I'll note for other readers of Hacker News who don't know (and thus don't trust) the domain of this submitted article that it is actually a syndicated news story from the Associated Press, and I would have to say that I think the article is well reported. (In other words, I trust the statistics behind the article, which come from the federal government's National Social Survey.)
The article includes some dire warnings about decline of social trust in the United States during the last forty years, and also some ideas about how social trust can increase. "People do get a little more trusting as they age. But beginning with the baby boomers, each generation has started off adulthood less trusting than those who came before them." I daresay it is correct that MOST Americans become more trusting as they age. In my middle age, I feel very comfortable both in the community I live in and as I travel about the United States. (I have been to all of the fifty United States, and to other territories of my country.)
To take the article seriously, and to suggest a possible help that was not suggested in the article, I will propose for your thoughtful discussion (I trust you here on Hacker News) one policy that might help. Let's take care of the economic gap problem mentioned in the article and some other factors that harm social trust by building all of the public school systems in the United States on the foundational principle of family choice. I have seen an example of how this policy could help where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. That reduces the effect of family income differences on the availability of adequately funded schools. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."[1] Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.[2]
The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment[3] and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.[4] And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.[5]
Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices. And I think that builds social trust by making school communities more nearly communities of choice than communities of compulsion.
The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. And the social trust level in Minnesota seems to be above the United States national average, although I'd have to check the National Social Survey data to be sure about that. A good country to compare in this regard to the United States would be the Netherlands, which by its constitution has had pervasive school choice for the last century.
[1] http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...
[2] http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html
[3] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...
[4] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...
[5] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...