Something I've noticed is that companies have a level of technical morale that is not quite the same thing as general morale. If general morale is how much peop

Something I've noticed is that companies have a level of technical morale that is not quite the same thing as general morale. If general morale is how much people like the organization and trust its moral decency, technical morale is the sense that the people and products are of high quality. They're correlated but not the same thing. General morale is a group's self-esteem (although, when low, it becomes us-versus-them against the leadership) and technical morale is its self-efficacy. Technical morale is also very slow to recover, and I think the U.S. has lost it over the past 30 years. People don't assume that others are capable. Rather, the prevailing assumption is that an as-yet-undetermined person is lazy, stupid, and incapable. People have this vague sense that things don't work as well as they used to; I don't know if that's actually true. On the matter of how they view each others' competency, groups tend to be either in a state of trust-density and trust-sparsity (a "group Bozo Bit") with no middle ground, and we've flipped that switch a long time ago.