9 ms·

The US is a low trust society, because of all the poverty. You really notice the difference if you travel to Europe. It turns out that having half of the popula

• popcalc 4y ago
  Hungary is extremely low trust and extremely poor, yet no one fears public transit nor letting their kids wander about.
  • em-bee 4y ago
    that's not a contradiction. if society in hungary is low trust (which i doubt btw, unless something changed since i was there last more than a decade ago) then this low trust does not extend to the safety of their children. letting kids wander about shows high trust in their kids not getting into danger. in the US people don't even trust that.
    • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      So let me get this straight, trust is measured on multiple axis except for the axis of children which sets the maximum?
      • em-bee 4y ago
        trust is measured on multiple axis, period. no exception. the US have low trust when it comes to children. Hungary does not. Hungary may still be low trust on other axis.
  • nmfisher 4y ago
    Why do you say Hungary is low trust?
• HDThoreaun 4y ago
  US is a low trust society because of a culture that reveres individualism and independence to the detriment of everything else, especially community and freedom from being abused in favor of freedom to abuse. Every man for themselves means kids need to constantly be supervised.
  • hn_version_0023 4y ago
    That culture is created by a media environment manufactured by companies whose employee base are well represented on this site. This line is pushed on us, ad nauseam. Unsurprisingly, most of us are sick from it.
    • valleyer 4y ago
      An alternative view is that our individualistic culture is simply an evolution of the American idea of "rugged individualism" -- an idea which somewhat predates the tech industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugged_individualism#Influence_on_contemporary_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugged_individualism#Influence...
    • jdminhbg 4y ago
      > That culture is created by a media environment manufactured by companies whose employee base are well represented on this site. Are you saying then that "that culture" is a decade old?
      • bluGill 4y ago
        Yellow journalism dates to the 1800's. I'm sure much longer, but that is something everyone should remember from history class.
        • jdminhbg 4y ago
          That's right, which makes it unlikely that the FAANG companies are responsible for it.
  • 4y ago
• henrikschroder 4y ago
  I made the same observation when I moved to the US, it was so weird to me that SF the city is pretty much devoid of children. They're all effectively locked up and prohibited from roaming. No-one trusts children, no-one trusts adults around children, no-one trusts strangers. But I went skiing in Lake Tahoe one weekend, and suddenly all of that disappeared. Suddenly, you have children freely interacting with strangers, there's much less adult supervision, and a whole lot of trust in others again. It's such a contrast, and you can experience it by simply driving for a couple of hours.
  • HDThoreaun 4y ago
    SF is actually a city that is devoid of children. They're not hidden, they just don't exist because housing is too expensive. People with kids mostly leave.
    • jefftk 4y ago
      It's low but not zero. SF is 13% under 18, compared to 29% nationally.
      • aidenn0 4y ago
        24% for New York City and 16% for Manhattan if people want an urban comparison, or a "insanely expensive" urban comparison.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      It's been a common pattern for a very long time in the US for new graduates to often live in a city especially if that's where their job is and then move out when they start a family. That was the pattern with essentially everyone I knew who went into finance in Manhattan.
  • jvanderbot 4y ago
    The kinds of strangers you are likely to meet in SF are not to be trusted. It's not irrational on an individual level, it's just a societal madness in the USA. I lived in LA, and would not let my wife walk around after dark let alone my daughters. There were a few individuals who lived under bridges that would regularly assault women. And we lived in a "good" area. We moved to an even better area and within a couple months there was a shooting, high speed chase, and a drunk driver rolled his car into our neighbor's yard. Needless to say, we moved away.
• notch898a 4y ago
  The people living in poverty very very rarely hurt a stranger's children. It's the cops who show up and take them, absolutely destroying their sense of security and growing independence.
  • gretch 4y ago
    This is very false. National studies show more violent crime happens in poor areas: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf
    • Zetice 4y ago
      What you've linked doesn't really contradict what the commenter said; he's arguing that folks don't generally hurt kids, poverty notwithstanding, and that tends to be my experience.
    • notch898a 4y ago
      That study says poor people are more likely victims. Doesn't even say who is performing the crimes (doubtful, but based on this study could be rich people robbing the poor or whatever), nor does it show the rate at which those in poverty victimize a stranger's child (which despite your sidestepped report here was what you replied to). For example, despite all the worries about kidnappings, there are only a few hundred kidnappings of children by complete strangers every year. As an aside (and separate point): The data in there was all 12+. I'm gonna be the one to come out and say it: if the hypothetical reality is the teenager is growing up in a hell-scape world of death-match-violence then unfortunately it's one of those cases of "nows the fucking time to get out there and learn how to (gradually) adapt to the hellscape while we try to make it better." (which honestly is a little what driving feels like when you turn 15)
    • anigbrowl 4y ago
      You need to cite more specifically, I'm not reading the whole study looking for the bit you think was relevant to the other poster's point.
• fl0ps 4y ago
  The US is a low trust society because we're told not to trust people through highly negative news stories. The result is the US being primed to think there are child murderers and rapists under every bush, etc, etc. Ancedent to this unintentional effect was the incentivised "if it bleeds it reads" motivation for promotion of the highly negative.
  • myself248 4y ago
    Both of these things can be true at the same time. The news can overemphasize the worst, AND we can have an epidemic of drug problems, mental illness, and the crimes that those bring.
    • Falkon1313 4y ago
      Yet oddly, when I was a kid, and the crime rate was roughly double what it is now, we didn't have this problem. There were drugs, oh you betchya, cocaine and crack and all these other cool things the D.A.R.E. officers were telling us about. There was crime, about twice as much of it as today. But us kids were out there riding our bikes around and playing till the streetlights came on. This is something different entirely.
• satvikpendem 4y ago
  I grew up in India, a much poorer nation than the US, and I played outside all the time, walking to relatives' houses and going to hang out with friends. I highly doubt it's the poverty causing this kind of thing in the US. Seems more to me the high amount of media "stranger danger" affecting people's viewpoints.
  • s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I think this is a key perspective. In the US you will have rich neighborhoods where kids play freely outside and poor neighborhoods where kids play freely outside. It is in the mixed neighborhoods there is an overwhelming fear of children playing
  • idontpost 4y ago
    I don't know how it is where you grew up in India, but where my wife's family lives in the Philippines, poverty is very different than here. They are much poorer than us, but at the same time, much more secure. Losing a job is not good, but they would not lose their home or starve as a result due a combination of not being in debt-slavery and familial/social networks close by. If we lost one of our two jobs, we'd be utterly fucked. We have no family nearby, and the housing market is so fucked we'd be in dire straits within a month.
  • sashank_1509 4y ago
    the highest murder rate in US is 15.8 Louisiana while the highest in India is 6.5 (Patna). Most places in India have half or lesser murder rates compared to the average in US. India in general is just a much safer country, not in the same league as China, Japan but far safer than US. Growing up in Bangalore, I walked the streets regularly at 2AM when I was a teen, something that I’m scared to do as a full grown adult in SF
    • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      If you include traffic deaths (more likely to cause kids to get killed than murders), India and China look much worse.
• Zetice 4y ago
  Parts of the US are like this, but huge swaths of Americans don't even bother locking their front doors.
  • InvaderFizz 4y ago
    That's largely changed. I grew up in rural areas where this was true. In fact, we didn't bother locking our doors when I was a kid. Now, however, people lock their doors because of meth heads even in the extremely rural areas of the southeast.
    • Zetice 4y ago
      Just… no. It has not changed, crime is down across the board.
• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I've been through a lof of the balkan areas in the 1990s, also yugoslavia/serbia during the sanctions before the 1999 nato bombing and fast after, and during all those times in all those areas there was A LOT of poverty. Kids were playing outside all the time... from urban belgrade, parks and playgrounds surrounded by huge socialist buildings, to rural villages. Going to school? Sure, kids 7, 8, 9yo walking alone to school was (and still is) a normal thing. Usually elementary schools (6/7->14/15yo) were walking distance, but some still had to use a public/city transport. High schools meant a bus/tram for a majority of kids. During weekends seeing a bunch of kids outside even late at night was normal and still is.
  • alluro2 4y ago
    I can back that claim. Unfortunately, it's no longer the case - not exclusively for the low trust reason, though - but that kids of school age, in my experience, now largely rush home after school to text to their same group of friends they just physically separated from, and play games. I believe the altered persona they can assume when texting, and freedom of expression they can have using that medium, over doing it in person, is of very high appeal, and something I find concerning for the future of society...
• logicalmonster 4y ago
  I'm sure that poverty can play a factor in worsening social trust, but can the reason for anything as complex in society only have 1 cause? Also, arguing your point, there's far poorer countries that are far more trusting. And arguably at the US's "poorest" (maybe during the Great Depression to WWII period) there was a much different social attitude to strangers than exists now. I'd say that commenters have brought up some good factors like mentioning the media's business model in hyping up negative clickbait, but personally I'd say that the increasingly heterogenous population is closer to the biggest factor. Identity politics drives a wedge between most groups that can tend to make you distrust the motives of almost anybody, even if the stranger is a member of your own group. As long as identify politics persists, countries with an increasingly heterogenous population will have even lower trust.
• yttribium 4y ago
  That's obviously not the case when poverty levels are decreasing over time along with social trust.
• citrin_ru 4y ago
  My impression is the opposite - it is easy to encounter unsupervised children in a poor neighborhoods but practically impossible in upper-middle class ones. Helicopter parenting is common in families where one of parent stays at home with one or two kids and directs all energy into supervising and 'developing' them. Having high income such families have disproportionate political power and able to enforce this model of rising kids on society at large.