therefore be comparably greater.
I've spent a few years in a couple of bulk commodities, and I'm sorry, but your thought about commodity markets is simply not true in my experience. There are entire webs of institutions and mechanisms that make sure people do not defraud each other.
Some keywords - look into Letters of Credit, Bills of Lading, Certificates of Origin, INCOTERMS, and the requirements to make these work (such as inspection certificates from independent third-party organisations like SGS or CIQ). Bulk commodities can be sampled, tested and certified as many as 4-8 times in between buyer and seller, on a dozen different criteria.
Bulk commodity trading happens in an intrinsically low trust environment - it is frequently arms-length, cross-border, multiparty, for millions of dollars per transaction, and with a crazy number of different risks that have to be mitigated. The incentives to defect and come away millions richer are huge. And much of the system was developed for a time before the Internet.
While this is a noble sentiment, the structure and transaction costs are absolutely essential for the whole thing to work.
Large systems aren’t inherently low-trust though. For example dealing with the same point of contact. Like your local GP in the NHS. I definitely remember home visits from our GP as a kid. So within a generation. Or with our kids family nurse that did all the pre and post checkups for both children.
Everyone works with the same or slowly changing set of subordinates below them (patients in the case of an NHS physician) and same handler above them so despite the organization being big and faceless everyone has a long term high trust relationship with the people directly above and below them.
This sounds interesting and Google is not coming up with useful leads - would you be able to point me to more information on the "Algerian Resistance" model you describe?
Read up on the ANLF. The ANLF structured their organization such that nobody had good knowledge of the organization except the portion of the org chart immediately above and below them. This annoyed the French because they would capture the grunts and it was a hell of a lot of work to work their way up to knowing who the leaders were since you'd need an unbroken chain of N people willing to narc on their boss. This is made harder because people are more likely to narc on their boss's boss who they don't really know vs their boss who they have a hack of a working relationship with but that depends on knowing who your boss's boss is. Be advised that I glossed over some details in my original comment.
This is why I've never much loved blockchain on a conceptual level.
Even if you can make existing transactions trustless, you need more and more new transactions to negotiate the boundary between the physical world and the data on the blockchain.
One thing I took away from the beginning of Matt Ridley's book Rational Optimism is that with trust, commerce is unlimited.
And here we are stuck in this world where the computer in your pocket is untrustworthy, and you can't tell a useful benign app from an app trying to upload your life.
I strongly disagree with your take on that survey. For one, it only mentions switching, not removing something (like social media) from your life. I have not switched providers because I found one that was more private. I have deleted facebook.
To be fair on those 68% who "don't care" they can't tell if they are using something that cares about their privacy or not.
Imagine two options of (1) an organisation who claims to do the right things and (2) an organisation who makes no claims. Picking either option could be a rational response for someone who cares about privacy. Any strategy has to account for the existence of liers/incompetents who claim to do something then don't.
To make privacy conscious decisions requires monitoring many information channels and having a nuanced understanding of the history and motivations of the people involved. That is too hard to do for most rational people. They need clearer support outlining what they are meant to be doing than what they get.
Your is probably an unpopular one, but I'd guess because of questions like "Who are these people that cared about privacy, were willing to switch and did actually switch, but don't realize that their phones might even be trying to upload their lives?" Unless you meant that the results of that survey showing 32% of people cared enough that they actually did something about it, in which case, that's not really an opinion. Just a fact that a very small survey (out of the people who use services/companies that can be switched from, if they cared enough to do so) includes a segment that seems to represent "people [that] care enough about privacy to switch to a service that preserves it."
What this survey does not try to establish is what percent of people "cared" and are "willing", but found it not worthwhile to switch, for reasons such as "this is how I communicate with my friends and I cannot convince them to switch" or decided it just wasn't worth it due to other costs.
For me, WhatsApp comes to mind, but I'm guessing it's a somewhat common problem. I personally do NOT want to use WhatsApp, but I have a group of friends that will not switch and especially with Covid, I do not want to lose those connections. Replace "group of friends" with <community> and WhatsApp with <whatever app>.
Not sure what you even meant by "This is not the source of mistrust". m463 pointed out a couple of things, neither of which was a _source_ of mistrust.
> only 32% [0] of people care enough about privacy to switch to a service that preserves it
This statistic reflects my unscientific view also.
I am very privacy conscious (I still have a gmail account but that's for job hunting only!) but I know few others that are, however, if these others experienced something detrimental as a result of giving away their privacy then I suspect that 32% figure would increase... but until that happens, people won't care.
Protecting your privacy online these days is time-consuming and, if I'm honest, exhausting: it's a constant arms race between stopping evermore intrusive code from data mining the hell out of me and just being able to use things without constantly analysing them to ensure they're legit.
In fact, yesterday I went to the eff site [0] to see how much data my browser was giving away and even though I have it locked down (I still have js) I was unique anyway...
I've asked myself in the days when I feel like just giving in "what is the danger from <shady company> knowing all this stuff about me?"... And, in all honesty, I haven't come up with an answer that would satisfy that 68%.
One thing of note is that communities that can rely on trust and thus have lower transactional cost overhead should be able to out-compete those that can't rely on trust. An example of this is with the Hasidic jews in NY's diamond district. This is something that Thomas Sowell touches on in a few of his books.
EDIT: Found my note
> What economist William Easterly has called “the radius of trust” varies greatly from group to group and from country to country. Within groups like the Marwaris of India, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, or Hasidic Jews in New York’s diamond industry, transactions involving substantial sums of money can take place without written agreements or recourse to the legal system, giving these groups competitive advantage over other members of their respective societies who cannot safely engage in similar low-cost ways of doing business. Whole nations likewise differ in the levels of honesty. Bicycles can be left parked without locks in Tokyo but doing so in many other countries would be a virtual guarantee that they would be stolen. [1]
Putnam also recently published "The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again" which takes the ideas of "Bowling Alone" and applies them to the Progress Studies related history/analysis.
Cost to whom? Imagine all the lost revenue if people would have a rational basis to trust each other more. Less transactions due to more informal exchanges must mean lost revenue to someone.
I guess it means less work for lawyers. The sarcastic reply is that lawyers don't need more money. The more serious reply is that the work a lawyer does doesn't increase the "value output" (I don't know the formal term) the same way that an engineer or researcher or teacher does. A lawyer, like an economist, helps grease the transactions of a society, but if society is already greased, the lawyer could be doing something directly "useful".
Inefficiencies present a net cost to society. In low trust environments, you see more generalism (fewer people to trust) and more nepotism (there's a social cost to cheating family members, so family members can be more trusted).
To make it short : Money and time lost due this lack of trust could be allocated to more valuable endeavor, such as pretty much anything.
Therefore it is better for society to solve this issue, even if it means some specific people that were making money out of it beforehand will not be able to anymore.
Part of the problem is that in, say, 5 years, you won't know who you meet was a weirdo anti-masker who you don't trust not to endanger the people around them. Nowadays it's quite easy to avoid these people, but once the current crisis abates they will go back to being visually indistinguishable.
(unrelated, but the cost of zero-trust can be measured quite directly by looking at the cost of making a Bitcoin transaction vs almost any other kind)
Just because someone doesn't agree with your view of the world doesn't automatically make them untrustworthy. From your perspective, maybe lives are more important than freedoms and you are willing to limit some freedoms temporarily or permanently if it means saving more lives. From someone else's perspective, maybe freedom is more important than lives, and they are willing to let some people (including themselves) die in order to avoid temporary or permanent limits on existing freedoms.
I think the point of the article is that if you suppress your instinct to mistrust people who think differently than you, your community will avoid incurring the social and economic costs that would otherwise accumulate.
Other people not wearing a mask makes me less safe. I don't know why I would want to trust such people. If they can't even take a basic precaution during a deadly pandemic then their judgement seems dangerously impaired. I don't trust them because I don't think they're trustworthy.
Even if masks didn't work, stubborn refusal to wear them is nearly as bad- people should wear the even if they are skeptical on the effectiveness just in case they do work, because doing small things to possibly help your neighbors is part of the social contract.
I'm not talking about forcing people to wear masks, I'm talking about not trusting the people who don't voluntarily wear masks.
But where does it end? People not wearing gas masks makes you less safe. People leaving their homes at all makes you less safe. A certain amount of risk is necessary if you're going to get out of your bed in the morning.
What most people (including me) do is this: we follow the law (in almost all cases) and we use our own subjective judgements to determine how to act besides that. This gets tricky because even if none of us breaks the law, our subjective judgements often differ. Some examples:
1. The law where I live says I need to wear a mask inside public places/stores, which I do happily.
2. I wear a mask when I'm outside and there's lots of people around, because according to my subjective judgement, this makes sense (the law does not require this).
3. I don't wear a mask when I'm outside and there aren't a lot of people around.
4. I don't wear a mask when I'm running along a trail.
5. I don't eat-in at restaurants, even though the law allows maskless, indoor dining.
What I find wrong about your comment is that you seem to be holding people accountable for not sharing the same subjective judgements as you. If I see people dining, maskless, inside a restaurant, I think "well, I wouldn't do that, but other people disagree". I don't categorize them as untrustworthy, bad people.
I'm not wearing a mask when I am not within breath distance of anyone either. That's not what I'm talking about.
Sometimes I am as charitable as you toward people who make dumb choices. Sometimes I am much less so, because those choices are helping fuck this all up for the rest of us. People having terrible judgement is, unfortunately, a good reason not to trust them as much as you otherwise would.
I understand your point of view and I see similar sentiments everywhere. Let me just deposit one thought:
Basically all people hate being lied to, or to feel manipulated or controlled.
A lot of people on the anti-mask train were totally on board for the '2 week lockdown' to flatten the curve. Those same people then saw their government officials repeatedly lie to them ("masks don't work!" ~ "Herd Immunity @ X%", etc), the media painted the picture of airborne ebola, and then those same politicians went out and violated their own lockdown orders.
Meanwhile, their local economy is destroyed and they or people they care about are suffering/struggling. And for those that take a more global view of things, there is some [0,1]evidence that supply chain disruption is killing more people than Covid itself.
It's easy to feel like those people are complete idiots and ruining it for everyone else. It's much harder, but much more valuable, to focus on solutions to the underlying problem. Ultimately, we need to restore trust in our institutions before we can begin to repair the divide.
and to add to this point, the folks advocating for usage of masks for all were not advocating to compensate the loss of income for the lockdowns.
this immediately created 2 classes -- folks who will get their salaries from their professions inspite of the lockdowns and those who won't and would be left to suffer
Related to this, one of my major concerns for 2021 and beyond is how much money we're [0]printing and the effect that will have on people's purchasing power. Couple that with the fact that a huge portion of small businesses in the US are [1]closed forever, many with severe financial repercussions for the owners (who are totally average people, not the upper class many think of when 'business owner' gets used as a term).
In short, I think we're going to be in for massive long-term unemployment (and underemployment) coupled with inflation beyond what anyone living today in the US has experienced. I'm not too confident about the state of this nation's finances
> Other people not wearing a mask makes me less safe
Yes, but that's been true for a long time, even before covid. I'm betting you didn't mistrust non-mask-wearers pre-covid even though I'm sure several millions have died in the US alone since early 1920s because people with the flu or other contagious diseases didn't wear a mask and went to work sick, etc. You just didn't notice because it happened at a rate that didn't overload hospitals.
> If they can't even take a basic precaution during a deadly pandemic then their judgement seems dangerously impaired.
Well imagine all of your news sources downplay covid and even when you get it yourself it's not as bad as the hysteria led you to believe - just some mild flulike symptoms and loss of smell and taste. You start to mistrust all of the zealots forcing you destroy the economy^, handicap an entire generation of students, destroy the mental wellbeing of many millions, in order to extend the lives of the elderly and immunocompromised by a few years. It's hard to put the blame 100% on the anti-masker. Plus, just because someone isn't wearing a mask doesn't automatically make them an anti-masker. I don't wear a mask when social distancing is possible, for example (like when going on runs).
^ Yes I know stock market is at all time high right now, but you can't just keep running an economy on printed money. If you aren't actually producing, soon all that paper you've printed will become a lot less valuable ("inflation") and the bubble will burst and you'll see what a real crisis looks like.
> You start to mistrust all of the zealots forcing you destroy the economy^, handicap an entire generation of students, destroy the mental wellbeing of many millions, in order to extend the lives of the elderly and immunocompromised by a few years
Wearing a mask doesn't destroy the economy or hurt students. It's the cheapest possible intervention. If wearing a mask helps, it actually sucks the wind out of the sails of people who want draconian lockdowns. People with a libertarian bent should be even more pro-masks, since it's very nearly the only thing that everyone can do in their personal lives to try stave off massive government interventions.
If people can't mentally separate masks from the other interventions then that seems like a problem in itself.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills whenever people bring up the economy with COVID responses. The virus doesn't and cannot care about the economy or holidays, or any other irrelvancy brought up for arguments. Not to mention the obvious - sick people and people trying to avoid being sick aren't good for the economy.
It is just such blatant illogic you would expect from primary schoolers and not adults with college degrees and sought after positions to use. Like declaring "but there is a picnic scheduled today!" and proceeding to go and hold a picnic in the middle of a record breaking forest fire.
> The virus doesn't and cannot care about the economy or holidays, or any other irrelevancy brought up for arguments
This is an overly simplistic view. The virus doesn't care, but policy makers should care, because if you optimize too much for saving lives from the virus at the cost of everything else, you might find the cure is worse than the disease.
Say you are a policymaker and a new disease emerges that will kill 1% of the population if left unchecked over time, mainly in the elderly. Also say that draconian control measures will cause suicide rate, unemployment, and mental health cases to go up 1% for every day they are in effect, mainly in young people.
What's your policy? Are you going to do everything you can to save the elderly at the expense of the youth? Or are you going to make sure the youth are good at the expense of the elderly? Something else entirely? As far as I can tell in the US, we are optimizing for saving the elderly and throwing everyone else under the bus in pursuit of that goal. We can expect to see a very large increase in suicides, unemployment, and mental health issues above and beyond what we saw in 2020 (including substance abuse) in coming months if we stay the course.
> Well imagine all of your news sources downplay covid and even when you get it yourself it's not as bad as the hysteria led you to believe - just some mild flulike symptoms and loss of smell and taste. You start to mistrust all of the zealots...
If you'd rather believe Fox News than scientists who are telling you this is much worse than the flu, then while you might not be a bad person, you've earned my mistrust.
You can drop your mask if you want, but you can't really blame the OP for not trusting you.
> If you'd rather believe Fox News than scientists who are telling you this is much worse than the flu...
Scientists say it is much worse than the flu. For the vast majority who actually experience the disease, it is not much worse than the flu. Thus, people start to mistrust the science because there's a disparity between the statistics on paper and what people actually experience in reality. I think most people understand now that covid is basically like the flu 99% of the time, and much worse than the flu for a tiny subset (and for the most part, the tiny subset can self-identify).
I dunno. It's worse than flu for more than 1%, about 1% die from it. A much larger proportion need to be hospitalized than from flu in a normal flu season.
Yes, you are right, it would have to be higher than 1%, but I think it would still be a minority. I searched around a bit, but it was super hard to find hard numbers. The closest I found was this[0] which seems to suggest that hospitalization rate of covid positive whites (including asians) is around 1%, but closer to 3-4% for other groups like blacks and latinos. I could be reading the charts wrong though.
> Scientists say it is much worse than the flu. For the vast majority who actually experience the disease, it is not much worse than the flu. Thus, people start to mistrust the science ...
You're probably right: it's hard to understand the difference between statistical evidence and anecdotes. On the other hand, a lot of other people who don't experience COVID still seem to be able to separate their own lack of statistical knowledge from the ability to trust scientists. I think these mask deniers are mistrusting scientists for some other reason.
I finally met an anti-masker in person and it was not at all like I expected. I was at the playground and my kids started playing with this hippie mom's kids. We started talking about what a weird time it is to be a kid. We ended up making a playdate for the kids and she mentioned she does not wear masks because of some spiritual reasons. I was surprised because I thought that anti maskers were all right leaning. I told her no mask is fine we can just do our playdate outside somewheres. I am a conservative atheist hunter and think it is good for my kids to be able to play with spiritual hippie vegan kids.
Anyway I guess my point is life is better if you judge people on their individual merits rather than group membership.
I'd worry that their kids wouldn't be up to date on their vaccines. You really don't want measles.
It's a low risk, obviously, especially if you are up to date. But as much as I like hippy vegans (not being sarcastic!) I would still worry they are walking around as potential measles incubators. If they have religious objections to wearing a piece of cloth over their face they probably aren't too excited about vaccines.
It's way down the list of things to worry about nowadays, obviously. But still.
What's this obsession of anti-anti-vax with measles? When I was on my national Reddit sub, it would come up 40 times a year.
When I was a kid, everyone was catching it. That was just one of those diseases you catch once and then you are done with it.
It is so low-risk that doctors didn't even declare the cases as they were supposed to be. They just observed them in case it would turn bad. Watching well and treating the few difficult case well made it so that there was just around 5 deaths a year, amongst cohorts of 800.000 who almost all caught it. At the scale of my department, that would be one letal case every 80 years... Outdoor leisure kill more in half a week here, as it was noticeable after lockdown (as we were very lucky with Covid, there were more outdoor leisure related death in 4 days of reopening than Covid related death from 9 months of first wave. NB: it was unfortunately different with second wave)
In the decade immediately before the measles vaccine was distributed in the US, an average of 495 deaths per year and 1000 people severly disabled (1). In modern per-capita US terms, that would be like 866 deaths (mostly children) and 1750 disabled. While that's not much compared to COVID, it is about 1/6 as many deaths as polio in its worst year in the US, and that was a widely feared virus.
The Measles vaccine is also a proxy for other behavior. Minimally, in the US, folks that aren't innoculated for measles probably aren't innoculated for mumps or rubella (as MMR is one vaccine), or other important vaccines altogether.
There is also the sick irony (no pun intended). The anti-vaxers are preventing a phase out of a vaccine by their actions. If measles got nationally eradicated or better yet internationally (a slow laborious process sadly) - it would mean fewer vaccines because it did its job perfectly.
> I was surprised because I thought that anti maskers were all right leaning.
It depends on places. In the area I live, it is also the neo-hippie/neo-rural/green/alternative-left who are anti-mask. But that's very localised, we happen to have a huge proportion of those various tendencies, that other people roughly group together and call with the word for 'hairy' in the local dialect :-), and less right and far-right people than elsewhere.
I agree with your conclusions on when one should wear a mask. I disagree with your conclusions about the intelligence, reasoning ability, or basic humanity of anti-maskers.
If you're someone who is flooded with reports of scientists waffling, of problematic reasons why people want you to wear masks, of health officials adjusting the rules du jour independent of defensible rationalizations, of higher-ups enforcing rules that they do not themselves follow, etc., and are NOT exposed to the (imho correct) arguments as to why mask-wearing is necessary and important... why wouldn't you conclude that it's a scam?
None of the conclusions about mask wearing can be made with 100% certainty. There really is a lot of bullshit going around on all sides. Even a fairly weak selection filter is enough to make perfectly rational actors come to opposite conclusions.
Our society is based on the implicit assumption that we all see more or less the same thing, so we can depend on (trust) that our sense of "normal" is shared, at least to some degree.
That assumption no longer holds. (Or rather, it holds for far fewer topics than it used to.)
shared values is an important part of trust though. suppose I'm an executive and I'm trying to hire a more diverse group of employees. one of my hiring managers says they're happy to apply whatever criteria I ask for, but they fundamentally don't believe diversity is important. I'm going to have a hard time trusting this person to do what I want.
shared values is an important part of trust though
That's actually a pretty big mistake society has made. You emphatically don't need to share values with someone to get along with them or work with them or trust them.
Focusing on values instead of goals and behaviors creates the environment of mistrust, because you don't know when someone is going to decide you don't share their values strongly enough and try to purge you. It also creates an environment where the people you want least are most willing to lie to fit in, and it gives them a weapon to use to push out anyone they don't like by amping up the values rhetoric.
If you want to build a club of terrified pretenders, filter by and focus on values. If you want to get something done and build an environment of trust, focus on shared goals, behaviors, and outcomes, and learn how to disagree and move on where consensus can't be reached.
Very insightful comment, reminds me 1984's Two Minutes Hate[0] where Winston is pretending to go along with the wailing and gnashing of teeth in order to not be discovered that he has different values. Your comment should be a top-level comment in some form, IMO.
> You emphatically don't need to share values with someone to get along with them or work with them or trust them.
I guess it depends what "trust" means to you. to me it often means something like "I can expect this person to make the same (or similar) decision I would in situation X, therefore I do not need to watch them as closely". some values can be irrelevant in certain contexts. if I'm a communist and my coworker is an ancap, it probably doesn't affect our ability to work together on a software project. but if I'm very risk averse (in an engineering sense) and my coworker has a "move fast and break things" mindset, I am going to have to pay a lot more attention to their code reviews.
I think that's a fair point. In the case of a risk tolerance mismatch, you can work out shared criteria, scoped to the initial disagreement, for how to collaborate.
I'd also suggest that one of the reasons we are encouraged to seek diversity is because we benefit from having people around us who wouldn't make the same decisions we would make in every situation.
If I am reading between the lines correctly, it sounds like predictability is what you expect shared values to provide. I think a shared vision is more important than shared values in this case. You can still predict that with which you disagree, if you communicate mutual expectations for how to scope disagreement within collaboration.
> From someone else's perspective, maybe freedom is more important than lives, and they are willing to let some people (including themselves) die in order to avoid temporary or permanent limits on existing freedoms.
> (including themselves)
Including others, which is against any serious code of ethics.
> From your perspective, maybe lives are more important than freedoms and you are willing to limit some freedoms temporarily or permanently if it means saving more lives.
It's extremely difficult for me to imagine a more fallacious argument than this.
The closest I can come is imagining a mass movement against DUI checkpoints by people who refuse to show their license, but who purposely get drunk before speeding through the checkpoint.
It is not only philosophically consistent to protest mask laws while at the same time wearing a mask during this pandemic-- it's ethically required. The fact that you don't seem to realize you've hard-coupled a defense of freedom with wanton irresponsibility is legitimately worrisome. It reeks of the success of online filter bubbles dividing consumers into the most destructive two poles of potential behavior/opinion.
Luckily, in my own community, talking in person to other humans, I don't witness anything like these two poles. Rather, I see a lot of pandemic fatigue, results of shit messaging from the government, some disinformation, and the occasional asshole who must be addicted to a political feed like a degenerate gambler in Vegas.
Honestly, for most people it's not going to matter what side of the political spectrum they were on. Nearly everyone has made at least one critical safety mistake, failing to protect themselves or their loved ones. At least in the U.S., noses peeking out from masks is a bi-partisan issue. High ground is a luxury of social media self-delusion.
Note-- in the time it took me to click reload in my browser, somebody had upvoted this post.
@dang-- what the hell? There's no way somebody read this whole comment in that amount of time.
Is it just a given that bots can freely upvote/downvote and attempt to screw with the flow of messages on here?
I honestly cannot understand how HN has convinced a coterie of tinkerers and reverse engineers not to discuss the system that sorts and rates their own expressions of ideas.
It could be that someone read just the first line of your comment, realized it jived with their view, and upvoted before continuing on and finishing reading the rest of your comment. If HN stores timestamps of upvotes in the backend we could confirm (i.e. upvoting within milliseconds of submission = bot)
What views are the real question. If they have by my standards horrible tastes certainly. If they deny that hugging you while they are on fire will burn you, that juggling loaded guns is dangerous, or view you as subhumans to be exploited not distrusting them is frankly dangerously stupid.
Looking at costs alone without context is a bad idea here as it is for beancounters.
I have been wrong about other issues in the past and it's with this frame of mind that think of these people. While I vehemently disagree with these anti-maskers, I also don't want to label them as "unter-menschen" forever. Maybe it's a good thing that living with people you disagree with, is a part of the social contract.
"wearing a mask during a deadly pandemic" is a really simple thing to do to demonstrate willingness to sign on to a social compact. Fortunately, almost everyone I see in my neighborhood does. I generally feel positively towards my actual neighbors. But based on conversations with friends elsewhere, this is not universally true.
I don't know if I could ever move to an area that didn't have high mask compliance during all this.
It's like living with someone who doesn't think playing with matches is a stupid risk to take. One day the house might burn down. It would be safer to live alone, or with people with similar attitudes to not playing with fire.
The words could be changed from "sign on to a social compact" to "sign on to this particular social compact" to be more accurate because chances are good that folks who don't wear masks probably ascribe to any number of other social compacts. Living in a diverse, heterogenous society means living within a variety of social compacts formed from differing cultural perspectives and different individual risk evaluations.
If one would not live in a place without high mask compliance, why would one live in a place without 100% mask compliance? If not 100%, what is the number? Why stop at mask compliance?
The problem is that we have to share the same air at the laundromat and the grocery.
I also wouldn't want to live somewhere with a high rate of drunk driving for similar reasons. Someone else's cultural comfort with getting behind the wheel while sloshed puts me at risk because we unavoidably share the same physical space.
What are you and other people doing going to the laundromat, grocery and drink driving? That's nuts in the middle of a pandemic--how are those places even available for walk-in business? Since I don't commonly leave my house I had no idea people were out there "unavoidably" sharing physical space. No wonder the pandemic isn't contained, its full of people with unavoidabilities.
In 5 years you might not be able to tell who supported totalitarian lockdowns, forcing healthy people to sacrifice their physical and mental health, their jobs, etc in order to keep the wealthy retired and the weak from having to experience hardship.
You won't know who you can't trust to not be a fascist who would gladly see your life ruined for going outside alone, because it's "against the lockdown rules".
That is, you won't be able to tell who is someone like you.
Get it?
Your own words are taking what's left of trust, pissing all over it, covering it in petrol, and setting it on fire, then saying "shame that those other guys ruined everything".
I'm talking about people choosing not to wear masks, that's all. Wearing a mask hurts nobody, and it probably helps your neighbors.
(incidentally, social cohesion is what makes draconian lockdowns less justifiable. If everyone chooses to social distance and wear a mask when asked to by competent public health bodies, you can go a long way toward getting a handle on this thing. It's only when social cohesion is at a low ebb that the political drive for enforcing it with police powers kicks in)
I think that having "searchable history" of every individual is precisely one of the negative contributions of social networks to social cohesion.
Everyone, or almost everyone, has some objectionable material or behavior in their past, and if you start judging people on the worst they ever did, you will come to distrust everyone.
Devil's advocate - couldn't it have the opposite effect as well for cohesion? In absense of facts speculation can run rampant and the worst assumed. There is a difference between knowing someone is an asshole and thinking they might be a pedophile. Paranoia aside human heurestics can get it very wrong - the teens with the new dark music are evil criminals while the pastor is trustworthy except the teens are lawful and open minded towards things which don't harm others but have morbid tastes. Meanwhile the pastor is a serial sex offender.
That part at the end in parenthesis is just completely wrong. The cost of a simple trustless transaction can be much lower. Bitcoin is extremely inefficient compared to the theoretical cost.
This applies to the workplace too, not just society at large. That's why if I'm ever at a company where I feel like I am mistrusted, or I mistrust the people I work with, I do what I can to leave. Not only is it an unpleasant environment to work in, but it feels predictive of failure.
Right, you can't directly measure productivity in many jobs, so proxies for productivity are used, and in low trust environments, those proxies are the sole source of truth, which makes gaming them more important than actually being productive.
> those proxies are the sole source of truth, which makes gaming them more important than actually being productive.
Reminds me of a short story I read, which I can't find now. The gist of it was about this person reading a memo or something at work on their computer, and the person wasn't actually reading it, they were just scrolling down the page and occasionally scrolling back up to pretend to re-read paragraphs because they knew the monitoring software flags such behavior as a positive indicator that the reader has increased comprehension of the memo.
It's not a short story, but maybe you're remembering a bit from "Snow Crash"?
> Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes... Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of. I didn't know it was part of a book, I think I originally read this paragraph on someone's blog. Thanks for sharing the original source!
I'm reading this article while waiting for one of the two people with write access to run my db migration, as developers don't get write access to the database in this company. Is this common?
Many companies do not provide read access to application databases either, without explicit consent via well-defined process. There are many compliance-related reasons why this is implemented, one of which may be the protection of your customers' financial performance data.
The better way is for nobody to have direct write access to the database, but instead for automated tools to do things like that, using reviewed code and config and writing an audit log of actions taken. The trust thing is part of the reason this is a good idea, but it's mostly a good idea to avoid good-faith accidents. I think it is common for companies that haven't yet had time to build those automated tools to delegate their work to senior, very trusted, engineers. But that's not a good solution, it's just more expedient, and a bit better than the database being world-writable, which is a bad solution.
I'm in a small company in that position, what's also helped is wrapping UPDATE statements in a transaction with a verification SELECT statement to make sure everything worked ok, then committing the transaction.
Excluding sole traders and cooperatives (and sometimes even including those, as the easiest way to lose friends is said to be to go into business together), it is entirely natural for the company and coworkers not to trust each other, not fully, as the goals and incentives of the company are not the same as goals and incentives of the employees. Your goal isn't likely to be to subordinate your life entirely to what the company wants, in a cult-like manner, with no regard for any other priorities like family, friends or personal growth - thus at the very least the kernel of mistrust always remains.
Some companies just manage to mask it better or tone it down to a level that if felt to be acceptable.
While true for many (the majority, even), it's not impossible for company-employee relationships to be symbiotic as well, not every company is like you describe.
The framing of this piece itself is a symptom of the problem. Everything, including our social relationships apparently have to be "capital" that make us "productive." This amoral, economistic view of human life is what got us into this mess in the first place. Why would people trust each other in a system that essentially rewards sociopathy, avarice, greed, and deception? It's telling that they can't provide a better prescription than "we should just trust each other more."
I wonder if you're unfairly conflating the term "social capital" with the general caustic meanness of economic "capitalism". Putnam is a political scientist, not an economist.
I honestly think that most of the relentless unpleasantness of capitalism doesn't come from capital itself, it comes from competition and conflict over scarce resources. It's this conflict between different pools of capital which makes capitalism relentless and exhausting, and the fact that such conflicts are often won by the side which starts with more for unrelated reasons which makes capitalism unfair and often of very questionable morality. I think it's relevant to the article to point out that I this model, all of these conflicts are essentially low trust environments since the actors have by definition opposing goals.
But "social capital" doesn't have to be about conflict. Let's say I am fortunate enough to have a friendly relationship with my next door neighbors. To give a cliched example, let's say I want to bake a cake and am running low on sugar. Being able to ask them allows me to finish my task without stopping everything to run to the store. Likewise, if they need to leave town for an emergency, they can call me to check on their place or walk their dog.
These examples don't involve any conflict, so it's not clear who's losing out on any of them*? The social capital of our friendship definitely made us more productive, but who wouldn't want that? This isn't about pleasing some kind of corporate manager and churning out more widgets, it's just about personal quality of life, so what's left for there to be a problem with the idea of social capital?
* I suppose if we're being extreme then we could say that the sugar providers and grocery store lost in the first exchange by my ability to avoid buying another bag. I'm not sure this is entirely true, though, since I'm very likely to buy more sugar on my next trip anyhow. They've lost out on the urgency perhaps, but as a side note I believe that urgency is the core of the other worst aspects and cruelty of commercial capitalism; urgency sometimes forces incredibly wasteful behavior in the name of "winning the race" against a competitor or many other kinds of artificial deadlines, etc. (Anyhow I digress...)
> Even if we’re not engaged with other people on a social or civic level, we still have to transact with them on an economic one. We still have to walk along the same streets, send our children to the same schools, and spend afternoons in the same parks.
No we don't. Kids are driven everywhere, meaning that there is a (locked) door between them and The Others, the richer the neighborhood the richer the schools and the less you have to put them together with poor kids.
With distance learning you don't even have to worry about the other kids in the class, or the commute.
This rings extremely true for me. I live in Norway, which in my experience is significantly more trusting than most other places, and it's wonderful. We do have other transaction costs though, like a fear of "bothering" each other. Different problem, similar effect.
At a much smaller scale, though. After living most of my life in Brazil, I still bristle at how stuff happens here in the US, with much less papertrail than I'm used to because people often trust the systems and people in place.
When I bought a home I just wired the down payment, didn't get anything other than the bank statement saying I had wired the money. In Brazil I'd get a paper proving they got it and stuff.
So while the fear of "bothering" is real, the fear of losing a considerable amount of money because the person on the other side is not trustworthy (and I'd say Brazilians in general assume no one is trustworthy) is worse in a much bigger scale. I'm not sure I'll ever be as carefree as americans but not having to care as much as I used to back in Brazil has been a huge boost for my mental health.
I’m feeling it in the other direction. I’ve been lucky to live a relatively carefree and unproblematic life in the US middle-class, until the last few years where I’ve attracted a well funded legal team to stalk everything I do and find faults. Now, I think living in a low trust society sounds great because the Boomers and other optimists in my life are starting to leave me alone. They don’t doubt my story, but it’s also beyond what they can process as real—former inmates and first generation Latin and Afro folk who I work with can fully comprehend the situation of being terrorized by lawyers and their “investigators.” Suddenly I am forced to be a low-trust person, and it’s not natural or pleasant... I’m mostly Scandinavian by blood, with a little of everything mixed in.
And that is amazingly important, never let that go away, when you can't even trust government officials to uphold your contracts, it's over. It's incredibly hard to get this back.
I think one (of many) factors propelling this trend is income inequality. Imagine you're in the grocery store checkout line with luxury foods and how uncomfortable it might be to make conversation with the clerk who may be working three jobs and trying to parent two children.
So we invented apps. Now we don't have to look up to hail a cab, we can look down at our phone. We don't even THINK about riding the bus (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/14/surprise-elon-musk-is...). We don't have to go into the store, we can have an Instacart employee leave them at our house without a trace that someone existed at all. We're stratifying into the Eloi and the Morlocks, but separated by the glass screen of a phone instead of layers of earth.
Income inequality isn't quite the spring-of-all-evils that it's being touted as. Although I think you are touching on some pressures and problems. Yes, it can be one of the factors in "othering" and can discourage commitment to a shared, common system, but I've been in lots of countries with low "inequality" that were far less trusting. True, it's apples/oranges comparison, but I'm not convinced that inequality is the source of our woes, but very likely amplifies it.
There's also room for causality the other way, here. If feel you have a lot in common with your compatriots, and generally trust them, then you are (I claim) more likely to support paying taxes to support those who are having a rough time. High trust can lead to lower inequality.
Conversely, if you already feel you have nothing in common with others, then why not vote (if you have everything) to give them nothing, or (if you have nothing) why not vote to seize their property and distribute it?
> True, it's apples/oranges comparison, but I'm not convinced that inequality is the source of our woes, but very likely amplifies it.
It’s not income inequality, it’s opportunity inequality. Which manifests itself as income (/wealth) inequality, so that’s the proxy most people use.
Once you lose the feeling of others being in your tribe and that they might also be interested in looking out for you, it’s very, very difficult to regain that. Even worse is once members of the tribe start assuming others are part of an enemy tribe.
I've spent a lot of years overseas, in third-world or developing countries, often torn by tribal or civil war, or other natural and man-made disasters. I have come to realize how foundational trust is in a functioning economy and self-governing society. We in G8 nations often don't see it, like fish not thinking about water. I've been extremely concerned with the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust. It's like watching people, on a boat at sea, tear up the hull for firewood... The irony is that the basic nature of people (the world over) really hasn't changed: people are msotly good and want to live in a healthy community. But culture, context, and experience can overrule those tendencies.
> I've been extremely concerned with the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust.
I assume you're referring to the neocons who lied us into the war in Iraq (and keep us there to this day), the Wall Street bankers & executives who created the 2008 financial crisis and the politicians who bailed them out at the people's expense, the military/intelligence and tech industry figures who set up a vast domestic mass spying infrastructure and then hounded the people who leaked it into hiding or prison, and the media apparatus which has run cover for all these sorts of things, right?
To me it often looks like a lot of what is described as "attacking trust" is actually just pointing out that it's already been worn down to a nub. We wouldn't have to deal with the emperor being naked if those darn troublemakers would just stop pointing out he's not wearing any clothes.
No, actually I'm referring to groups on the left _and_ right. While popularizing the attacking of shared society and our systems foundations did start with the counter-culture left in the 60s, it has certainly become a bipartisan effort in recent decades.
All the things I mentioned were entirely bipartisan affairs. In fact, we just witnessed the president who initiated the Iraq War feted and lauded by the press for his appearance at the inauguration of a new president from the "opposing" party who enthusiastically endorsed that war as a Senator.
The counterculture left is a very broad category, with some legitimate and organic elements mixed up with some very confused, self-indulgent, or aimlessly subversive ones. But it didn't fire the first shots in the attack on trust, not by a long shot.
> Did you vote for Donald Trump in the last election?
> I didn't vote. It's ironic: That's the one old journalism trope that I agree with, which is that if you vote, you psychologically become too connected to a politician. I prefer to just keep my distance.
They're a dying breed.
And it was never the case that journalists were 100% objective and unbiased. That's impossible. But there was a point in time when they at least made the attempt. Avoided the appearance of impropriety.
If you want people to trust you, try being trustworthy.
Glenn Greenwald's personal issues with (1) what he considers the appropriate relationship between journalism and "objectivity" and (2) his ability to maintain that relationship if he votes are not my problem.
There are dozens/hundreds/thousands of journalists around the world who are perfectly capable of reporting in a way that is useful, insightful, factual, while still voting in elections. I don't want journalists that I read to avoid the appearance of impropriety, I want them to tell me about the world in ways that I can't find out for myself. And I want them to vote.
I'm actually generally disgusted by meeting journalists who claim to not have opinions about the things they report on. I would hope that their opinions would be complex, because when you know enough about most things in the world, you realize that most things are pretty complicated and there generally aren't simple answers. But this BS of "I just try to report on what I find out, I don't really have an opinion" is, for me, a shorthand for "I'm too afraid of drawing conclusions about anything, which means I can't help my readers to do that either".
It's helpful to distinguish between journalists and historians.
Historians have the time and context to make judgments and draw conclusions.
Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour. The story may still be happening by the time the piece is published. You don't have all the information, so any opinion will inherently be misinformed.
Report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else.
It's possible that what we really need is a separate class of people in between the two. Reporters who provide facts on things that are actively happening, and commentators who provide opinion on things that have finished happening, e.g. a month later once the facts are better established and there has been time to do a thorough investigation, but not years or decades after the fact.
The problem is how to prevent the two from merging together and creating what we have now.
There are many, many journalists who work on stories that do not have "hour from now" deadlines.
People reporting on, for example: the move towards renewable energy supplies, the redistricting/closure of Chicago public schools over the last decade, gerrymandering processes in a half-dozen states ... in fact, I'd wager than the majority of things that journalists write about are not "hot news" at all.
You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.
> There are many, many journalists who work on stories that do not have "hour from now" deadlines.
But now it sounds like you're agreeing with me. So the ones who are reporting on stories that are still actively happening should hold off on the opinion, right?
> You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.
"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.
>Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour.
This is not the definition of a journalist.
>"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.
This is written as if reduction of journalistic opinion is the goal. I don't agree this is a goal. I'm not interested in a reduction of subjectivity in journalism. I'm interested in an increase in factual, expansive, multi-viewpoint reporting and analysis. If that comes with 3% journalistic opinion (whatever that means) or 83%, I'm fine with it.
What's not ok is journalistic subjectivity filling in for factual, expansive, multi-viewpoint reporting. However, there are plenty of journalists who are clearly capable of avoiding this issue.
>Report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else.
Exactly. But that doesn't mean that journalists (or anyone else, as that's important in many non-journalistic contexts) don't or shouldn't have opinions.
Rather the goal should be to report the facts without bias.
That may sound like hair-splitting, but it isn't. We're humans and we all have opinions, biases and ideas of our own.
But when it comes to reporting news or just facts/results (e.g., revenue figures, safety/efficacy testing results, etc.) the idea is to consciously set aside those biases.
Some do that better than others, which prsents an arbitrage opportunity that allows those with no desire or intention to report honestly/factually to insert blatantly false and/or misleading information.
Quality reporting of news and fact doesn't require a lack of opinion or bias about the subject at hand. Rather it requires the desire, willingness and ability to set aside those things in support of trustworthy reporting.
There are many reasons why that arbitrage opportunity exists, but the existence of opinions on the part of those reporting isn't a major contributor, IMHO.
As the old saw goes, "opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one."
The death spiral is caused by journalists putting their hands on the tiller.
If people are running around lying with partisan motivations, the most important thing you can have is a source of information trusted to be at least mostly objective. Someone to take the time to do the investigation and tell you what really happened in any given case, and carry good faith arguments from each side, not institutions that pick a side and defend them no matter what.
Because people lose trust in institutions with an obvious bias. And then what do you have? Twitter?
Journalists lying to viewers faces about peaceful protests while streets burned in the background has helped the death spiral more than you can imagine.
Glenn Greenwald is used to claim that point-of-view journalism is perfectly fine, as long as the point of view is factually grounded. He said it on multiple occasions. If you look at his work and tweet feed, it is strongly point of view driven and at times emotional (the prevailing emotion and perpetual outrage). He does not seem to like concrete politician, but it very very clear who his enemies are. Glenn Greenwald is not an example of someone who is not psychologically connected or avoids the appearance of impropriety.
Glenn Greenwald on Trump during Biden inauguration: "Trump left the White House about as weak, cucked, and submissive as it’s possible for a grown adult to scamper away." I really dont know what he wanted Trump to do, he was way more critical of Biden and democrats then of Trump last months. Leaving during innaguration without causing issues sounds like exactly what is expected.
But the very same day, he called the "chills" tween inappropriate, claimed that such tweet is overly emotional and equated that tweet with being on public tv. Glenn Greenwald is last person that has any grounds to pontificate about objectivity and bias.
It is the responsibility of each participant to criticize the status quo and those who have taken up responsibility and power, or else they keep building on brittle, hierarchical foundations until everything crashes down.
Yes, there are populists who spread political lies, insecure managers who default to micro-management, bureaucratic systems that slow everything down and disillusioned workers. Their common trait is mistrust: They often have been hurt by those that they should be trusting, they are not being heard and sometimes they see through the bullshit. The best case is that there is simply a lack of real communication, education and direct involvement, because that problem is solvable.
It is very simple: for trust to grow and stabilize, both parties need to care and invest in each other. There is no shortcut, no trick and no amount of marketing, propaganda or talk will get either side out of this. That means both sides need to admit their mistakes, be vulnerable, caring, hopeful and most importantly honest and transparent.
Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population.
(What is a non-special interest? Business interests.)
It is completely illogical to immediately conclude that people who are complaining and pointing out that things are not right are necessarily themselves the cause of all that strife. Maybe they were responding to antecedent causes?
> What is a non-special interest? Business interests.
Ironically, business interests are the original special interests that Adam Smith warned about: “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 9)
> Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population.
The problem is with the rhetoric. You don't need to daemonize the system to reform it. For example, AFAIU the Women's Suffrage movement didn't take that course. Nor did the early mid-century Civil Rights movement. Later in the century (e.g. with the Vietnam War protests) radical Leftist academic discourse went mainstream. Conservative academics and pundits started adopting similar rhetoric not long after (consider Reagan's anti-government slogan), which really went mainstream in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s with Gingrich's Republican Revolution campaigning strategies.
The rhetoric has essentially become nihilistic. People like Chomsky are as much to blame as anyone else. But you don't become someone as famous as Chomsky without radical, absolutist rhetoric. In that sense academia in general is to blame. Though, there were other dynamics, e.g. opinion journalism, that brought the academic discourse into the popular discourse.
I've seen an argument made that people fundamentally need to be able to trust that their government officials are honest (read: acting in good faith) and fundamentally competent. For a certain generation of people, Watergate eliminated any notion of the first, and the Iran-Contra affair blew away the second.
The real problem is that both of those needs are self-fulfilling: if people expect their politicians to be tacitly dishonest and incompetent, they're fine with electing openly dishonest and incompetent politicians because "at least they're open about it".
> I assume you're referring to the neocons who ...
Could you expand upon why? You mentioned your own perceptions on "attacking trust", but I didn't find much of that (or any assignment of blame to anyone) expressed in the parent comment.
The parent mentions "the efforts of sub-groups in our societies attacking the foundations of trust" so it seems pretty clear to me there's an assignment of blame to someone there. There's a bit of sarcasm in my reply in that, usually, when I see people doing that in regards to this topic, they're not referring to the sort ruinous, trust-eviscerating projects I cited, but rather to things like "misinformation" or "divisive rhetoric" which, when properly viewed in context, are more symptoms than causes.
> “Bret, I couldn't control them. They just started yelling at each other, and it would take me two minutes to say to them, 'stop' - to put my hand up to the camera like I did right there for them to get control of themselves," Luntz said
> I assume you're referring to the neocons who lied us into the war in Iraq (and keep us there to this day), the Wall Street bankers & executives who created the 2008...
Really? Why reach back, in the case of neocons, to the early aughts? We need somebody that many people trusted who abused that trust, or someone attacking the trustworthiness of trustworthy people. I'm pretty sure you can find examples just in the last year. These are probably the ones the OP had in mind.
This is what I've found incredibly healthy and liberating about less developed countries. Nobody believes politicians or assumes that government has their best interests in mind. That level of trust appears as a toxic mythology from my perspective.
So your assessment of the benefits of several hundred years of continuous political culture, along with a semi-continuous chain of protest movements, in "developed" countries is ... "meh" ??
Cynicism at this level does nothing but ensure that your worst take on government is what we actually get.
I thought that the parent made an interesting observation.
It's not cynicism, it a simple fact, backed up by history, of what happens when nobody trusts their government, when a the government of a people deviate too much from the interests of those people and making their lives more difficult instead of less, when all of that goes too far.
This can lead to reform. It can also lead to instability. It doesn't matter whether a country is "developed" or not. Developed countries can still have corrupt governments that are not responsive to their people, civil wars, etc. It can happen quick, or take a long time.
The stakes are high. Can enough of us agree on how to fix our problems? I don't know. I think that removing corporate and union money from politics would be a good first step, which is what most other countries already have done. Beyond that I wonder if we've grown our federal government too far past it's design specifications, expecting whoever is president this year to fix all our problems, leaving the other 49% of people very upset.
Perhaps it would help if I elaborated. I feel that you're filling in the blanks with some of your own projections.
The locals here openly accept money for voting. Politicians and bureaucrats are widely regarded as liars and cheats. The government's authority is checked by continuous protests. Government officials don't want to rock the boat or create further instability.
Similarly, the people have very little interest in politics. There's not constant bickering or hyperbolic demonization. Political fights don't permeate every sphere of life.
Everyone mostly stays in their own lane.
Yes, corruption is a problem here. Corruption is also a problem in the US. However the barrier to entry is higher. K street lobbyists don't come cheaply.
Yes, the government is ineffective. The question is, do the people want it to be effective? Even the private sphere is similarly ineffective. That's just a cultural norm, separate from the relationship to government.
Yet they are still developing countries. Maybe being a low trust environment isn't actually working in their favor and having a government you can trust to solve problems is good. A corollary: maybe working to sow distrust in the government doesn't promote the general welfare.
I think you have it backwards. First their government was untrustworthy, then they stopped trusting them. Not the other way around.
And this is not a problem of developing countries only! Developed countries have had their governments turn on them in a surprisingly short time. It can get to the point where a people can't change their government, the government being the institution with all the money, power, and guns.
You're being downvoted, but you hit the nail on the head.
I feel like for people of my vintage (born in the early 80s) the whole war on terror was extremely caustic to my generational cohort. It was a weird environment where every trusted institution in society lined-up in support of both wars, and then actively worked to sideline any debate and discussion. The Dixie Chicks got infamously cancelled for saying something completely milquetoast against the Bush and the war.
And just as we thought we were turning a corner on the War on Terror the financial crash of 2008 hit. Here, it was another highly regarded institution: finance. Young people might not remember this, but finance used to be the industry you would track into if you were a high achieving member of the intelligentsia. The industry was viewed as being staffed to the gills with the best-and-brightest and was afforded anodyne coverage from the establishment media. So naturally, when they imploded the country and then went on TV and blamed it on losers with mortgages[1], and proceeded to face zero real consequences because the justice system never bothered putting laws in place to protect regular people and felt such actions would "punish people for taking risks" (which as an aside: if you are just externalizing risk to 3rd parties you aren't actually "encouraging people to take risks")
It's a trope, but social trust has been eroded because people feel like there's basically "meritocratic" caste system in this country: if you go to the right school, get into the right industry, and make enough money you are granted a measure of impunity when you externalize harm that you quite frankly shouldn't have.
"Young people might not remember this, but finance used to be the industry you would track into if you were a high achieving member of the intelligentsia. The industry was viewed as being staffed to the gills with the best-and-brightest and was afforded anodyne coverage from the establishment media."
Speaking as someone who was born before the 80s, my perception is that you have misread this situation. The rise of finance was a consequence of the "greed is good" 80s, which meant that disproportionate rewards went to financial industries, which was both a cause and a consequence of the collapse of every other career open to the intelligentsia.
You see a similar situation on a smaller scale in the rise of Silicon Valley's start up culture, where that is seen as the most valid or only career choice in spite of asymptotically levelling benefits.
The demonstration that "the best and brightest" operating open loop without regulation leads to spectacular busts is left as an exercise to the reader.
You are correct, grab any of the excellent financial history books written by Frederick Lewis Allen. People assume things that have not existed very long have always existed.
Could it have been the other way around, where the rise of finance industries caused the "greed is good" 80s?
I've assume that Nixon taking the U.S. off the gold standard precipitated the growth in the finance industry, the government needs banks to grow money supply and debt, right?
"Greed is good" may have just been an add campaign designed to justify what was already happening, a frenzy of finance, consumerism, and debt that has not stopped yet.
>there's basically "meritocratic" caste system in this country: if you go to the right school, get into the right industry, and make enough money you are [ ... ]
This is a description of the absolute opposite of what "meritocratic" means.
No, "meritocracy" was brought into the common lexicon in the 1960s, specifically as an alternative to existing forms of social structure. A system where it did not matter which school you went to, in particular.
I do not read the GP as being satirical in their use, although the use of quotes makes it somewhat unclear.
No. dragonwriter is referencing the original history of the word. The author Michael Young who coined the word in 1958 was using it in his book to show everything wrong with a “merit” based system, as he explains here: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
"Michael Young popularised but did not coin the term “meritocracy”. That came in 1956, two years before his book, when in the magazine Socialist Commentary (to which Young contributed) the industrial sociologist Alan Fox put the word in quotation marks and defined it as “the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure”.
“When the word meritocracy made its first recorded appearance, in 1956 in the obscure British journal Socialist Commentary, it was a term of abuse, describing a ludicrously unequal state that surely no one would want to live in. Why, mused the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, would you want to give more prizes to the already prodigiously gifted? Instead, he argued, we should think about “cross-grading”: how to give those doing difficult or unattractive jobs more leisure time, and share out wealth more equitably so we all have a better quality of life and a happier society.” - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/merito...
“Jean Floud, Alan Fox, and Michael Young had a number of commonalities. Jean Floud taught at the London School of Economics while Michael Young was pursuing his PhD. Alan Fox was a member of that 1950s circle of left-leaning thinkers that included Jean Froud and Michael Young. Since all three are now dead, it's tough to say which amongst those three coined the word "meritocracy". Michael Young had already been evincing thoughts along the lines that led to his publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy since 1951. Most references go with Michael Young as the originator of the word. One last thing is certain: The term as coined by one of those three was anything but complimentary. It was instead quite derogatory.” - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/34390/did-the-t...
“the magazine Socialist Commentary (to which Young contributed) the industrial sociologist Alan Fox put the word in quotation marks and defined it as ‘the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure’.”.
1. Young says he created the word, and we have no reason to doubt that (as per Guardian link).
2. It was used in a negative sense in 1956
I think you are cherry-picking. If you wish to disagree with the generally held beliefs, then I think you should pick a better reference than one comment on an Internet page.
It's weird. You're right, but those are still seen as "meritocratic", and one could argue were meritocratic historically, at least in some degree, because in theory you get into the right school by scholastic merit, you get into the right industry by merit of your learned and demonstrated skillset and willingness to work in that industry, and you have money by merit of having created value from your hard work in industry.
In practice you get into the right schools because you belong to the right social circles, you get into the right industry because you come from the right schools, or are in the right social circles, and you make enough money because you got into the right schools and industry or inherited by virtue of being born into the right social circles...
When meritocracy was being pushed as a social goal in the 1960s, it related more to the question of who end up in positions of power, positions where they could make decisions that would affect society.
It was not necessarily about who was going to get rich. It was about no longer picking decision makers from the children of the existing decision makers.
It ran into two problems. The first was that we didn't really think through how we were going to establish merit in the first place. What's happened there is that we've adopted a bunch of stupid shorthand ("they graduated Harvard") that essentially is undifferentiated from what we were doing before we tried to build a meritocracy. We never found (maybe never tried to find) any way of establishing that a kid with a degree from a public university in Kansas was actually going to be better at national infrastructure planning than the one from Harvard (or not, for that matter).
The second problem is that the people who benefited from the meritocratic goal (I am one of them) have worked quite hard to pull up the ladders behind them (us). We've erected all sorts of barriers (but mostly cost) to ensure that only our descendants and direct beneficiaries get access to the social institutions that are now used to define "merit".
It's in air quotes for a reason - we label it meritocracy but there are clearly structural issues in place that preventing our society from being such a thing.
War on Drugs started it, but the War on Terror accelerated it. The GOP misinformation campaign is finishing it off...
Realistically, this is just a reversion to things in the early 20th century. The system of trust we've built up is only about 50 or 60 years old, and it's decayed as people took it for granted. Hopefully we're noticing it now.
My professor once talked about a Canadian small town he worked in for a while where people where people generally left their keys in the ignition when they went to the store.
I actually remember the weird feeling I got when I moved from my parents home (where we didn't lock our doors at night) to my first apartment (where I definitely did).
I remember when I lived in Barcelona and filled up my motorbike at a gas station. I went inside to pay and the lady was shocked that I left my helmet on the bike's seat for the 30 seconds I'd be away from it, and urged me to go get it lest it be snatched. Real eye-opener as well. Back in Switzerland I'd never give that another thought.
Not sure if you've read up on recent developments in Ethereum, but in case you haven't, check out proof of stake [1]. Basically, POS lets people put their money on the line for consensus rather than let people only participate in consensus by solving hard computation problems.
yeah... the 50s only look good if you ignore the massive racial, gender and environmental problems. US economy was great with the post-war boom, but there's a reason why there are so many TV shows about the rotten foundations of 50s glam.
No, there are TV shows about that because those who control the media want to make us think the 50's, which by all accounts were comparatively really good, really weren't good at all due to some hidden darkness below the surface. Because otherwise we might start to think double-plus bad thoughts about why so many things have turned to shit.
And I mean good for all races - in terms of real-world material and communal circumstances - as opposed to abstract "rights" (other peoples obligations) that mostly benefit a small upper middle class.
Except for the clothes (which aren't very different), that could be a picture of downtown Placerville today (well, not today because of the weather, but…) Or a million other places in today's USA.
> Where’s the broken glass? The needles, the poop?
The same place as the non-white people, who are disproportionately also the people cleaning up the places where the white people live without it.
> The stumbling drunks harassing the young women?
Most everywhere, including indoors. That was normal, accepted, unremarkable behavior.
Less censorship in the media. All that stuff was there in the 1950s as much as it is now, but you didn't see it anywhere in the media because it was not allowed by fiat of central authorities (from the Hayes office to the boardrooms of various publisher and broadcast networks). Heroin was not introduced in the 21st century and needles are not new but there are far fewer cigarette butts everywhere today. Cities stank of stale cigarettes and urine and car exhaust and if you were anywhere near water, dead fish.
A few photos that do not show the winos or the dog crap on every sidewalk do not prove there wasn't any. It just proves the existence of a few photos. Nobody, for example, picked up someone else's poop off the streets and brought it home in a little bag like they do today, and there were just as many dog owners in Manhattan in the 1950s as there are now. The signs required you to 'curb your dog' which meant leave it in the gutter, but it usually ended up on the sidewalk with all the gum, spit, old newspapers, and pigeon droppings. People went to jail for being homosexual or using birth control. Credit cards and consumer loans were illegal in the US until the 1960s so everything was cash-only and muggings were a real and present threat. Racism was overt, explicit, widespread, and rampant.
I think what you see of the 1950s is selection bias. Times are good now. Better than the 1950s because we stopped hiding stuff and lying to ourselves and have tried to make things better instead.
I would add that photography was quite expensive back then so I bet no one was wasting his film on making photos of awful places.
It would be like judging current reality by Instagram photos, so must be that everyone is fit and travels to beautiful destinations ... well homeless people don't put their photos on Instagram.
This is a surprising hot take in these times. I wholeheartedly disagree.
I understand what you're saying and yes I believe obviously we have more pictures/proof of existence (connected world) and yes there are a lot of areas where we have made progress but is "trust" in general better ?
I don't want to make this political but it is the elephant in the room right now. There is a whole side of a political party + media completely dismissing and grouping the whole other side in simplistic and alienating ways.
I'm not for either political side and I'm not a trump supporter. (Sadly I have to add this disclaimer, it's incredibly saddening)
I think someone else in this thread mentioned China as a high-trustful society. I think that goes to show that we're not talking about overall "better" and overall "accepting" but specifically "trust".
Maybe we find out that trust is in conflict with the other values we hold ? but to say that general trust is high now seems really naive.
I know it's an outlier but you don't need media selectiveness to show you San Fransico's homelessness problem , in fact I see more of that from word of mouth/first hand experience. I personally have seen signs of deteriorating trust in my "neighborhood". I don't want to put up strawmen but maybe it depends on how much your view is based on media vs what you see ? in which case where you live would probably have a huge impact in what your views on this are ?
I hate using that because I don't want to say that some people are too privileged to see this, imo obvious, change. As someone who was raised in a rough neighborhood (poor/high crime rate) and then moved out to a better place, I was shocked how my world view changed and I really thought the whole world had moved to a better place until I went back and realized there are still people in that "old world". It was incredibly shocking that I believed some of these things and now I'm vigilant and accepting that my world view (large part to where I live) tints the world.
I obviously don't know the solution and maybe "trust" is a value we have to lose to have some of our more progressive values or maybe it's just harder to incorporate those other values with trust.
I think it's fair to say that in the 50's communities were more trusting (for some, racism/monoculture related I'm sure). Not better but more trusting (huge emphasis on for some).
I'm sure most of you have observed this, but there's a game theory answer to the question of trust:
https://ncase.me/trust/
In practice, distrusting is a matter of worrying about the minority. If you lock anything, you're worried about 1% or 0.1%, maybe less, who will legitimately do something bad. But, the consequences are so heavy that people apply that distrust to everyone.
IMO trust is associated with a certain social interaction. Once it's broken, one common way (the most? not sure) of re-establishing trust is to establish new social interactions, probably more personal and less complex. The example I'm thinking of is the emergence of organised crime in Sicily out of informal relationships between citizens who can't count on the state for protection or justice. Or the emergence of feudal contracts between a leader and his subordinates, where the old Roman system of tax collection and provincial administration had broken down (in some cases long after Rome had left the area - polities like Soissons ran the Roman administrative model into the ground until the high-personal-trust structure of early feudalism came along and overtook them).
We're kind of barreling toward this reality in pockets of the western world. Where I live in the US (wealthy blue state, not rural Alabama, don't get your hopes up) you pretty much can't do fair business at a fair price without a personal reference or prior business relationship. And in some of the smaller wealthier towns you can see this kind of behavior start to creep into local government. Of course this is a far cry from not being able to rely on the police but it's definitely movement in that direction.
? Where I live in the US (wealthy blue state, not rural Alabama, don't get your hopes up) you pretty much can't do fair business at a fair price without a personal reference or prior business relationship.
Sounds overly-simplistic but the solution is to build trust again.
Unfortunately, the incentives that rule our society are pushing us away from this. We need to align incentives properly if we're going to have any hope of building trust again. ex:
1. The internet, as a technology, is amazing but functions as a possible bullhorn for everyone, without filter. It does not reward the best possible or most positive idea, only the one that grabs the most attention.
2. Shock and outrage drive the clicks/views/attention and everyone gets paid on these metrics.
3. Social media companies thrive on and optimize for attention metrics. The longer you use them, at the expense of things like participating in your community and building relationships, the more "successful" they are and the more $$$ they get
4. Society has moved towards more specialized play and communities. We participate in fewer and fewer activities where we just randomly encounter strangers.
5. Our current election system rewards divisiveness because it drives turnout. The candidate that can do the best job doesn't win-the candidate that can get the most votes does.
Possibly unpopular view: Encouraging religious participation would go a long way to help. Whether you believe or do not, religion helps align society away from purely individualistic pursuits and more towards a "corporate good".
> Possibly unpopular view: Encouraging religious participation would go a long way to help. Whether you believe or do not, religion helps align society away from purely individualistic pursuits and more towards a "corporate good".
How does that work out in 3rd world countries where there's high levels of religious membership and high levels of angry young men
And you don't get an exact line, but there's certainly a trend there.
Those with high corruption and relatively low religion are ex Soviet/Commumist (Azerbajan, Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Hungary, Belarus, Cuba have <50% religion and >50 corrupt)
There's always outliers, like Singapore (70% religious but only 15 corrupt / 85 notcorrupt), but there's a trend
> There seems to be a correlation between countries with corrupt untrusted governments and high religious importance.
Yes, when the system is very corrupt, you need to have some alternative way to build community, cohesion, and stability.
In communist Poland, the Church has been the center of the opposition to the communist system. The system has been very corrupt, but people found solace, community and the support in the Church. When John Paul II was elected the Pope, the Polish people were reinvigorated, and rallied around him, creating Solidarity movement etc. The communist system has recognized the power of Church, and fought it viciously: for example, it murdered Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest famous for his association with Solidarity. This made Polish people rally around the Church even more.
After the fall of communism, the Church no longer needed to provide this form of support, and over time, as the civil society has improved, the Church has used the legitimacy and respect it has built during communism to push its own agenda, which in past years has been rather divisive instead of uniting. Religion is not universal social good: its value depends on both the historical circumstance, and the actual content of practice and attitudes of leadership. It can be extremely beneficial, uniting society in ways impossible otherwise, but it can also be extremely damaging, to a deadly degree.
Just as capitalism is an amazing "technology" to maximize monetary value creation, organized religion is quite possibly the best technology ever created for achieving things like person-to-person engagement, building trusted communities, and creating a shared value systems. There are others (community groups, bowling leagues, etc) but none have been as durable and successful.
Like other technologies, it can be used for both good and evil and will be very effective doing so.
Just throwing this out there: I'm a believer in Christianity and love to connect w/ people about this kinda stuff. If anyone wants to talk more, email is in profile.
The first thing that comes to mind is, if you don't have a high level of trust in the society, the trust fostered by being the same religion is all the more valuable. If you think you can go out into a high-trust society and do just fine, then leaving that religious community your parents raised you in seems low-cost.
Also, if high trust drives economic growth, and wealthier societies become less religious, you would get that same pattern. I think to determine which is driving which, you would need to look at the relation between religion now and trust levels in the past, and vice versa.
I'm not sure religious participation is the answer. Organized religion is responsible for plenty of misinformation. In the recent pandemic, there have been multiple superspreader events at unauthorized religious gatherings.
Maybe sports leagues or mandatory national (or state) service?
I think you're spot on about a lot of these points. On your last "unpopular view" about religion, religious groups can be like any other group of people in that each group falls somewhere on a spectrum between warm and welcoming vs. aggressively tribal. I think the sentiment is right, though – maybe "civic engagement" is what we're after here.
Whatever the answer, I'm convinced it will take nearly constant vigilance to prevent it from eventually being corrupted to serve the very evil it was meant to eradicate. This seems to be one of the few constants throughout human history.
A method to address mistrust is to initiate "virtue circles": do people unrequested favors, without expectation of any return. Just do it; it actually feels good. And it is infectious. Others start doing it too, and double so when you subtly exhibit the joy of helping others without any expectations. Once more than 3 people in any social circle start this type of positive interaction, a positive culture shift occurs in the social group. It is quite amazing how fast this transition happens, as if people are waiting for an excuse to be better with others.
And make sure there is space for people to do this, and reward it where possible.
Companies are moving more and more towards metrics, which means the nice guy that helps everyone out but isn't as great with his metrics gets screwed, vs. the asshole who optimizes only for the metrics while screwing everyone over gets ahead. Once the nice guy has seen this happen over and over, even the nicest person breaks, gives in, and starts playing by the rules of the system, which by design incentivize working towards the measurable goals.
Very much this. I would amplify it a bit and say talk to real humans in real life (not through a screen). Be a good neighbor, smile and greet people, help strangers. It sounds trite, but I think its the best path. A persons physical community is more important that twitter (or HN for that matter). Culture is made from the choices and shared knowledge of individuals. Being open to others is a prerequisite to influencing change. Accepting imperfections and poor decissions in others is a prerequisite to improving things. I don't see a magical switch that can be flipped to suddenly change a culture, nor do I see secret cabals controling us from the shadows, so no help from the illuminati or whatever.. It's the choices we make and the views we hold about our fellow citizens, and those are better in real-life than on-screen.
I can't put the article better than it puts itself. I'd recommend everyone read it top to bottom. tl;dr If everyone's playing tug of war, everyone has to spend all this effort pulling just to stay where we are.
What I'll add is how this seems to show up in HN discussions. A frequent trope here is an article about someone or some company doing something that pisses people off, then the comments debating whether it's the incentive-maker's fault and it's not wrong for people to maximize according to the incentives provided. The whole thing is a microcosm of this lack of trust.
It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's lost isn't the decision to trust, it's the whole framing. In a perfect trust society, taking the compete option in a prisoner's dilemma would be seen as immoral. In a zero trust society, the whole choice reduces to analyzing the payoff matrix. That's what's lost. It's the change from a framing around 'cooperation is the moral action' towards a framing around payoff matrices.
I'd argue that on HN, the general sentiment is on the payoff matrix end of the spectrum.
I offer this feedback with the utmost respect for Farnam Street and Shane Parrish:
1. Loss is mentioned a lot but not mentioned is linking the asymmetric movement of trust to the cognitive bias of loss aversion.
2. Aside from Putnam, another take worth mentioning is Steven M. R. Covey's The Speed of Trust which speaks to the link of trust to performance within organizations.
3. The interface, boundary or contract is a common method of encapsulating trust. For example, since ancient times people have used "silent trade" in which trade goods are placed in the open and left behind. This requires a significant but finite amount of trust, minimal amount of social cohesion and provides a great deal of communication.
Silent trade: "Group A would leave trade goods in a prominent position and signal, by gong, fire, or drum for example, that they had left goods. Group B would then arrive at the spot, examine the goods and deposit their trade goods or money that they wanted to exchange and withdraw. Group A would then return and either accept the trade by taking the goods from Group B or withdraw again leaving Group B to add to or change out items to create an equal value. The trade ends when Group A accepts Group B's offer and removes the offered goods leaving Group B to remove the original goods."
The upside of mistrust is an increase in intelligence gathering and seeking. Evolution favors those that can figure out motivation. Gossip while hugely inefficient plays a huge part of everyday life and motivation.
Mistrust is getting an undeserved bad rap. It is unpopular but it is an adaptation to widespread lack of trustworthiness. The lack of popularity has some motivated reasoning elements - it isn't reassuring to believe that mistrust is the right option, it isn't conceived of as "how it should be". It feels better to say "You should be able to trust the people around you." even if they really aren't. As an idea it is "uncuddley". Not all mistrust is correct nor rational of course.
> A society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. If we don’t have to balance every exchange instantly, we can get a lot more accomplished. Trustworthiness lubricates social life.
I see bureaucracy as a technology we use to replace trust, but most times it just results in an unnecessary waste of resources.
Hopefully this isn't too much of derailing the conversation:
This was something that surprised me about China when I visited, although maybe it shouldn't have.
The level of community and how close people are seemed unreal, coming from the US.
Maybe part of it is the "forced" community - city/urban blocks gated off with single entrance/exit ways, in some cases. I'm not sure.
But the dancing every night in the street in big cities, the elderly gathering to play Mahjongg in dedicated buildings, and other things, really opened my eyes about how far apart we are.
The level of community and how close people are seemed unreal
All of that exists in Christian churches and their deep (but often quiet) influence over many social efforts and programs across the United States. Have you visited one recently?
Rally is also a pretty tight community as well, everyone is always there to help you press on regardless, whether its a tow out of a ditch on stage or lending a spare for a blown fuse in service.
All very true! That's why I don't think Christianity is a terrible thing, despite not being a believer.
Regarding Rally - yeah I know - I drive stage. I've had my fellow competitors help me fix my car between stages, there is no family like the rally community.
EDIT: By the way, China has these things too. I was thinking of the things I wish we had.
The gig economy exploits the efficiencies of a trusting society masterfully. It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that we'd let total strangers drive us home from bars and use our houses like hotels. But it turns out that with only a little oversight, we can trust our fellow citizens just as well as an employee of a professional company.
Systems of maintaining trust are very important, but having a trustworthy culture and populace is just as important. In the words of William Easterly, these systems can either be virtuous cycles or vicious cycles. Either trust flourishes or mistrust flourishes and going from one to the other is challenging because of its game-theoretical properties.
Contrary to what might be the common understanding in SV, we've actually had cabs before we had Uber. They also involved total strangers driving us home from bars. We've also had people rent their private homes as lodging: that's how I vacationed with my parents in Eastern Europe in early 1990s. Even today, if you go to any town on Baltic Sea, you'll find plenty of "Rooms" signs (in local language) on private homes; many of them have been up for decades.
All of what Uber and Airbnb do, had most definitely existed before. What Uber and Airbnb brought was making it much more efficient, convenient and safe. Uber and Airbnb use some level of social trust, but they also provide extra trust on their own, which comes from the rating function they provide. Before Uber and Airbnb, if you had bad experience in a cab or a rented lodging, there was little recourse, and the service provides had little incentive to behave well. Now, they can easily get kicked off the platform after too many complaints.
Uber and AirBnB actually burned extreme amounts of trust. Blatantly illegal business practices and general sociopathy of the former, facilitating destruction of local neighbourhoods in case of the latter - adding an app on top of existing practices doesn't pay back for what it cost to get there.
> Blatantly illegal business practices and general sociopathy of the former,
Trust, morality and legality are not the same thing. Sure, Uber was operating illegally in many places, but millions of people used these illegal services and saw nothing wrong with it. They didn’t see using an unlicensed cab company as anything bad.
Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it morally wrong, or socially destructive. There have been plenty of cases where it’s the laws that are morally wrong and socially destructive. If you want to argue that Uber destroyed trust, you can’t simply say it broke the law and call it a day, you need also to argue that the law they broke was good and desirable.
So, what was the evil and socially destructive thing that Uber actually did?
> Trust, morality and legality are not the same thing. Sure, Uber was operating illegally in many places, but millions of people used these illegal services and saw nothing wrong with it. They didn’t see using an unlicensed cab company as anything bad.
People baited into purchasing new cars and screwed over car insurance sure did. But more importantly, everyone saw that the legal system in cities around the world isn't powerful enough to deal with direct offense. We saw you can build a multi-billion dollar megacorp not on just regulatory arbitrage, but plainly illegal business - and nobody got hold accountable (except for an off driver caught without proper insurance). All of this fundamentally erodes the trust in the rule of law - the trust on which modern society stands.
> Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it morally wrong
It doesn't, but it was illegal and greedy and exploitative, and dragged people into gig economy which arguably is itself morally questionable.
> If you want to argue that Uber destroyed trust, you can’t simply say it broke the law and call it a day, you need also to argue that the law they broke was good and desirable.
Taxi laws differ by the city. "Taxi mafia" was mostly a phenomenon of some places in the US; in many cities, taxis worked just well. Uber violated law almost everywhere they got, without any care for whether the law was useful or justifiable. It wasn't some act of civil disobedience - they did it for pure profit, to undercut competition and dominate the local markets they entered.
> So, what was the evil and socially destructive thing that Uber actually did?
Now, that's actually a topic much bigger than what I outlined above. The mischief of Uber's sociopathic management has been well publicized and well documented over the past 5+ years. It was a recurring topic on HN for a long time, too. I suggest starting with these two links:
> But more importantly, everyone saw that the legal system in cities around the world isn't powerful enough to deal with direct offense. We saw you can build a multi-billion dollar megacorp not on just regulatory arbitrage, but plainly illegal business - and nobody got hold accountable (except for an off driver caught without proper insurance). All of this fundamentally erodes the trust in the rule of law - the trust on which modern society stands.
It's not that it wasn't powerful enough. The governments could fight Uber just fine, and they in fact did in many places. What actually happened was instead the government in most places have figured that the customers liked the illegal service so much, that if they do fight it, they will actually reduce, instead of increasing their legitimacy. Imagine the government tomorrow decides to ban shaking hands. Would prosecuting the hand-shakers increase the trust in government and its legitimacy? No: people would rightly conclude that it's the government that's wrong, and it doesn't deserve trust or charity here. This is the case with many aspects of the regulatory state: its legitimacy depends on people being unaware of how crippling and authoritarian it is in many situations. Making stupid laws and keeping people unaware of their stupidity is no way to build trust.
> It doesn't, but it was illegal and greedy and exploitative, and dragged people into gig economy which arguably is itself morally questionable.
Taxis have always been "gig economy". Even before Uber, few taxi drivers were salaried employees. Most of them were independent operators, or working on commission.
> Taxi laws differ by the city. "Taxi mafia" was mostly a phenomenon of some places in the US; in many cities, taxis worked just well.
Which cities were these? In every city I am aware off, on both sides of the pond, traditional taxis have not been able to compete very well with Uber. Sure, in some places the taxis were less bad than in others, but almost everywhere they were overpriced and untrustworthy. Have you tried paying with card in a taxi in Poland before Uber came up? Somehow, despite MasterCard sticker on the window, the payment terminal always happened to be broken... Also, try taking a non-Uber cab from the airport in Warsaw or Krakow.
> What actually happened was instead the government in most places have figured that the customers liked the illegal service so much, that if they do fight it, they will actually reduce, instead of increasing their legitimacy.
I don't think it's that, unless you think the dissatisfaction expressed by officials is just posturing. I believe that it's just because bureaucracy moves slowly - and the core of Uber's strategy was to corner the market and gain sympathy of the riders before local regulators could gear up - at which point they'd be fighting their own citizen. Basically, pitting people against their local governments.
> Imagine the government tomorrow decides to ban shaking hands. Would prosecuting the hand-shakers increase the trust in government and its legitimacy? No: people would rightly conclude that it's the government that's wrong, and it doesn't deserve trust or charity here.
I get your example and it's a fair point - but I must say we generally did just that in 2020 with COVID restrictions :). That itself initially impacted the trust positively, but I guess it's easier to imagine the threat of a pandemic than a threat of an underpaid and uninsured driver operating an illegal cab having an accident.
> In every city I am aware off, on both sides of the pond, traditional taxis have not been able to compete very well with Uber. Sure, in some places the taxis were less bad than in others, but almost everywhere they were overpriced and untrustworthy.
I'm not saying they weren't in need of some competitive pressure, but generally, taxis weren't able to compete very well with Uber because it's really hard to compete with an international corporation that just ignores the law, while subsidizing its offerings from practically infinite VC budget. Whether the existing taxi services in any given city were good or bad or in between, it didn't matter - they didn't stand a chance.
> Have you tried paying with card in a taxi in Poland before Uber came up? Somehow, despite MasterCard sticker on the window, the payment terminal always happened to be broken... Also, try taking a non-Uber cab from the airport in Warsaw or Krakow.
I am from Kraków, I was born there, and I moved out only ~3 years ago. I've been riding taxis ever since childhood. From my perspective, network taxis weren't all that bad (it was common knowledge you don't use the "entrepreneurs" that park outside airports and railway stations, you probably even remember a TV show that revealed how they scam you if they think you're a tourist). Uber itself didn't introduce anything substantial over what iCar did a decade before. And while iCar was also playing a bit loose with the regulations, and there were some conflict with the local taxi networks (I recall articles about some tire slashing), they've ultimately managed to settle it through courts and iCar could deliver its value proposition completely legally. Uber didn't even bother.
> I don't think it's that, unless you think the dissatisfaction expressed by officials is just posturing. I believe that it's just because bureaucracy moves slowly - and the core of Uber's strategy was to corner the market and gain sympathy of the riders before local regulators could gear up - at which point they'd be fighting their own citizen. Basically, pitting people against their local governments.
And what's the problem with that? The government is meant to serve people, not to rule over them. If the governments can't push their power, because the people will hate it and won't allow it, that's good: that's why we have representative democracy in the first place. If one can improve the lives of the people and make them happier by subverting the law, this is really damning for the government.
> That itself initially impacted the trust positively
Yes, and then people saw the government restrictions mostly for what they were: a safety theater.
> but I guess it's easier to imagine the threat of a pandemic than a threat of an underpaid and uninsured driver operating an illegal cab having an accident.
I don't think that risk of car accident is something so completely foreign that people entering a cab don't know what they are getting into. More importantly, even if you grant the government the authority to take away people's freedom to do things the government considers too risky, purely out of paternalism, the fact is that the government had no reason whatsoever to believe that Uber cabs are less safe: if you want to argue that the government is better informed about the risks of riding a regular cab vs. Uber than a regular person, it had better actually be better informed.
> I'm not saying they weren't in need of some competitive pressure, but generally, taxis weren't able to compete very well with Uber because it's really hard to compete with an international corporation that just ignores the law,
If the law is so onerous, and Uber violating it results in its repeal (or at least ceasing enforcement), then instead of complaining, the taxi companies should rejoice, and thank Uber for the great service it provided.
This is of course ridiculous, because the reason traditional taxi companies are unhappy about Uber breaking the laws precisely because the laws help protect their business and extract rent at the expense of the consumers. Fighting against rent-seekers is a good thing, and rent-seeking is another reason why not all laws governments pass are good, and why it's not always morally wrong to violate them.
> while subsidizing its offerings from practically infinite VC budget. Whether the existing taxi services in any given city were good or bad or in between, it didn't matter - they didn't stand a chance.
Weren't you just a moment ago saying that the drivers were "underpaid"? If it ain't the drivers who are subsidized, then who is, exactly?
> From my perspective, network taxis weren't all that bad (it was common knowledge you don't use the "entrepreneurs" that park outside airports and railway stations, you probably even remember a TV show that revealed how they scam you if they think you're a tourist).
They were expensive, they didn't always arrive when called, you had to always be on the lookout to not be scammed, the vehicles were old, often dirty, the drivers were rude, the payment was cash only, and many more. I remember that, and Uber was improvement on every single metric. Cabs are much better now, precisely because Uber forces them to behave better or die.
> Uber itself didn't introduce anything substantial over what iCar did a decade before.
If so, how did Uber gain any foothold at all? If it's all VC subsidies, they'll run out, and in the meantime, the customers keep benefitting from subsidized rides.
> If one can improve the lives of the people and make them happier by subverting the law, this is really damning for the government.
People run to below-costs services like cats to catnip. You can make anyone happy by selling them $10 bills for $1. The problem is, what happens when all the competitors are gone, and the reason for below-cost offering ends?
> More importantly, even if you grant the government the authority to take away people's freedom to do things the government considers too risky, purely out of paternalism, the fact is that the government had no reason whatsoever to believe that Uber cabs are less safe
Of course they had, and we grant such authorities all the time. There's a special type of insurance covering commercial transport of people, it's illegal to engage in commercial transport of people without such insurance (and for good reason, if accident happens, then both the driver and the passengers are screwed); the problem, in Uber's case, was too little enforcement, and Uber shielding itself behind "independent contractor" veil and pretending they didn't encourage it.
> the reason traditional taxi companies are unhappy about Uber breaking the laws precisely because the laws help protect their business and extract rent at the expense of the consumers
These laws didn't came out of the blue and weren't just instances of random regulatory capture. The laws creating barriers to entry and (in some places) granting taxi companies limited monopoly are the flip side of the legal requirements that come with the taxi service being treated as a part of public transport infrastructure. Things like the legal requirement for taking passengers in unprofitable locations, or having cars in the fleet adapted for the needs of people with limited mobility. Things Uber did not do, because it didn't have to (and couldn't, really, with their "just a platform" business setup). Instead, Uber offered subsidized rides for able-bodied people in city centres, and no rides at all for elderly or disabled or people living further away.
> Weren't you just a moment ago saying that the drivers were "underpaid"? If it ain't the drivers who are subsidized, then who is, exactly?
The rides were. The prices you paid for a ride were sometimes less than the driver would get from Uber, but Uber wasn't going to pay the drivers more than they needed to (at least not until some follow-up competition came).
> If it's all VC subsidies, they'll run out
That's why Uber is betting so hard on self-driving. They've been operating on a loss for many years now, and they know they can't sustain it.
> and in the meantime, the customers keep benefitting from subsidized rides.
> People run to below-costs services like cats to catnip. You can make anyone happy by selling them $10 bills for $1. The problem is, what happens when all the competitors are gone, and the reason for below-cost offering ends?
You don't seem to be following Uber financials. Uber makes good profits on the rides. They are losing money on their attempts to expand into other segments (like Eats), and R&D.
> Of course they had, and we grant such authorities all the time. There's a special type of insurance covering commercial transport of people, (...)
That's because drivers who transport people tend to drive much more than average, and so the insurers want to charge them higher premiums even if they are safer on per-km basis. Either way, your argument in no way proves that the authorities had any reason to believe that Uber is less safe than regular taxis.
> These laws didn't came out of the blue and weren't just instances of random regulatory capture. The laws creating barriers to entry and (in some places) granting taxi companies limited monopoly are the flip side of the legal requirements that come with the taxi service being treated as a part of public transport infrastructure.
Rent-seekers always hide behind excuses that they are actually serving important public function.
> Things like the legal requirement for taking passengers in unprofitable locations, or having cars in the fleet adapted for the needs of people with limited mobility. Things Uber did not do, because it didn't have to (and couldn't, really, with their "just a platform" business setup).
Uber actually does all of these. In many cities, you can specifically hire wheelchair accessible vehicle via Uber. Moreover, drivers cannot just refuse unprofitable rides, because they don't know where they going before accepting them, in a way taxi drivers often can and do.
But, more importantly, if the government wants this service to be provided, it should just pay for it, instead of instituting a hidden tax on cab riders. The riders pay more, the profit reaped by cab companies is typically more than the actual cost that the government would have to pay if they just paid for it directly, and on top of that, the deadweight loss is immense, as seen by the huge expansion of people transport services whenever Uber enters the market.
> The rides were. The prices you paid for a ride were sometimes less than the driver would get from Uber, but Uber wasn't going to pay the drivers more than they needed to (at least not until some follow-up competition came).
So how were the drivers "underpaid", if they were paid as much as they were needed to? Also, just a moment ago you said the competition was not possible, and yet now you claim some came up, and actually forced Uber to increase wage. Can you make up your mind?
> That's why Uber is betting so hard on self-driving. They've been operating on a loss for many years now, and they know they can't sustain it.
As I noted above, this is very much false, and is extremely apparent if you spend even a moment looking at financials. They operate ride segment at a profit, and they very much can sustain it. They cannot sustain their valuation if they downscale their R&D and expansion to other segment, and just focus on rides, their share price will get a good hit, but as a business on the cash flow basis, they are very much solid and are able to operate rides indefinitely.
> The meantime always ends, eventually. Leaving behind a thoroughly destroyed market.
This is very much false, empirically. The subsidies for Uber rides in US cities are pretty much over, while the market is very healthy.
A lot of things were unthinkable 20Y ago that were perfectly normal for the century leading up to the mid-1960s.
Pretty much everything you list was, at one time, somewhere between commonplace and not-infrequent. It was the commercialization that brought with it the divide.
The importance of social trust has had a major impact on my belief in the importance of government-guaranteed tax-funded universal healthcare. Before about 2015, I thought it was nice, but not a pressing crisis, but around then, I started to notice things like signs saying "why does my insulin cost more than methadone?" and "why is medical marijuana cheaper than my heart disease medication?". These situations might have simple economic explanations in terms of supply-side dynamics, but they are morally infuriating to the same chunk of the electorate who self-identify as conservative capitalists. Not long after, Martin Shkreli appeared.
There seems to be a powerful, possibly instinctive, connection between A: being able to turn to someone for help when you're in need and B: considering that someone to be trustworthy. In 2020, we saw this writ large, when the United States became the global epicenter of conspiracy theories about SARS-CoV-2. The general population's trust in the medical system and the government is a huge unaccounted-for externality that can have serious effects on our economic and political stability.
Furthermore, one of the most lamented, supposedly idiosyncratic, problems with the US medical system is the sheer amount of paperwork required to do almost anything. It seems like an excellent example of this:
>We need to trust the people around us in order to live happy, productive lives. If we don’t trust them, we end up having to find costly ways to formalize our relationships.
(Opponents of guaranteed universal healthcare in the United States will generally agree that we do not have a "free" market in healthcare, but it is usually harder to convince them it will never be politically possible in light of the above.)
Czech doctors tend to complain about tons of paperwork, too. We have a public healthcare system with almost universal coverage.
There must be an element of "cover your ass" in there. Usually, excess of papers indicates someone's wariness of possible averse consequences down the line.
I agree with you on calling out the moral absurdities in our health care system, and how that is a reflection on our level of social trust. I'd like to see changes, also.
Cynically I would say that politically we have optimized for profit and bureaucracy. Would I be wrong? I'd say that this is because our democracy is imperfect - money, corporations, and corruption are driving too much of our politics.
It's always bothered me that so many people would presume to fix health care at the federal level. For a while Congress has been one of the least trusted institutions in the country. Why do we expect them to fix anything? The Affordable Care Act was anything but that, it did nothing to control costs or fix all the pricing transparency problems. Poor folks get a free yearly visit and screenings but have to pay a few thousand dollar deductible when they are sick (money they typically don't have) before they get any covered care, while the government subsidized insurance premiums go right past the recipients directly into the pockets of the insurance companies.
I'd be more comfortable seeing something like many of the countries in Europe have, price controls on drugs and simple standards set at a national level, with implementation details, tax collection, and administrative details left to the states or provinces.
The states were just starting to innovate before the ACA. Vermont tried single payer. Massachusetts had Romneycare. NY and California we making plans, etc. With the ACA the feds commandeered the whole thing, and didn't do so great a job with it.
I think that the states are in a much better position to fix this, but that the insurance companies and other related incumbents would rather have this controlled from a federal level where they can most easily influence the outcome to be in their favor.
When the poors see their standard of living decline (exporting jobs, expensive real estate, shitty schools, ineffective government) all while the rich get richer, yeah, the basic social contract between the classes evaporates.
You may trust your neighbor, but that has zero bearing on society at large. Society only works if the different classes trust each other not to screw each other out of existence.
We're seeing this in all the rich countries now- a generation of youngsters are realizing that a middle class existence may not exist for them. Even in Europe, which is more egalitarian, things aren't looking as rosy as they used to be. And of course in poorer countries with high birth rates, we already see turmoil as young angry men realize they are destined for a life of poverty while their government enriches itself.
EDIT: I think the guy who started Huawei said something to the effect of when you are a millionaire, you only care about yourself, but when you are a billionaire, you are all the sudden responsible for a lot of people. I wish that attitude permeated our business schools and boardrooms. The amount of people from top business schools who parrot "Always do the right thing" and then proceed to sell their own grandmother down the street blows my mind.
> EDIT: I think the guy who started Huawei said something to the effect of when you are a millionaire, you only care about yourself, but when you are a billionaire, you are all the sudden responsible for a lot of people. I wish that attitude permeated our business schools and boardrooms.
That’s what the poors need; noblesse oblige oligarchy.
We already have an oligarchy. They control the government, and can get laws passed the poors cannot.
What purpose should they serve, ideally?
- focus just on investment and profit
- improve society ie noblesse oblige
- compete for public honor, ie holding high office
I'm not suggesting their is one answer, but given the rich hold such sway over government, I definitely don't think they can sit back and enjoy their high tariff burgundy while we have riots in the streets, first from the left and now the right.
"You may trust your neighbor, but that has zero bearing on society at large."
On the contrary, if you don't trust your neighbor, you have no basis for trusting anyone. It's the foundation for any other trust relationships. As for the relationships between classes, that also relies on trust in things larger than classes: trust in the legal and social framework.
I trust my neighbors not to steal my stuff. I don't trust them not to narc on me. If they do narc on my I trust the city to realize that's a dumb use of resources. But I don't trust the state to be so smart.
How often have you heard something along the lines of "I'm not worried my kids will be kidnapped, I'm worried some jerk will call the cops if I let them walk to the park on their own"?
This observation is often trotted out, but I'm not sure it's fair. 50 years ago was no picnic, either. We were mired in the Cold War (Vietnam, no less). Nixon was in the White House. There was tons of social unrest (Nixon wrote in his memoirs about the thousands of bomb threats and attempted bombings). Civil rights / racial tensions were extremely high (MLK was assassinated in '68). The 70's were an absolutely terrible economic decade - oil shock and stagflation, anyone?
> huge increase in labor supply: outsourcing, women entering workforce in large numbers
In 1970, women entered the workforce, so you would have expected productivity to double, so GDP would have doubled, and thusly everyone's standard of living, right?
Instead what happened is all that extra capital drove up costs in housing and healthcare. Credit cards were introduced and the savings rate plummetted. Instead of having tons of extra money, everyone actually wound up in debt instead. (Please note: I'm not blaming women entering the workforce for this phenomenon; it was totally our surrounding economic system)
My high level point is that I think young people back then had a lot of reason to feel precarious and not trust in their institutions to act in their interests. We probably suffered a lot for it then, but we did eventually build our way out of it, for at least a short while, even if it feels like we're essentially further down the economic path now.
I'm going to take the risk of saying "This time it's different!"
- There is no such thing as lifetime employment for most fields.
- Outsourcing wiped out a lot of decent jobs in the US.
- Automation is wiping out a bunch more.
- College debt is thing, though I fully expect this administration to forgive it.
- Housing is significantly more expensive**.
- All the rich countries are ageing fast.
- Men are going to college much less, and trend is accelerating***.
* Lawyers are a good example. Search engines have wiped out a whole class of entry-level legal work. We certainly don't need as many as we have now, but what well-paying jobs are going to replace them? Finance is going through a similar transition where you just don't need as many people to conduct trades. I feel like I was reading FT a few months ago and several of the major Ibanks were saying they expect to need a third as many employees in the next decade.
**Taipei is a prime example. Taiwanese salaries are super low, yet property is super expensive. Last time I looked, around $100/sqft for condos. People buying investment properties are the obvious culprit, but I don't think there is political will to deprive the government of property taxes and wipe out the savings of older voters, in order to save the young. And lo and behold the birthrate is 0.9 there.
***I think this was on HN a few days ago: https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-.... You can argue college is a waste of time, and I'm inclined to agree, but I think we can make up a narrative where young men feel there is no hope.
There's other possible possible confounding factors, like the rise of mass media and the internet, leaving the gold standard and the growth of the finance, increased beaucratization and corporatization of everything, etc. Hard to know sometimes how all this stuff is related.
But I think it is valid that the parent pointed out that younger generations today feel screwed, that they won't be able to do as well economically or socially as their parents. Many are lonely on the internet, trapped in student loans, and searching for decent jobs. On average they are having to postpone leaving their parents houses, getting married, having kids and buying a house, waiting to do these things until significantly later in life than their parents and grandparents. They've heard about the American Dream and don't feel like they'll have it. And there's a lot of them.
I know that this is not true for everybody, lots of things are better, and it's relative - other people have it worse, etc. But this sentiment is still a thing - a lot of young people feel like they have it worse than their parents and grandparents.
I don't know that debating the details will change their minds.
Women entering workforce did raised standard for a lot of them. The domestic violence and abuse rates against women are down by a lot. And yes, they go up and down with female employment too, employment affects how she can manage her status in family, how much is husband resentful over her being at home and crucially, how much she is locked. (I don't know male abuse stats and the whole topic is less talked about)
> opioid epidemic, obesity epidemic
Alcohol consumption is down against 1971. The heroin, cocain etc problems are smaller then they used to be. People are less violent overall.
People still live longer. And while they are obese, their life expectancy went up against that time. And some of it is that historical diseases from various malnutritions are down.
Economic standards are dropping for new graduates. But, it is not all bleak everything is worst situation.
288 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadhttps://www.chronicle.com/article/robert-putnam-and-the-ethi...
https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html
> Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.
That seems incredibly naive. If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be different?
It is highly unlikely a researcher in "finding X" is an expert in "solving X" or otherwise has the capacity to do so.
The "head in the sand" approach here doesn't "ease community tensions" it does precisely the opposite: prolong them for fear open investigation "goes against the consensus".
Well, that metaphor doesn't apply here. The research shows that something we're already doing is potentially harmful. A more accurate metaphor would be discovering milk is actually poisonous as currently processed, and withholding the research for fear of disrupting the dairy industry (which the researcher happens to be a member of).
Your mistake is in presupposing the goodness of the thing the research is revealing to be potentially harmful. Hiding science that disagrees with your preconceived ideas is a dangerous path to take. You strengthen your position by whittling away the pieces that disagree with reality and updating your approach, not by denying reality and insisting you were right all along.
Research seems to show social cost to cultural diversity. Research not published for fear of appearing to oppose diversity.
And you go ahead and do precisely what he was afraid of...
Social research isn't published precisely for this reason...
> "Wow just wow what a 'racist campaign for the return of segregation'"
I wonder why it is so difficult to do or publish research in this area?
in any case, it's not ethnic diversity that impacts social trust but (sub-)cultural friction, which can happen between subsets ('tribes") of the same ethnicity (which is mostly a superfluous distinction anyway). tabs vs spaces, for instance.
we like to imagine mountains out of molehills and then point to our mounded constructions to prove how we're so irreconcileably different, but it's often a thin veil over an insecure assertion of authority and superiority.
An echo chamber is trusting yourself and the other members - even when that trust is misplaced.
[ETA: does someone think I'm implying that's a good thing? It's not. It's bad for everyone, even the perpetrators.]
Those consequences can be reduced; the question is, can they be reduced faster than forcing a new generation grow up under the diversity?
His work doesn't appear to have been desk-drawered or self-censored.
Reinvigorating your old work for publication, once you have a commercially viable avenue to promote it, is pretty average capitalism.
Plenty of work that is politically awkward is published under a strict pseudonym. This wasn't - and the author's position is that it was their choice not to publish.
It seems that as systems scale (in size) they tend to become inherently lower-trust. Consider a physician who makes house calls (not uncommon as recently as a few generations ago, and certainly not incompatible with modern medicine) and a large medical system such as Kaiser Permanente or NHS.
The economic benefits of the larger-scale system are obvious, and are directly measured, but the economic detriment due to increased transaction costs (derived from decreased trust) are neither obvious nor readily measurable.
Upsides of systems at scale can still outweigh downsides, and often do, but I suspect many industrial systems have a maximum scale above which efficiency gains lose out to, in this author's framing, transaction costs.
This abuts certain natural "borders" for system growth, such as national (or in the case of EU, common market) boundaries.
I think the commodity markets (grains, coal, oil, steel, etc) are a significant counterexample: they do use spot checks but by and large run pretty lean on mechanism and rely on trust.
Another one is customs enforcement.
Those seem like a weird example to hold up as a success — that high trust spot checking system is failing in the face of trying to integrate with a low trust actor and is tearing down international trade with it.
There's a game theory argument that the system is somewhat self-managing; though you could defect in any single transaction your reputation would suffer and it wouldn't be worth it.
Perhaps it's a good counterexample because of its size: everybody purchasing directly in the commodities market (i.e. people who take delivery) can afford to have one bad batch because their volume is so high. But still, that depends on some degree of gatekeeping on the input side.
When measuring quality is expensive and/or difficult, the risks for a defector are lower, and the defector's incentives may therefore be comparably greater.
Some keywords - look into Letters of Credit, Bills of Lading, Certificates of Origin, INCOTERMS, and the requirements to make these work (such as inspection certificates from independent third-party organisations like SGS or CIQ). Bulk commodities can be sampled, tested and certified as many as 4-8 times in between buyer and seller, on a dozen different criteria.
Bulk commodity trading happens in an intrinsically low trust environment - it is frequently arms-length, cross-border, multiparty, for millions of dollars per transaction, and with a crazy number of different risks that have to be mitigated. The incentives to defect and come away millions richer are huge. And much of the system was developed for a time before the Internet.
While this is a noble sentiment, the structure and transaction costs are absolutely essential for the whole thing to work.
Everyone works with the same or slowly changing set of subordinates below them (patients in the case of an NHS physician) and same handler above them so despite the organization being big and faceless everyone has a long term high trust relationship with the people directly above and below them.
Even if you can make existing transactions trustless, you need more and more new transactions to negotiate the boundary between the physical world and the data on the blockchain.
And here we are stuck in this world where the computer in your pocket is untrustworthy, and you can't tell a useful benign app from an app trying to upload your life.
and it's a shame.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but it appears only 32% [0] of people care enough about privacy to switch to a service that preserves it.
I suspect an even lower percentage know that apps on their phones might even be trying to upload their lives.
This is not the source of "mistrust".
[0]: https://hbr.org/2020/01/do-you-care-about-privacy-as-much-as...
Imagine two options of (1) an organisation who claims to do the right things and (2) an organisation who makes no claims. Picking either option could be a rational response for someone who cares about privacy. Any strategy has to account for the existence of liers/incompetents who claim to do something then don't.
To make privacy conscious decisions requires monitoring many information channels and having a nuanced understanding of the history and motivations of the people involved. That is too hard to do for most rational people. They need clearer support outlining what they are meant to be doing than what they get.
Your is probably an unpopular one, but I'd guess because of questions like "Who are these people that cared about privacy, were willing to switch and did actually switch, but don't realize that their phones might even be trying to upload their lives?" Unless you meant that the results of that survey showing 32% of people cared enough that they actually did something about it, in which case, that's not really an opinion. Just a fact that a very small survey (out of the people who use services/companies that can be switched from, if they cared enough to do so) includes a segment that seems to represent "people [that] care enough about privacy to switch to a service that preserves it."
What this survey does not try to establish is what percent of people "cared" and are "willing", but found it not worthwhile to switch, for reasons such as "this is how I communicate with my friends and I cannot convince them to switch" or decided it just wasn't worth it due to other costs.
For me, WhatsApp comes to mind, but I'm guessing it's a somewhat common problem. I personally do NOT want to use WhatsApp, but I have a group of friends that will not switch and especially with Covid, I do not want to lose those connections. Replace "group of friends" with <community> and WhatsApp with <whatever app>.
Not sure what you even meant by "This is not the source of mistrust". m463 pointed out a couple of things, neither of which was a _source_ of mistrust.
This statistic reflects my unscientific view also.
I am very privacy conscious (I still have a gmail account but that's for job hunting only!) but I know few others that are, however, if these others experienced something detrimental as a result of giving away their privacy then I suspect that 32% figure would increase... but until that happens, people won't care.
Protecting your privacy online these days is time-consuming and, if I'm honest, exhausting: it's a constant arms race between stopping evermore intrusive code from data mining the hell out of me and just being able to use things without constantly analysing them to ensure they're legit.
In fact, yesterday I went to the eff site [0] to see how much data my browser was giving away and even though I have it locked down (I still have js) I was unique anyway...
I've asked myself in the days when I feel like just giving in "what is the danger from <shady company> knowing all this stuff about me?"... And, in all honesty, I haven't come up with an answer that would satisfy that 68%.
[0] - https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
EDIT: Found my note
> What economist William Easterly has called “the radius of trust” varies greatly from group to group and from country to country. Within groups like the Marwaris of India, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, or Hasidic Jews in New York’s diamond industry, transactions involving substantial sums of money can take place without written agreements or recourse to the legal system, giving these groups competitive advantage over other members of their respective societies who cannot safely engage in similar low-cost ways of doing business. Whole nations likewise differ in the levels of honesty. Bicycles can be left parked without locks in Tokyo but doing so in many other countries would be a virtual guarantee that they would be stolen. [1]
[1] "Economic Facts and Fallacies" Thomas Sowell
To make it short : Money and time lost due this lack of trust could be allocated to more valuable endeavor, such as pretty much anything.
Therefore it is better for society to solve this issue, even if it means some specific people that were making money out of it beforehand will not be able to anymore.
(unrelated, but the cost of zero-trust can be measured quite directly by looking at the cost of making a Bitcoin transaction vs almost any other kind)
Just because someone doesn't agree with your view of the world doesn't automatically make them untrustworthy. From your perspective, maybe lives are more important than freedoms and you are willing to limit some freedoms temporarily or permanently if it means saving more lives. From someone else's perspective, maybe freedom is more important than lives, and they are willing to let some people (including themselves) die in order to avoid temporary or permanent limits on existing freedoms.
I think the point of the article is that if you suppress your instinct to mistrust people who think differently than you, your community will avoid incurring the social and economic costs that would otherwise accumulate.
Even if masks didn't work, stubborn refusal to wear them is nearly as bad- people should wear the even if they are skeptical on the effectiveness just in case they do work, because doing small things to possibly help your neighbors is part of the social contract.
I'm not talking about forcing people to wear masks, I'm talking about not trusting the people who don't voluntarily wear masks.
What most people (including me) do is this: we follow the law (in almost all cases) and we use our own subjective judgements to determine how to act besides that. This gets tricky because even if none of us breaks the law, our subjective judgements often differ. Some examples:
1. The law where I live says I need to wear a mask inside public places/stores, which I do happily.
2. I wear a mask when I'm outside and there's lots of people around, because according to my subjective judgement, this makes sense (the law does not require this).
3. I don't wear a mask when I'm outside and there aren't a lot of people around.
4. I don't wear a mask when I'm running along a trail.
5. I don't eat-in at restaurants, even though the law allows maskless, indoor dining.
What I find wrong about your comment is that you seem to be holding people accountable for not sharing the same subjective judgements as you. If I see people dining, maskless, inside a restaurant, I think "well, I wouldn't do that, but other people disagree". I don't categorize them as untrustworthy, bad people.
Sometimes I am as charitable as you toward people who make dumb choices. Sometimes I am much less so, because those choices are helping fuck this all up for the rest of us. People having terrible judgement is, unfortunately, a good reason not to trust them as much as you otherwise would.
Basically all people hate being lied to, or to feel manipulated or controlled.
A lot of people on the anti-mask train were totally on board for the '2 week lockdown' to flatten the curve. Those same people then saw their government officials repeatedly lie to them ("masks don't work!" ~ "Herd Immunity @ X%", etc), the media painted the picture of airborne ebola, and then those same politicians went out and violated their own lockdown orders.
Meanwhile, their local economy is destroyed and they or people they care about are suffering/struggling. And for those that take a more global view of things, there is some [0,1]evidence that supply chain disruption is killing more people than Covid itself.
It's easy to feel like those people are complete idiots and ruining it for everyone else. It's much harder, but much more valuable, to focus on solutions to the underlying problem. Ultimately, we need to restore trust in our institutions before we can begin to repair the divide.
[0]https://time.com/5864803/oxfam-hunger-covid-19/ [1]https://www.un.org/press/en/2020/ga12294.doc.htm
this immediately created 2 classes -- folks who will get their salaries from their professions inspite of the lockdowns and those who won't and would be left to suffer
In short, I think we're going to be in for massive long-term unemployment (and underemployment) coupled with inflation beyond what anyone living today in the US has experienced. I'm not too confident about the state of this nation's finances
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/yelp-data-shows-60percent-of...
Yes, but that's been true for a long time, even before covid. I'm betting you didn't mistrust non-mask-wearers pre-covid even though I'm sure several millions have died in the US alone since early 1920s because people with the flu or other contagious diseases didn't wear a mask and went to work sick, etc. You just didn't notice because it happened at a rate that didn't overload hospitals.
> If they can't even take a basic precaution during a deadly pandemic then their judgement seems dangerously impaired.
Well imagine all of your news sources downplay covid and even when you get it yourself it's not as bad as the hysteria led you to believe - just some mild flulike symptoms and loss of smell and taste. You start to mistrust all of the zealots forcing you destroy the economy^, handicap an entire generation of students, destroy the mental wellbeing of many millions, in order to extend the lives of the elderly and immunocompromised by a few years. It's hard to put the blame 100% on the anti-masker. Plus, just because someone isn't wearing a mask doesn't automatically make them an anti-masker. I don't wear a mask when social distancing is possible, for example (like when going on runs).
^ Yes I know stock market is at all time high right now, but you can't just keep running an economy on printed money. If you aren't actually producing, soon all that paper you've printed will become a lot less valuable ("inflation") and the bubble will burst and you'll see what a real crisis looks like.
Wearing a mask doesn't destroy the economy or hurt students. It's the cheapest possible intervention. If wearing a mask helps, it actually sucks the wind out of the sails of people who want draconian lockdowns. People with a libertarian bent should be even more pro-masks, since it's very nearly the only thing that everyone can do in their personal lives to try stave off massive government interventions.
If people can't mentally separate masks from the other interventions then that seems like a problem in itself.
It is just such blatant illogic you would expect from primary schoolers and not adults with college degrees and sought after positions to use. Like declaring "but there is a picnic scheduled today!" and proceeding to go and hold a picnic in the middle of a record breaking forest fire.
This is an overly simplistic view. The virus doesn't care, but policy makers should care, because if you optimize too much for saving lives from the virus at the cost of everything else, you might find the cure is worse than the disease.
Say you are a policymaker and a new disease emerges that will kill 1% of the population if left unchecked over time, mainly in the elderly. Also say that draconian control measures will cause suicide rate, unemployment, and mental health cases to go up 1% for every day they are in effect, mainly in young people.
What's your policy? Are you going to do everything you can to save the elderly at the expense of the youth? Or are you going to make sure the youth are good at the expense of the elderly? Something else entirely? As far as I can tell in the US, we are optimizing for saving the elderly and throwing everyone else under the bus in pursuit of that goal. We can expect to see a very large increase in suicides, unemployment, and mental health issues above and beyond what we saw in 2020 (including substance abuse) in coming months if we stay the course.
If you'd rather believe Fox News than scientists who are telling you this is much worse than the flu, then while you might not be a bad person, you've earned my mistrust.
You can drop your mask if you want, but you can't really blame the OP for not trusting you.
Scientists say it is much worse than the flu. For the vast majority who actually experience the disease, it is not much worse than the flu. Thus, people start to mistrust the science because there's a disparity between the statistics on paper and what people actually experience in reality. I think most people understand now that covid is basically like the flu 99% of the time, and much worse than the flu for a tiny subset (and for the most part, the tiny subset can self-identify).
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...
You're probably right: it's hard to understand the difference between statistical evidence and anecdotes. On the other hand, a lot of other people who don't experience COVID still seem to be able to separate their own lack of statistical knowledge from the ability to trust scientists. I think these mask deniers are mistrusting scientists for some other reason.
Anyway I guess my point is life is better if you judge people on their individual merits rather than group membership.
It's a low risk, obviously, especially if you are up to date. But as much as I like hippy vegans (not being sarcastic!) I would still worry they are walking around as potential measles incubators. If they have religious objections to wearing a piece of cloth over their face they probably aren't too excited about vaccines.
It's way down the list of things to worry about nowadays, obviously. But still.
When I was a kid, everyone was catching it. That was just one of those diseases you catch once and then you are done with it.
It is so low-risk that doctors didn't even declare the cases as they were supposed to be. They just observed them in case it would turn bad. Watching well and treating the few difficult case well made it so that there was just around 5 deaths a year, amongst cohorts of 800.000 who almost all caught it. At the scale of my department, that would be one letal case every 80 years... Outdoor leisure kill more in half a week here, as it was noticeable after lockdown (as we were very lucky with Covid, there were more outdoor leisure related death in 4 days of reopening than Covid related death from 9 months of first wave. NB: it was unfortunately different with second wave)
The Measles vaccine is also a proxy for other behavior. Minimally, in the US, folks that aren't innoculated for measles probably aren't innoculated for mumps or rubella (as MMR is one vaccine), or other important vaccines altogether.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161023051702/https://www.cdc.g...
It depends on places. In the area I live, it is also the neo-hippie/neo-rural/green/alternative-left who are anti-mask. But that's very localised, we happen to have a huge proportion of those various tendencies, that other people roughly group together and call with the word for 'hairy' in the local dialect :-), and less right and far-right people than elsewhere.
I agree with your conclusions on when one should wear a mask. I disagree with your conclusions about the intelligence, reasoning ability, or basic humanity of anti-maskers.
If you're someone who is flooded with reports of scientists waffling, of problematic reasons why people want you to wear masks, of health officials adjusting the rules du jour independent of defensible rationalizations, of higher-ups enforcing rules that they do not themselves follow, etc., and are NOT exposed to the (imho correct) arguments as to why mask-wearing is necessary and important... why wouldn't you conclude that it's a scam?
None of the conclusions about mask wearing can be made with 100% certainty. There really is a lot of bullshit going around on all sides. Even a fairly weak selection filter is enough to make perfectly rational actors come to opposite conclusions.
Our society is based on the implicit assumption that we all see more or less the same thing, so we can depend on (trust) that our sense of "normal" is shared, at least to some degree.
That assumption no longer holds. (Or rather, it holds for far fewer topics than it used to.)
You should win a prize for the only comment here to get it.
In the absence of both shared values and goals, trust is harmful.
That's actually a pretty big mistake society has made. You emphatically don't need to share values with someone to get along with them or work with them or trust them.
Focusing on values instead of goals and behaviors creates the environment of mistrust, because you don't know when someone is going to decide you don't share their values strongly enough and try to purge you. It also creates an environment where the people you want least are most willing to lie to fit in, and it gives them a weapon to use to push out anyone they don't like by amping up the values rhetoric.
If you want to build a club of terrified pretenders, filter by and focus on values. If you want to get something done and build an environment of trust, focus on shared goals, behaviors, and outcomes, and learn how to disagree and move on where consensus can't be reached.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate
I guess it depends what "trust" means to you. to me it often means something like "I can expect this person to make the same (or similar) decision I would in situation X, therefore I do not need to watch them as closely". some values can be irrelevant in certain contexts. if I'm a communist and my coworker is an ancap, it probably doesn't affect our ability to work together on a software project. but if I'm very risk averse (in an engineering sense) and my coworker has a "move fast and break things" mindset, I am going to have to pay a lot more attention to their code reviews.
I'd also suggest that one of the reasons we are encouraged to seek diversity is because we benefit from having people around us who wouldn't make the same decisions we would make in every situation.
If I am reading between the lines correctly, it sounds like predictability is what you expect shared values to provide. I think a shared vision is more important than shared values in this case. You can still predict that with which you disagree, if you communicate mutual expectations for how to scope disagreement within collaboration.
> (including themselves)
Including others, which is against any serious code of ethics.
> From your perspective, maybe lives are more important than freedoms and you are willing to limit some freedoms temporarily or permanently if it means saving more lives.
It's extremely difficult for me to imagine a more fallacious argument than this.
The closest I can come is imagining a mass movement against DUI checkpoints by people who refuse to show their license, but who purposely get drunk before speeding through the checkpoint.
It is not only philosophically consistent to protest mask laws while at the same time wearing a mask during this pandemic-- it's ethically required. The fact that you don't seem to realize you've hard-coupled a defense of freedom with wanton irresponsibility is legitimately worrisome. It reeks of the success of online filter bubbles dividing consumers into the most destructive two poles of potential behavior/opinion.
Luckily, in my own community, talking in person to other humans, I don't witness anything like these two poles. Rather, I see a lot of pandemic fatigue, results of shit messaging from the government, some disinformation, and the occasional asshole who must be addicted to a political feed like a degenerate gambler in Vegas.
Honestly, for most people it's not going to matter what side of the political spectrum they were on. Nearly everyone has made at least one critical safety mistake, failing to protect themselves or their loved ones. At least in the U.S., noses peeking out from masks is a bi-partisan issue. High ground is a luxury of social media self-delusion.
@dang-- what the hell? There's no way somebody read this whole comment in that amount of time.
Is it just a given that bots can freely upvote/downvote and attempt to screw with the flow of messages on here?
I honestly cannot understand how HN has convinced a coterie of tinkerers and reverse engineers not to discuss the system that sorts and rates their own expressions of ideas.
Looking at costs alone without context is a bad idea here as it is for beancounters.
I don't know if I could ever move to an area that didn't have high mask compliance during all this.
It's like living with someone who doesn't think playing with matches is a stupid risk to take. One day the house might burn down. It would be safer to live alone, or with people with similar attitudes to not playing with fire.
If one would not live in a place without high mask compliance, why would one live in a place without 100% mask compliance? If not 100%, what is the number? Why stop at mask compliance?
I also wouldn't want to live somewhere with a high rate of drunk driving for similar reasons. Someone else's cultural comfort with getting behind the wheel while sloshed puts me at risk because we unavoidably share the same physical space.
Interestingly, I wear none, and use that for signaling: I find that I associate more easily with people who also refuse the masquerade!
So you may have a point: mask offer the possibility to signal, which we can both use to refuse to associate given our difference in values.
You won't know who you can't trust to not be a fascist who would gladly see your life ruined for going outside alone, because it's "against the lockdown rules".
That is, you won't be able to tell who is someone like you.
Get it?
Your own words are taking what's left of trust, pissing all over it, covering it in petrol, and setting it on fire, then saying "shame that those other guys ruined everything".
Jesus wept.
(incidentally, social cohesion is what makes draconian lockdowns less justifiable. If everyone chooses to social distance and wear a mask when asked to by competent public health bodies, you can go a long way toward getting a handle on this thing. It's only when social cohesion is at a low ebb that the political drive for enforcing it with police powers kicks in)
Everyone, or almost everyone, has some objectionable material or behavior in their past, and if you start judging people on the worst they ever did, you will come to distrust everyone.
Reminds me of a short story I read, which I can't find now. The gist of it was about this person reading a memo or something at work on their computer, and the person wasn't actually reading it, they were just scrolling down the page and occasionally scrolling back up to pretend to re-read paragraphs because they knew the monitoring software flags such behavior as a positive indicator that the reader has increased comprehension of the memo.
> Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes... Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
Saved my bacon more than once!
In my experience, migrations are usually part of the code base, evaluated as such with PR and whatnot, and run automatically when deploying.
It depends on the size and context of the company, but I would not necessarily see this as a lack of trust.
Some companies just manage to mask it better or tone it down to a level that if felt to be acceptable.
Which mess are you referring to?
I honestly think that most of the relentless unpleasantness of capitalism doesn't come from capital itself, it comes from competition and conflict over scarce resources. It's this conflict between different pools of capital which makes capitalism relentless and exhausting, and the fact that such conflicts are often won by the side which starts with more for unrelated reasons which makes capitalism unfair and often of very questionable morality. I think it's relevant to the article to point out that I this model, all of these conflicts are essentially low trust environments since the actors have by definition opposing goals.
But "social capital" doesn't have to be about conflict. Let's say I am fortunate enough to have a friendly relationship with my next door neighbors. To give a cliched example, let's say I want to bake a cake and am running low on sugar. Being able to ask them allows me to finish my task without stopping everything to run to the store. Likewise, if they need to leave town for an emergency, they can call me to check on their place or walk their dog.
These examples don't involve any conflict, so it's not clear who's losing out on any of them*? The social capital of our friendship definitely made us more productive, but who wouldn't want that? This isn't about pleasing some kind of corporate manager and churning out more widgets, it's just about personal quality of life, so what's left for there to be a problem with the idea of social capital?
* I suppose if we're being extreme then we could say that the sugar providers and grocery store lost in the first exchange by my ability to avoid buying another bag. I'm not sure this is entirely true, though, since I'm very likely to buy more sugar on my next trip anyhow. They've lost out on the urgency perhaps, but as a side note I believe that urgency is the core of the other worst aspects and cruelty of commercial capitalism; urgency sometimes forces incredibly wasteful behavior in the name of "winning the race" against a competitor or many other kinds of artificial deadlines, etc. (Anyhow I digress...)
No we don't. Kids are driven everywhere, meaning that there is a (locked) door between them and The Others, the richer the neighborhood the richer the schools and the less you have to put them together with poor kids.
With distance learning you don't even have to worry about the other kids in the class, or the commute.
When I bought a home I just wired the down payment, didn't get anything other than the bank statement saying I had wired the money. In Brazil I'd get a paper proving they got it and stuff.
So while the fear of "bothering" is real, the fear of losing a considerable amount of money because the person on the other side is not trustworthy (and I'd say Brazilians in general assume no one is trustworthy) is worse in a much bigger scale. I'm not sure I'll ever be as carefree as americans but not having to care as much as I used to back in Brazil has been a huge boost for my mental health.
So we invented apps. Now we don't have to look up to hail a cab, we can look down at our phone. We don't even THINK about riding the bus (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/14/surprise-elon-musk-is...). We don't have to go into the store, we can have an Instacart employee leave them at our house without a trace that someone existed at all. We're stratifying into the Eloi and the Morlocks, but separated by the glass screen of a phone instead of layers of earth.
Conversely, if you already feel you have nothing in common with others, then why not vote (if you have everything) to give them nothing, or (if you have nothing) why not vote to seize their property and distribute it?
It’s not income inequality, it’s opportunity inequality. Which manifests itself as income (/wealth) inequality, so that’s the proxy most people use.
Once you lose the feeling of others being in your tribe and that they might also be interested in looking out for you, it’s very, very difficult to regain that. Even worse is once members of the tribe start assuming others are part of an enemy tribe.
I assume you're referring to the neocons who lied us into the war in Iraq (and keep us there to this day), the Wall Street bankers & executives who created the 2008 financial crisis and the politicians who bailed them out at the people's expense, the military/intelligence and tech industry figures who set up a vast domestic mass spying infrastructure and then hounded the people who leaked it into hiding or prison, and the media apparatus which has run cover for all these sorts of things, right?
To me it often looks like a lot of what is described as "attacking trust" is actually just pointing out that it's already been worn down to a nub. We wouldn't have to deal with the emperor being naked if those darn troublemakers would just stop pointing out he's not wearing any clothes.
The counterculture left is a very broad category, with some legitimate and organic elements mixed up with some very confused, self-indulgent, or aimlessly subversive ones. But it didn't fire the first shots in the attack on trust, not by a long shot.
There was a time when journalists at least attempted to be independent:
https://conversationswithslava.substack.com/p/coming-soon
Glenn Greenwald:
https://reason.com/2021/01/23/journalists-are-authoritarians...
> Did you vote for Donald Trump in the last election?
> I didn't vote. It's ironic: That's the one old journalism trope that I agree with, which is that if you vote, you psychologically become too connected to a politician. I prefer to just keep my distance.
They're a dying breed.
And it was never the case that journalists were 100% objective and unbiased. That's impossible. But there was a point in time when they at least made the attempt. Avoided the appearance of impropriety.
If you want people to trust you, try being trustworthy.
There are dozens/hundreds/thousands of journalists around the world who are perfectly capable of reporting in a way that is useful, insightful, factual, while still voting in elections. I don't want journalists that I read to avoid the appearance of impropriety, I want them to tell me about the world in ways that I can't find out for myself. And I want them to vote.
I'm actually generally disgusted by meeting journalists who claim to not have opinions about the things they report on. I would hope that their opinions would be complex, because when you know enough about most things in the world, you realize that most things are pretty complicated and there generally aren't simple answers. But this BS of "I just try to report on what I find out, I don't really have an opinion" is, for me, a shorthand for "I'm too afraid of drawing conclusions about anything, which means I can't help my readers to do that either".
Historians have the time and context to make judgments and draw conclusions.
Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour. The story may still be happening by the time the piece is published. You don't have all the information, so any opinion will inherently be misinformed.
Report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else.
It's possible that what we really need is a separate class of people in between the two. Reporters who provide facts on things that are actively happening, and commentators who provide opinion on things that have finished happening, e.g. a month later once the facts are better established and there has been time to do a thorough investigation, but not years or decades after the fact.
The problem is how to prevent the two from merging together and creating what we have now.
People reporting on, for example: the move towards renewable energy supplies, the redistricting/closure of Chicago public schools over the last decade, gerrymandering processes in a half-dozen states ... in fact, I'd wager than the majority of things that journalists write about are not "hot news" at all.
You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.
But now it sounds like you're agreeing with me. So the ones who are reporting on stories that are still actively happening should hold off on the opinion, right?
> You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.
"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.
>Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour.
This is not the definition of a journalist.
>"100% is impossible so 90% is no different than 3%" is the perfect as the enemy of the good.
This is written as if reduction of journalistic opinion is the goal. I don't agree this is a goal. I'm not interested in a reduction of subjectivity in journalism. I'm interested in an increase in factual, expansive, multi-viewpoint reporting and analysis. If that comes with 3% journalistic opinion (whatever that means) or 83%, I'm fine with it.
What's not ok is journalistic subjectivity filling in for factual, expansive, multi-viewpoint reporting. However, there are plenty of journalists who are clearly capable of avoiding this issue.
Exactly. But that doesn't mean that journalists (or anyone else, as that's important in many non-journalistic contexts) don't or shouldn't have opinions.
Rather the goal should be to report the facts without bias.
That may sound like hair-splitting, but it isn't. We're humans and we all have opinions, biases and ideas of our own.
But when it comes to reporting news or just facts/results (e.g., revenue figures, safety/efficacy testing results, etc.) the idea is to consciously set aside those biases.
Some do that better than others, which prsents an arbitrage opportunity that allows those with no desire or intention to report honestly/factually to insert blatantly false and/or misleading information.
Quality reporting of news and fact doesn't require a lack of opinion or bias about the subject at hand. Rather it requires the desire, willingness and ability to set aside those things in support of trustworthy reporting.
There are many reasons why that arbitrage opportunity exists, but the existence of opinions on the part of those reporting isn't a major contributor, IMHO.
As the old saw goes, "opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one."
If people are running around lying with partisan motivations, the most important thing you can have is a source of information trusted to be at least mostly objective. Someone to take the time to do the investigation and tell you what really happened in any given case, and carry good faith arguments from each side, not institutions that pick a side and defend them no matter what.
Because people lose trust in institutions with an obvious bias. And then what do you have? Twitter?
Glenn Greenwald on Trump during Biden inauguration: "Trump left the White House about as weak, cucked, and submissive as it’s possible for a grown adult to scamper away." I really dont know what he wanted Trump to do, he was way more critical of Biden and democrats then of Trump last months. Leaving during innaguration without causing issues sounds like exactly what is expected.
But the very same day, he called the "chills" tween inappropriate, claimed that such tweet is overly emotional and equated that tweet with being on public tv. Glenn Greenwald is last person that has any grounds to pontificate about objectivity and bias.
It is the responsibility of each participant to criticize the status quo and those who have taken up responsibility and power, or else they keep building on brittle, hierarchical foundations until everything crashes down.
Yes, there are populists who spread political lies, insecure managers who default to micro-management, bureaucratic systems that slow everything down and disillusioned workers. Their common trait is mistrust: They often have been hurt by those that they should be trusting, they are not being heard and sometimes they see through the bullshit. The best case is that there is simply a lack of real communication, education and direct involvement, because that problem is solvable.
It is very simple: for trust to grow and stabilize, both parties need to care and invest in each other. There is no shortcut, no trick and no amount of marketing, propaganda or talk will get either side out of this. That means both sides need to admit their mistakes, be vulnerable, caring, hopeful and most importantly honest and transparent.
(What is a non-special interest? Business interests.)
It is completely illogical to immediately conclude that people who are complaining and pointing out that things are not right are necessarily themselves the cause of all that strife. Maybe they were responding to antecedent causes?
Ironically, business interests are the original special interests that Adam Smith warned about: “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 9)
The problem is with the rhetoric. You don't need to daemonize the system to reform it. For example, AFAIU the Women's Suffrage movement didn't take that course. Nor did the early mid-century Civil Rights movement. Later in the century (e.g. with the Vietnam War protests) radical Leftist academic discourse went mainstream. Conservative academics and pundits started adopting similar rhetoric not long after (consider Reagan's anti-government slogan), which really went mainstream in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s with Gingrich's Republican Revolution campaigning strategies.
The rhetoric has essentially become nihilistic. People like Chomsky are as much to blame as anyone else. But you don't become someone as famous as Chomsky without radical, absolutist rhetoric. In that sense academia in general is to blame. Though, there were other dynamics, e.g. opinion journalism, that brought the academic discourse into the popular discourse.
The real problem is that both of those needs are self-fulfilling: if people expect their politicians to be tacitly dishonest and incompetent, they're fine with electing openly dishonest and incompetent politicians because "at least they're open about it".
Could you expand upon why? You mentioned your own perceptions on "attacking trust", but I didn't find much of that (or any assignment of blame to anyone) expressed in the parent comment.
Everything else on the other hand: https://news.yahoo.com/ex-gop-pollster-frank-luntz-172755768...
> “Bret, I couldn't control them. They just started yelling at each other, and it would take me two minutes to say to them, 'stop' - to put my hand up to the camera like I did right there for them to get control of themselves," Luntz said
Really? Why reach back, in the case of neocons, to the early aughts? We need somebody that many people trusted who abused that trust, or someone attacking the trustworthiness of trustworthy people. I'm pretty sure you can find examples just in the last year. These are probably the ones the OP had in mind.
Instead they look for their own solutions.
Cynicism at this level does nothing but ensure that your worst take on government is what we actually get.
It's not cynicism, it a simple fact, backed up by history, of what happens when nobody trusts their government, when a the government of a people deviate too much from the interests of those people and making their lives more difficult instead of less, when all of that goes too far.
This can lead to reform. It can also lead to instability. It doesn't matter whether a country is "developed" or not. Developed countries can still have corrupt governments that are not responsive to their people, civil wars, etc. It can happen quick, or take a long time.
The stakes are high. Can enough of us agree on how to fix our problems? I don't know. I think that removing corporate and union money from politics would be a good first step, which is what most other countries already have done. Beyond that I wonder if we've grown our federal government too far past it's design specifications, expecting whoever is president this year to fix all our problems, leaving the other 49% of people very upset.
The locals here openly accept money for voting. Politicians and bureaucrats are widely regarded as liars and cheats. The government's authority is checked by continuous protests. Government officials don't want to rock the boat or create further instability.
Similarly, the people have very little interest in politics. There's not constant bickering or hyperbolic demonization. Political fights don't permeate every sphere of life.
Everyone mostly stays in their own lane.
Yes, corruption is a problem here. Corruption is also a problem in the US. However the barrier to entry is higher. K street lobbyists don't come cheaply.
Yes, the government is ineffective. The question is, do the people want it to be effective? Even the private sphere is similarly ineffective. That's just a cultural norm, separate from the relationship to government.
And this is not a problem of developing countries only! Developed countries have had their governments turn on them in a surprisingly short time. It can get to the point where a people can't change their government, the government being the institution with all the money, power, and guns.
I feel like for people of my vintage (born in the early 80s) the whole war on terror was extremely caustic to my generational cohort. It was a weird environment where every trusted institution in society lined-up in support of both wars, and then actively worked to sideline any debate and discussion. The Dixie Chicks got infamously cancelled for saying something completely milquetoast against the Bush and the war.
And just as we thought we were turning a corner on the War on Terror the financial crash of 2008 hit. Here, it was another highly regarded institution: finance. Young people might not remember this, but finance used to be the industry you would track into if you were a high achieving member of the intelligentsia. The industry was viewed as being staffed to the gills with the best-and-brightest and was afforded anodyne coverage from the establishment media. So naturally, when they imploded the country and then went on TV and blamed it on losers with mortgages[1], and proceeded to face zero real consequences because the justice system never bothered putting laws in place to protect regular people and felt such actions would "punish people for taking risks" (which as an aside: if you are just externalizing risk to 3rd parties you aren't actually "encouraging people to take risks")
It's a trope, but social trust has been eroded because people feel like there's basically "meritocratic" caste system in this country: if you go to the right school, get into the right industry, and make enough money you are granted a measure of impunity when you externalize harm that you quite frankly shouldn't have.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-Jw-5Kx8k
Speaking as someone who was born before the 80s, my perception is that you have misread this situation. The rise of finance was a consequence of the "greed is good" 80s, which meant that disproportionate rewards went to financial industries, which was both a cause and a consequence of the collapse of every other career open to the intelligentsia.
You see a similar situation on a smaller scale in the rise of Silicon Valley's start up culture, where that is seen as the most valid or only career choice in spite of asymptotically levelling benefits.
The demonstration that "the best and brightest" operating open loop without regulation leads to spectacular busts is left as an exercise to the reader.
I've assume that Nixon taking the U.S. off the gold standard precipitated the growth in the finance industry, the government needs banks to grow money supply and debt, right?
"Greed is good" may have just been an add campaign designed to justify what was already happening, a frenzy of finance, consumerism, and debt that has not stopped yet.
This is a description of the absolute opposite of what "meritocratic" means.
Well, its actually exactly what the use that brought “meritocracy” into the common lexicon was referring to, though that use was satirical.
I do not read the GP as being satirical in their use, although the use of quotes makes it somewhat unclear.
This gives a good background:
https://kottke.org/17/03/the-satirical-origins-of-the-merito...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/21/michael-youn...
“When the word meritocracy made its first recorded appearance, in 1956 in the obscure British journal Socialist Commentary, it was a term of abuse, describing a ludicrously unequal state that surely no one would want to live in. Why, mused the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, would you want to give more prizes to the already prodigiously gifted? Instead, he argued, we should think about “cross-grading”: how to give those doing difficult or unattractive jobs more leisure time, and share out wealth more equitably so we all have a better quality of life and a happier society.” - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/merito...
“Jean Floud, Alan Fox, and Michael Young had a number of commonalities. Jean Floud taught at the London School of Economics while Michael Young was pursuing his PhD. Alan Fox was a member of that 1950s circle of left-leaning thinkers that included Jean Froud and Michael Young. Since all three are now dead, it's tough to say which amongst those three coined the word "meritocracy". Michael Young had already been evincing thoughts along the lines that led to his publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy since 1951. Most references go with Michael Young as the originator of the word. One last thing is certain: The term as coined by one of those three was anything but complimentary. It was instead quite derogatory.” - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/34390/did-the-t...
“the magazine Socialist Commentary (to which Young contributed) the industrial sociologist Alan Fox put the word in quotation marks and defined it as ‘the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure’.”.
1. Young says he created the word, and we have no reason to doubt that (as per Guardian link).
2. It was used in a negative sense in 1956
I think you are cherry-picking. If you wish to disagree with the generally held beliefs, then I think you should pick a better reference than one comment on an Internet page.
In practice you get into the right schools because you belong to the right social circles, you get into the right industry because you come from the right schools, or are in the right social circles, and you make enough money because you got into the right schools and industry or inherited by virtue of being born into the right social circles...
It was not necessarily about who was going to get rich. It was about no longer picking decision makers from the children of the existing decision makers.
It ran into two problems. The first was that we didn't really think through how we were going to establish merit in the first place. What's happened there is that we've adopted a bunch of stupid shorthand ("they graduated Harvard") that essentially is undifferentiated from what we were doing before we tried to build a meritocracy. We never found (maybe never tried to find) any way of establishing that a kid with a degree from a public university in Kansas was actually going to be better at national infrastructure planning than the one from Harvard (or not, for that matter).
The second problem is that the people who benefited from the meritocratic goal (I am one of them) have worked quite hard to pull up the ladders behind them (us). We've erected all sorts of barriers (but mostly cost) to ensure that only our descendants and direct beneficiaries get access to the social institutions that are now used to define "merit".
Realistically, this is just a reversion to things in the early 20th century. The system of trust we've built up is only about 50 or 60 years old, and it's decayed as people took it for granted. Hopefully we're noticing it now.
People like to think they live in unique times, but they don’t.
I actually remember the weird feeling I got when I moved from my parents home (where we didn't lock our doors at night) to my first apartment (where I definitely did).
I realized solving for a « no trust » environment is extremely expensive (even purely computationally if you look at proof of work as a solution).
Most of the times, deciding to start putting a little trust in the design saves a lot of complexity...
[1] https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/
https://www.radiogunk.com/forums/index.php?threads/1950s-ame...
Where's the broken glass? The needles, the poop? The stumbling drunks harassing the young women? The masses of tents where children used to play?
What the fuck has happened to us?
The President, and elements of the 101st Airborne Division had to be involved.
And I mean good for all races - in terms of real-world material and communal circumstances - as opposed to abstract "rights" (other peoples obligations) that mostly benefit a small upper middle class.
And it was 132.1 million in 1940.
I'm sure they still have this environment in some countries where no one wants to visit.
> https://www.radiogunk.com/forums/index.php?threads/1950s-ame...
Except for the clothes (which aren't very different), that could be a picture of downtown Placerville today (well, not today because of the weather, but…) Or a million other places in today's USA.
> Where’s the broken glass? The needles, the poop?
The same place as the non-white people, who are disproportionately also the people cleaning up the places where the white people live without it.
> The stumbling drunks harassing the young women?
Most everywhere, including indoors. That was normal, accepted, unremarkable behavior.
A few photos that do not show the winos or the dog crap on every sidewalk do not prove there wasn't any. It just proves the existence of a few photos. Nobody, for example, picked up someone else's poop off the streets and brought it home in a little bag like they do today, and there were just as many dog owners in Manhattan in the 1950s as there are now. The signs required you to 'curb your dog' which meant leave it in the gutter, but it usually ended up on the sidewalk with all the gum, spit, old newspapers, and pigeon droppings. People went to jail for being homosexual or using birth control. Credit cards and consumer loans were illegal in the US until the 1960s so everything was cash-only and muggings were a real and present threat. Racism was overt, explicit, widespread, and rampant.
I think what you see of the 1950s is selection bias. Times are good now. Better than the 1950s because we stopped hiding stuff and lying to ourselves and have tried to make things better instead.
It would be like judging current reality by Instagram photos, so must be that everyone is fit and travels to beautiful destinations ... well homeless people don't put their photos on Instagram.
This is a surprising hot take in these times. I wholeheartedly disagree.
I understand what you're saying and yes I believe obviously we have more pictures/proof of existence (connected world) and yes there are a lot of areas where we have made progress but is "trust" in general better ?
I don't want to make this political but it is the elephant in the room right now. There is a whole side of a political party + media completely dismissing and grouping the whole other side in simplistic and alienating ways.
I'm not for either political side and I'm not a trump supporter. (Sadly I have to add this disclaimer, it's incredibly saddening)
I think someone else in this thread mentioned China as a high-trustful society. I think that goes to show that we're not talking about overall "better" and overall "accepting" but specifically "trust".
Maybe we find out that trust is in conflict with the other values we hold ? but to say that general trust is high now seems really naive.
I know it's an outlier but you don't need media selectiveness to show you San Fransico's homelessness problem , in fact I see more of that from word of mouth/first hand experience. I personally have seen signs of deteriorating trust in my "neighborhood". I don't want to put up strawmen but maybe it depends on how much your view is based on media vs what you see ? in which case where you live would probably have a huge impact in what your views on this are ?
I hate using that because I don't want to say that some people are too privileged to see this, imo obvious, change. As someone who was raised in a rough neighborhood (poor/high crime rate) and then moved out to a better place, I was shocked how my world view changed and I really thought the whole world had moved to a better place until I went back and realized there are still people in that "old world". It was incredibly shocking that I believed some of these things and now I'm vigilant and accepting that my world view (large part to where I live) tints the world.
I obviously don't know the solution and maybe "trust" is a value we have to lose to have some of our more progressive values or maybe it's just harder to incorporate those other values with trust.
I think it's fair to say that in the 50's communities were more trusting (for some, racism/monoculture related I'm sure). Not better but more trusting (huge emphasis on for some).
In practice, distrusting is a matter of worrying about the minority. If you lock anything, you're worried about 1% or 0.1%, maybe less, who will legitimately do something bad. But, the consequences are so heavy that people apply that distrust to everyone.
When a mistrust dynamic sets in, how can it be reversed?
Are you able to share an anecdote on this?
Unfortunately, the incentives that rule our society are pushing us away from this. We need to align incentives properly if we're going to have any hope of building trust again. ex:
1. The internet, as a technology, is amazing but functions as a possible bullhorn for everyone, without filter. It does not reward the best possible or most positive idea, only the one that grabs the most attention.
2. Shock and outrage drive the clicks/views/attention and everyone gets paid on these metrics.
3. Social media companies thrive on and optimize for attention metrics. The longer you use them, at the expense of things like participating in your community and building relationships, the more "successful" they are and the more $$$ they get
4. Society has moved towards more specialized play and communities. We participate in fewer and fewer activities where we just randomly encounter strangers.
5. Our current election system rewards divisiveness because it drives turnout. The candidate that can do the best job doesn't win-the candidate that can get the most votes does.
Possibly unpopular view: Encouraging religious participation would go a long way to help. Whether you believe or do not, religion helps align society away from purely individualistic pursuits and more towards a "corporate good".
How does that work out in 3rd world countries where there's high levels of religious membership and high levels of angry young men
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...
"Is religion important in your daily life"
There seems to be a correlation between countries with corrupt/untrusted governments and high religious importance.
Compare the Corruption Perceptions Index 2019 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index] with importance of religion [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...]
And you don't get an exact line, but there's certainly a trend there.
Those with high corruption and relatively low religion are ex Soviet/Commumist (Azerbajan, Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Hungary, Belarus, Cuba have <50% religion and >50 corrupt)
There's always outliers, like Singapore (70% religious but only 15 corrupt / 85 notcorrupt), but there's a trend
https://i.imgur.com/oFiAbAN.png
Yes, when the system is very corrupt, you need to have some alternative way to build community, cohesion, and stability.
In communist Poland, the Church has been the center of the opposition to the communist system. The system has been very corrupt, but people found solace, community and the support in the Church. When John Paul II was elected the Pope, the Polish people were reinvigorated, and rallied around him, creating Solidarity movement etc. The communist system has recognized the power of Church, and fought it viciously: for example, it murdered Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest famous for his association with Solidarity. This made Polish people rally around the Church even more.
After the fall of communism, the Church no longer needed to provide this form of support, and over time, as the civil society has improved, the Church has used the legitimacy and respect it has built during communism to push its own agenda, which in past years has been rather divisive instead of uniting. Religion is not universal social good: its value depends on both the historical circumstance, and the actual content of practice and attitudes of leadership. It can be extremely beneficial, uniting society in ways impossible otherwise, but it can also be extremely damaging, to a deadly degree.
There is some insight here if you dig deeper into the data.
1. https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-07-17/these-are-most-religi...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
3. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/12/how-do-amer...
Like other technologies, it can be used for both good and evil and will be very effective doing so.
Just throwing this out there: I'm a believer in Christianity and love to connect w/ people about this kinda stuff. If anyone wants to talk more, email is in profile.
Also, if high trust drives economic growth, and wealthier societies become less religious, you would get that same pattern. I think to determine which is driving which, you would need to look at the relation between religion now and trust levels in the past, and vice versa.
Maybe sports leagues or mandatory national (or state) service?
Companies are moving more and more towards metrics, which means the nice guy that helps everyone out but isn't as great with his metrics gets screwed, vs. the asshole who optimizes only for the metrics while screwing everyone over gets ahead. Once the nice guy has seen this happen over and over, even the nicest person breaks, gives in, and starts playing by the rules of the system, which by design incentivize working towards the measurable goals.
That means when leaders are speaking, they need to monitor how their words are perceived, and resolve misunderstandings quickly.
Also, overcommunicate and share evidence, and be honest and direct.
What I'll add is how this seems to show up in HN discussions. A frequent trope here is an article about someone or some company doing something that pisses people off, then the comments debating whether it's the incentive-maker's fault and it's not wrong for people to maximize according to the incentives provided. The whole thing is a microcosm of this lack of trust.
It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's lost isn't the decision to trust, it's the whole framing. In a perfect trust society, taking the compete option in a prisoner's dilemma would be seen as immoral. In a zero trust society, the whole choice reduces to analyzing the payoff matrix. That's what's lost. It's the change from a framing around 'cooperation is the moral action' towards a framing around payoff matrices.
I'd argue that on HN, the general sentiment is on the payoff matrix end of the spectrum.
1. Loss is mentioned a lot but not mentioned is linking the asymmetric movement of trust to the cognitive bias of loss aversion.
2. Aside from Putnam, another take worth mentioning is Steven M. R. Covey's The Speed of Trust which speaks to the link of trust to performance within organizations.
3. The interface, boundary or contract is a common method of encapsulating trust. For example, since ancient times people have used "silent trade" in which trade goods are placed in the open and left behind. This requires a significant but finite amount of trust, minimal amount of social cohesion and provides a great deal of communication.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36076.The_Speed_of_Trust
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade
I see bureaucracy as a technology we use to replace trust, but most times it just results in an unnecessary waste of resources.
This was something that surprised me about China when I visited, although maybe it shouldn't have.
The level of community and how close people are seemed unreal, coming from the US.
Maybe part of it is the "forced" community - city/urban blocks gated off with single entrance/exit ways, in some cases. I'm not sure.
But the dancing every night in the street in big cities, the elderly gathering to play Mahjongg in dedicated buildings, and other things, really opened my eyes about how far apart we are.
All of that exists in Christian churches and their deep (but often quiet) influence over many social efforts and programs across the United States. Have you visited one recently?
Rally is also a pretty tight community as well, everyone is always there to help you press on regardless, whether its a tow out of a ditch on stage or lending a spare for a blown fuse in service.
Regarding Rally - yeah I know - I drive stage. I've had my fellow competitors help me fix my car between stages, there is no family like the rally community.
EDIT: By the way, China has these things too. I was thinking of the things I wish we had.
Systems of maintaining trust are very important, but having a trustworthy culture and populace is just as important. In the words of William Easterly, these systems can either be virtuous cycles or vicious cycles. Either trust flourishes or mistrust flourishes and going from one to the other is challenging because of its game-theoretical properties.
All of what Uber and Airbnb do, had most definitely existed before. What Uber and Airbnb brought was making it much more efficient, convenient and safe. Uber and Airbnb use some level of social trust, but they also provide extra trust on their own, which comes from the rating function they provide. Before Uber and Airbnb, if you had bad experience in a cab or a rented lodging, there was little recourse, and the service provides had little incentive to behave well. Now, they can easily get kicked off the platform after too many complaints.
Trust, morality and legality are not the same thing. Sure, Uber was operating illegally in many places, but millions of people used these illegal services and saw nothing wrong with it. They didn’t see using an unlicensed cab company as anything bad.
Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it morally wrong, or socially destructive. There have been plenty of cases where it’s the laws that are morally wrong and socially destructive. If you want to argue that Uber destroyed trust, you can’t simply say it broke the law and call it a day, you need also to argue that the law they broke was good and desirable.
So, what was the evil and socially destructive thing that Uber actually did?
People baited into purchasing new cars and screwed over car insurance sure did. But more importantly, everyone saw that the legal system in cities around the world isn't powerful enough to deal with direct offense. We saw you can build a multi-billion dollar megacorp not on just regulatory arbitrage, but plainly illegal business - and nobody got hold accountable (except for an off driver caught without proper insurance). All of this fundamentally erodes the trust in the rule of law - the trust on which modern society stands.
> Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it morally wrong
It doesn't, but it was illegal and greedy and exploitative, and dragged people into gig economy which arguably is itself morally questionable.
> If you want to argue that Uber destroyed trust, you can’t simply say it broke the law and call it a day, you need also to argue that the law they broke was good and desirable.
Taxi laws differ by the city. "Taxi mafia" was mostly a phenomenon of some places in the US; in many cities, taxis worked just well. Uber violated law almost everywhere they got, without any care for whether the law was useful or justifiable. It wasn't some act of civil disobedience - they did it for pure profit, to undercut competition and dominate the local markets they entered.
> So, what was the evil and socially destructive thing that Uber actually did?
Now, that's actually a topic much bigger than what I outlined above. The mischief of Uber's sociopathic management has been well publicized and well documented over the past 5+ years. It was a recurring topic on HN for a long time, too. I suggest starting with these two links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber#Criticism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber#Controversies
(Though they do seem to downplay the insurance issues and threats against journalists.)
It's not that it wasn't powerful enough. The governments could fight Uber just fine, and they in fact did in many places. What actually happened was instead the government in most places have figured that the customers liked the illegal service so much, that if they do fight it, they will actually reduce, instead of increasing their legitimacy. Imagine the government tomorrow decides to ban shaking hands. Would prosecuting the hand-shakers increase the trust in government and its legitimacy? No: people would rightly conclude that it's the government that's wrong, and it doesn't deserve trust or charity here. This is the case with many aspects of the regulatory state: its legitimacy depends on people being unaware of how crippling and authoritarian it is in many situations. Making stupid laws and keeping people unaware of their stupidity is no way to build trust.
> It doesn't, but it was illegal and greedy and exploitative, and dragged people into gig economy which arguably is itself morally questionable.
Taxis have always been "gig economy". Even before Uber, few taxi drivers were salaried employees. Most of them were independent operators, or working on commission.
> Taxi laws differ by the city. "Taxi mafia" was mostly a phenomenon of some places in the US; in many cities, taxis worked just well.
Which cities were these? In every city I am aware off, on both sides of the pond, traditional taxis have not been able to compete very well with Uber. Sure, in some places the taxis were less bad than in others, but almost everywhere they were overpriced and untrustworthy. Have you tried paying with card in a taxi in Poland before Uber came up? Somehow, despite MasterCard sticker on the window, the payment terminal always happened to be broken... Also, try taking a non-Uber cab from the airport in Warsaw or Krakow.
I don't think it's that, unless you think the dissatisfaction expressed by officials is just posturing. I believe that it's just because bureaucracy moves slowly - and the core of Uber's strategy was to corner the market and gain sympathy of the riders before local regulators could gear up - at which point they'd be fighting their own citizen. Basically, pitting people against their local governments.
> Imagine the government tomorrow decides to ban shaking hands. Would prosecuting the hand-shakers increase the trust in government and its legitimacy? No: people would rightly conclude that it's the government that's wrong, and it doesn't deserve trust or charity here.
I get your example and it's a fair point - but I must say we generally did just that in 2020 with COVID restrictions :). That itself initially impacted the trust positively, but I guess it's easier to imagine the threat of a pandemic than a threat of an underpaid and uninsured driver operating an illegal cab having an accident.
> In every city I am aware off, on both sides of the pond, traditional taxis have not been able to compete very well with Uber. Sure, in some places the taxis were less bad than in others, but almost everywhere they were overpriced and untrustworthy.
I'm not saying they weren't in need of some competitive pressure, but generally, taxis weren't able to compete very well with Uber because it's really hard to compete with an international corporation that just ignores the law, while subsidizing its offerings from practically infinite VC budget. Whether the existing taxi services in any given city were good or bad or in between, it didn't matter - they didn't stand a chance.
> Have you tried paying with card in a taxi in Poland before Uber came up? Somehow, despite MasterCard sticker on the window, the payment terminal always happened to be broken... Also, try taking a non-Uber cab from the airport in Warsaw or Krakow.
I am from Kraków, I was born there, and I moved out only ~3 years ago. I've been riding taxis ever since childhood. From my perspective, network taxis weren't all that bad (it was common knowledge you don't use the "entrepreneurs" that park outside airports and railway stations, you probably even remember a TV show that revealed how they scam you if they think you're a tourist). Uber itself didn't introduce anything substantial over what iCar did a decade before. And while iCar was also playing a bit loose with the regulations, and there were some conflict with the local taxi networks (I recall articles about some tire slashing), they've ultimately managed to settle it through courts and iCar could deliver its value proposition completely legally. Uber didn't even bother.
And what's the problem with that? The government is meant to serve people, not to rule over them. If the governments can't push their power, because the people will hate it and won't allow it, that's good: that's why we have representative democracy in the first place. If one can improve the lives of the people and make them happier by subverting the law, this is really damning for the government.
> That itself initially impacted the trust positively
Yes, and then people saw the government restrictions mostly for what they were: a safety theater.
> but I guess it's easier to imagine the threat of a pandemic than a threat of an underpaid and uninsured driver operating an illegal cab having an accident.
I don't think that risk of car accident is something so completely foreign that people entering a cab don't know what they are getting into. More importantly, even if you grant the government the authority to take away people's freedom to do things the government considers too risky, purely out of paternalism, the fact is that the government had no reason whatsoever to believe that Uber cabs are less safe: if you want to argue that the government is better informed about the risks of riding a regular cab vs. Uber than a regular person, it had better actually be better informed.
> I'm not saying they weren't in need of some competitive pressure, but generally, taxis weren't able to compete very well with Uber because it's really hard to compete with an international corporation that just ignores the law,
If the law is so onerous, and Uber violating it results in its repeal (or at least ceasing enforcement), then instead of complaining, the taxi companies should rejoice, and thank Uber for the great service it provided.
This is of course ridiculous, because the reason traditional taxi companies are unhappy about Uber breaking the laws precisely because the laws help protect their business and extract rent at the expense of the consumers. Fighting against rent-seekers is a good thing, and rent-seeking is another reason why not all laws governments pass are good, and why it's not always morally wrong to violate them.
> while subsidizing its offerings from practically infinite VC budget. Whether the existing taxi services in any given city were good or bad or in between, it didn't matter - they didn't stand a chance.
Weren't you just a moment ago saying that the drivers were "underpaid"? If it ain't the drivers who are subsidized, then who is, exactly?
> From my perspective, network taxis weren't all that bad (it was common knowledge you don't use the "entrepreneurs" that park outside airports and railway stations, you probably even remember a TV show that revealed how they scam you if they think you're a tourist).
They were expensive, they didn't always arrive when called, you had to always be on the lookout to not be scammed, the vehicles were old, often dirty, the drivers were rude, the payment was cash only, and many more. I remember that, and Uber was improvement on every single metric. Cabs are much better now, precisely because Uber forces them to behave better or die.
> Uber itself didn't introduce anything substantial over what iCar did a decade before.
If so, how did Uber gain any foothold at all? If it's all VC subsidies, they'll run out, and in the meantime, the customers keep benefitting from subsidized rides.
People run to below-costs services like cats to catnip. You can make anyone happy by selling them $10 bills for $1. The problem is, what happens when all the competitors are gone, and the reason for below-cost offering ends?
> More importantly, even if you grant the government the authority to take away people's freedom to do things the government considers too risky, purely out of paternalism, the fact is that the government had no reason whatsoever to believe that Uber cabs are less safe
Of course they had, and we grant such authorities all the time. There's a special type of insurance covering commercial transport of people, it's illegal to engage in commercial transport of people without such insurance (and for good reason, if accident happens, then both the driver and the passengers are screwed); the problem, in Uber's case, was too little enforcement, and Uber shielding itself behind "independent contractor" veil and pretending they didn't encourage it.
> the reason traditional taxi companies are unhappy about Uber breaking the laws precisely because the laws help protect their business and extract rent at the expense of the consumers
These laws didn't came out of the blue and weren't just instances of random regulatory capture. The laws creating barriers to entry and (in some places) granting taxi companies limited monopoly are the flip side of the legal requirements that come with the taxi service being treated as a part of public transport infrastructure. Things like the legal requirement for taking passengers in unprofitable locations, or having cars in the fleet adapted for the needs of people with limited mobility. Things Uber did not do, because it didn't have to (and couldn't, really, with their "just a platform" business setup). Instead, Uber offered subsidized rides for able-bodied people in city centres, and no rides at all for elderly or disabled or people living further away.
> Weren't you just a moment ago saying that the drivers were "underpaid"? If it ain't the drivers who are subsidized, then who is, exactly?
The rides were. The prices you paid for a ride were sometimes less than the driver would get from Uber, but Uber wasn't going to pay the drivers more than they needed to (at least not until some follow-up competition came).
> If it's all VC subsidies, they'll run out
That's why Uber is betting so hard on self-driving. They've been operating on a loss for many years now, and they know they can't sustain it.
> and in the meantime, the customers keep benefitting from subsidized rides.
The meantime always ends, eventually. Leaving behind a thoroughly destroyed market. C.f. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/
You don't seem to be following Uber financials. Uber makes good profits on the rides. They are losing money on their attempts to expand into other segments (like Eats), and R&D.
> Of course they had, and we grant such authorities all the time. There's a special type of insurance covering commercial transport of people, (...)
That's because drivers who transport people tend to drive much more than average, and so the insurers want to charge them higher premiums even if they are safer on per-km basis. Either way, your argument in no way proves that the authorities had any reason to believe that Uber is less safe than regular taxis.
> These laws didn't came out of the blue and weren't just instances of random regulatory capture. The laws creating barriers to entry and (in some places) granting taxi companies limited monopoly are the flip side of the legal requirements that come with the taxi service being treated as a part of public transport infrastructure.
Rent-seekers always hide behind excuses that they are actually serving important public function.
> Things like the legal requirement for taking passengers in unprofitable locations, or having cars in the fleet adapted for the needs of people with limited mobility. Things Uber did not do, because it didn't have to (and couldn't, really, with their "just a platform" business setup).
Uber actually does all of these. In many cities, you can specifically hire wheelchair accessible vehicle via Uber. Moreover, drivers cannot just refuse unprofitable rides, because they don't know where they going before accepting them, in a way taxi drivers often can and do.
But, more importantly, if the government wants this service to be provided, it should just pay for it, instead of instituting a hidden tax on cab riders. The riders pay more, the profit reaped by cab companies is typically more than the actual cost that the government would have to pay if they just paid for it directly, and on top of that, the deadweight loss is immense, as seen by the huge expansion of people transport services whenever Uber enters the market.
> The rides were. The prices you paid for a ride were sometimes less than the driver would get from Uber, but Uber wasn't going to pay the drivers more than they needed to (at least not until some follow-up competition came).
So how were the drivers "underpaid", if they were paid as much as they were needed to? Also, just a moment ago you said the competition was not possible, and yet now you claim some came up, and actually forced Uber to increase wage. Can you make up your mind?
> That's why Uber is betting so hard on self-driving. They've been operating on a loss for many years now, and they know they can't sustain it.
As I noted above, this is very much false, and is extremely apparent if you spend even a moment looking at financials. They operate ride segment at a profit, and they very much can sustain it. They cannot sustain their valuation if they downscale their R&D and expansion to other segment, and just focus on rides, their share price will get a good hit, but as a business on the cash flow basis, they are very much solid and are able to operate rides indefinitely.
> The meantime always ends, eventually. Leaving behind a thoroughly destroyed market.
This is very much false, empirically. The subsidies for Uber rides in US cities are pretty much over, while the market is very healthy.
Well, unfortunately it's still unthinkable in a lot of third-world countries nowadays, and it's precisely because of lack of trust.
Pretty much everything you list was, at one time, somewhere between commonplace and not-infrequent. It was the commercialization that brought with it the divide.
There seems to be a powerful, possibly instinctive, connection between A: being able to turn to someone for help when you're in need and B: considering that someone to be trustworthy. In 2020, we saw this writ large, when the United States became the global epicenter of conspiracy theories about SARS-CoV-2. The general population's trust in the medical system and the government is a huge unaccounted-for externality that can have serious effects on our economic and political stability.
Furthermore, one of the most lamented, supposedly idiosyncratic, problems with the US medical system is the sheer amount of paperwork required to do almost anything. It seems like an excellent example of this:
>We need to trust the people around us in order to live happy, productive lives. If we don’t trust them, we end up having to find costly ways to formalize our relationships.
(Opponents of guaranteed universal healthcare in the United States will generally agree that we do not have a "free" market in healthcare, but it is usually harder to convince them it will never be politically possible in light of the above.)
There must be an element of "cover your ass" in there. Usually, excess of papers indicates someone's wariness of possible averse consequences down the line.
Cynically I would say that politically we have optimized for profit and bureaucracy. Would I be wrong? I'd say that this is because our democracy is imperfect - money, corporations, and corruption are driving too much of our politics.
It's always bothered me that so many people would presume to fix health care at the federal level. For a while Congress has been one of the least trusted institutions in the country. Why do we expect them to fix anything? The Affordable Care Act was anything but that, it did nothing to control costs or fix all the pricing transparency problems. Poor folks get a free yearly visit and screenings but have to pay a few thousand dollar deductible when they are sick (money they typically don't have) before they get any covered care, while the government subsidized insurance premiums go right past the recipients directly into the pockets of the insurance companies.
I'd be more comfortable seeing something like many of the countries in Europe have, price controls on drugs and simple standards set at a national level, with implementation details, tax collection, and administrative details left to the states or provinces.
The states were just starting to innovate before the ACA. Vermont tried single payer. Massachusetts had Romneycare. NY and California we making plans, etc. With the ACA the feds commandeered the whole thing, and didn't do so great a job with it.
I think that the states are in a much better position to fix this, but that the insurance companies and other related incumbents would rather have this controlled from a federal level where they can most easily influence the outcome to be in their favor.
You may trust your neighbor, but that has zero bearing on society at large. Society only works if the different classes trust each other not to screw each other out of existence.
We're seeing this in all the rich countries now- a generation of youngsters are realizing that a middle class existence may not exist for them. Even in Europe, which is more egalitarian, things aren't looking as rosy as they used to be. And of course in poorer countries with high birth rates, we already see turmoil as young angry men realize they are destined for a life of poverty while their government enriches itself.
EDIT: I think the guy who started Huawei said something to the effect of when you are a millionaire, you only care about yourself, but when you are a billionaire, you are all the sudden responsible for a lot of people. I wish that attitude permeated our business schools and boardrooms. The amount of people from top business schools who parrot "Always do the right thing" and then proceed to sell their own grandmother down the street blows my mind.
That’s what the poors need; noblesse oblige oligarchy.
What purpose should they serve, ideally? - focus just on investment and profit - improve society ie noblesse oblige - compete for public honor, ie holding high office
I'm not suggesting their is one answer, but given the rich hold such sway over government, I definitely don't think they can sit back and enjoy their high tariff burgundy while we have riots in the streets, first from the left and now the right.
On the contrary, if you don't trust your neighbor, you have no basis for trusting anyone. It's the foundation for any other trust relationships. As for the relationships between classes, that also relies on trust in things larger than classes: trust in the legal and social framework.
I trust my neighbors not to steal my stuff. I don't trust them not to narc on me. If they do narc on my I trust the city to realize that's a dumb use of resources. But I don't trust the state to be so smart.
How often have you heard something along the lines of "I'm not worried my kids will be kidnapped, I'm worried some jerk will call the cops if I let them walk to the park on their own"?
I don't believe we have more inequality now than 100 years ago, or anything before that.
- huge increase in labor supply: outsourcing, women entering workforce in large numbers
- productivity wage-gap: http://www.oecd.org/economy/decoupling-of-wages-from-product...
- savings gap between millenials and previous generations: https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-saving-habits-le...
- white american men's life expectancy dropping, for first time ever: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/life-expectancy-for-american-me...
- cost of housing in major cities increasing dramatically
- opioid epidemic
- obesity epidemic
- unemployment among the young in Europe is stubbornly high.
Qualitatively, you can see nihilism on the rise among the young: https://jeromysonne.com/the-nihilism-of-r-wallstreetbets/
This observation is often trotted out, but I'm not sure it's fair. 50 years ago was no picnic, either. We were mired in the Cold War (Vietnam, no less). Nixon was in the White House. There was tons of social unrest (Nixon wrote in his memoirs about the thousands of bomb threats and attempted bombings). Civil rights / racial tensions were extremely high (MLK was assassinated in '68). The 70's were an absolutely terrible economic decade - oil shock and stagflation, anyone?
> huge increase in labor supply: outsourcing, women entering workforce in large numbers
I recall watching a presentation a few years back on this, but sadly I can't find the link. This appears to be a follow-up on the research, though. (From the Brookings Institute -https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
In 1970, women entered the workforce, so you would have expected productivity to double, so GDP would have doubled, and thusly everyone's standard of living, right?
Instead what happened is all that extra capital drove up costs in housing and healthcare. Credit cards were introduced and the savings rate plummetted. Instead of having tons of extra money, everyone actually wound up in debt instead. (Please note: I'm not blaming women entering the workforce for this phenomenon; it was totally our surrounding economic system)
My high level point is that I think young people back then had a lot of reason to feel precarious and not trust in their institutions to act in their interests. We probably suffered a lot for it then, but we did eventually build our way out of it, for at least a short while, even if it feels like we're essentially further down the economic path now.
Edit: cleaned up typo and link, sorry
- There is no such thing as lifetime employment for most fields.
- Outsourcing wiped out a lot of decent jobs in the US. - Automation is wiping out a bunch more.
- College debt is thing, though I fully expect this administration to forgive it.
- Housing is significantly more expensive**.
- All the rich countries are ageing fast.
- Men are going to college much less, and trend is accelerating***.
* Lawyers are a good example. Search engines have wiped out a whole class of entry-level legal work. We certainly don't need as many as we have now, but what well-paying jobs are going to replace them? Finance is going through a similar transition where you just don't need as many people to conduct trades. I feel like I was reading FT a few months ago and several of the major Ibanks were saying they expect to need a third as many employees in the next decade.
**Taipei is a prime example. Taiwanese salaries are super low, yet property is super expensive. Last time I looked, around $100/sqft for condos. People buying investment properties are the obvious culprit, but I don't think there is political will to deprive the government of property taxes and wipe out the savings of older voters, in order to save the young. And lo and behold the birthrate is 0.9 there.
***I think this was on HN a few days ago: https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-.... You can argue college is a waste of time, and I'm inclined to agree, but I think we can make up a narrative where young men feel there is no hope.
But I think it is valid that the parent pointed out that younger generations today feel screwed, that they won't be able to do as well economically or socially as their parents. Many are lonely on the internet, trapped in student loans, and searching for decent jobs. On average they are having to postpone leaving their parents houses, getting married, having kids and buying a house, waiting to do these things until significantly later in life than their parents and grandparents. They've heard about the American Dream and don't feel like they'll have it. And there's a lot of them.
I know that this is not true for everybody, lots of things are better, and it's relative - other people have it worse, etc. But this sentiment is still a thing - a lot of young people feel like they have it worse than their parents and grandparents.
I don't know that debating the details will change their minds.
> opioid epidemic, obesity epidemic
Alcohol consumption is down against 1971. The heroin, cocain etc problems are smaller then they used to be. People are less violent overall.
People still live longer. And while they are obese, their life expectancy went up against that time. And some of it is that historical diseases from various malnutritions are down.
Economic standards are dropping for new graduates. But, it is not all bleak everything is worst situation.