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 Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
41–48 of 48 posts
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#42> Every email could be phishing. Every phone call could be fraud. From my personal experience I can say that the majority of E-Mails is spam and the majority of phone calls is fraud.
Every ad could be a virus is why everyone has ad blockers. Amazon solved trust. Credit cards did too. Guaranteed reliable help when things do go wrong is one way to do it. Cross border commerce makes trust worse because you can never get justice for being wronged.
Amazon solved trust is very much different than my perception of them:
- ads everywhere trying to push low quality product
- fake/bought product reviews
- commingled inventory (up until recently, still I would never buy food items, drugs or other health sensitive items like air filters or sunscreen there)
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#43Best saying I heard on this topic: trust is speed
And time is money.
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#44Hmmm. 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 th…
I even feel that CloudFlare is beginning to go the way of the enshittification — I don’t have anything in particular to point to at the moment but the data points are adding up, for me
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#45> Every email could be phishing. Every phone call could be fraud. From my personal experience I can say that the majority of E-Mails is spam and the majority of phone calls is fraud.
Every ad could be a virus is why everyone has ad blockers. Amazon solved trust. Credit cards did too. Guaranteed reliable help when things do go wrong is one way to do it. Cross border commerce makes trust worse because you can never get justice for being wronged.
This is true to a certain degree, you’ll be wrecked by reviews. If you’re a brand selling direct, then you’re cooked forever by bad reviews.
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#46People have gotten more and more exposed to how the government and politicians have been lying to them for decades. What would you expect but a low trust society with this.
Politicians have been breaking promises and not answering direct questions and burying inconvenient facts for decades.
They've only recently started directly lying.
There is a difference and conflating the two is a large part of the problem.
You can find examples of them lying in history, but those were huge scandals that brought down governments. Lying had consequences. That's what we've lost
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#47I 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…
I find myself at Costco several times a week lately, and I always try to interact with employees. Even just "hello", "good morning", or "thanks I'm a fan of your work" gives you an opportunity to sense if employees are happy and treated well.
Good companies take care of their employees and customers.
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#48Trust 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…
The Fourth Turning argues institutional effectiveness is cyclical and that the US is headeds towards the end of tearing down institutions versus building them up (and towards the end of focus on self versus community).
This does assume the current crisis is successfully resolved as it was for the Civil War and Great Depression/WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Turning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Turning_Is_Here