The high price of mistrust
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The high price of mistrust
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Re: The high price of mistrust
#2Unfortunately most research on social capital and mistrust has been desk-drawered or heavily self censored due to the political implications.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/robert-putnam-and-the-ethi...
https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html
Re: The high price of mistrust
#3I 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.
Re: The high price of mistrust
#4Putnam 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.
Re: The high price of mistrust
#5Unfortunately most research on social capital and mistrust has been desk-drawered or heavily self censored due to the political implications. https://www.chronicle.com/article/robert-putnam-and-the-ethi... https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html
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?
Re: The high price of mistrust
#6Cost 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.
Re: The high price of mistrust
#7Unfortunately most research on social capital and mistrust has been desk-drawered or heavily self censored due to the political implications. https://www.chronicle.com/article/robert-putnam-and-the-ethi... https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html
Thinly veiled campaigning for the return of segregation? Because nothing increases trust like "whites only" signs?
Re: The high price of mistrust
#8Part 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)
Re: The high price of mistrust
#9Unfortunately most research on social capital and mistrust has been desk-drawered or heavily self censored due to the political implications. https://www.chronicle.com/article/robert-putnam-and-the-ethi... https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html
Thinly veiled campaigning for the return of segregation? Because nothing increases trust like "whites only" signs?
Where in any of that was "the return of segregation"?
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...
Re: The high price of mistrust
#10Unfortunately most research on social capital and mistrust has been desk-drawered or heavily self censored due to the political implications. https://www.chronicle.com/article/robert-putnam-and-the-ethi... https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html
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".