The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You

I just remember reading "the rational optimist", and they talked about and trust trade.

Basically with trust, trade is unfettered.

We trade productively with trust and we all prosper.

I see this in my life. I have good trust in costco, and I buy there with very little friction/mistrust. I know a bunch of things - they give me a decent price without trickery (unless you count giving my money back as rebates), they vet the products they sell, and they have a great return policy if I don't like the purchase for any reason.

meanwhile buying an airplane ticket, making a hotel reservation or getting a tow truck. That is a low-trust high-nonsense situation that makes me unhappy from reservation to checkout, almost to the point I dread travel. I do travel less, and I'm less spontaneous.

Trust has been eroded for the last 30 years for many reasons and most of them are due to how the politicians and public institutions have behaved.

In all western countries, if you dig a little, you will find scandals after scandals from the ruling parties or the so called elite.

Why should a lambda citizen believe that there is any sense of trust anymore when those who are at the top clearly have no problem lying to get in or stay in power?

It's the same problem with the media biases. Newspapers and news organizations have completely stopped providing information and started pushing propaganda. Nothing more.

Then we lament the loss of confidence and the demise of democracy in the west.

Started in the 1950s with the dawn of consumer credit. Mis selling that to buyers was highly profitable and everywhere. Really shook people’s trust. The dawn of the salesman.

Before that it was merely single low trust events. Scandals type. Lead in paint style.

Hmmm. This also means that there is an opportunity in there.

In the Early Modern Ages, powerful people wove endless plots against one another, the Borgias held papacy, poisoning was a common way to solve disputes, all sorts of offices were sold openly...

... and in the middle of this, the Huguenots and Calvinists built huge business empires by being known as honest and reliable.

Maybe there is some space to repeat this by just avoiding the entshittification trap. I can see this happening in some corners of the IT world already. For example, Cloudflare has a good reputation in almost all regards. Linux has also held and expanded its market share by not being scammy and sleazy.

Increased transparency is part of the process.

Prior to the Internet, it was much harder to keep up with all the dirty details of whatever was happening in your parliament/Congress/government/town hall. Most people defaulted to a certain degree of trust by being happily ignorant.

There is a common note among the old political journalists (I mean 100+ years ago) saying that the practical execution of power was extremely dirty and that blessed is anyone who does not know.

Well, now we all know.