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This is just another instance of western societies devolving from a high-trust environment into a low-trust environment. In the short term, cheating in the pri

This is just another instance of western societies devolving from a high-trust environment into a low-trust environment. In the short term, cheating in the prisoners dilemma of social trust is beneficial for the cheater, but in the long run it ends up resulting in lower economic growth, making everyone poorer. Social trust is the key to economic growth (by allowing de-risked specialization) and political liberty (by allowing minimal black-letter law.) It is too bad that it is rarely discussed, and has been casually jettisoned by the west.

angelbob 11y ago
What do you see in contrast to "the west"? I'm just curious what you're comparing the US (and possibly Western Europe) to. I don't see China as being a tremendously high-trust social environment, for instance.
- jpt4 11y ago
  > What do you see in contrast to "the west"? The West of a previous time, presumably.
  - r0naa 11y ago
    OP will correct me if I am mistaken but I read it that way: The "surprise/shock" that results from dealing with a cheating/dishonest entity is an instance of the confrontation between past and new Western standards for social trust. People are adapting to the fact that you cannot trust social entities as much as you did in the past. I would like to add that this is almost certainly a consequence of having governments that don't respect their own laws and broke the sacred trust between them and their citizens. Politcians and government are leading by example, whether they like it or not.
    - PopeOfNope 11y ago
      Media plays a part as well. It's hard to trust your neighbors when you're constantly seeing and hearing about people doing horrific things to each other on the nightly news.
- carsongross 11y ago
  I agree regarding China, and I think it will end up limiting economic growth there once they get past the industrialization bump. (I believe they are past it.) I contrast the west with, for example, Russia, which has a very intelligent work-force and extensive natural resources, but has been unable to break out of the corruption and lack of trust endemic to their culture. India is another example: there is no reason they shouldn't be a first world country looking only at their human and natural capital. The middle east is lousy with countries with incredibly intelligent peoples stuck in second-world (at best) conditions. And so on.
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    Isn't colonialism is a much better explanation in the case of India and, to a lesser extent China?
    - meatysnapper 11y ago
      No, it's poor to non-existent property rights and corruption. Look at Venezuela vs Chile for an example of two very similar countries with wildly differing property rights.
    - Chinjut 11y ago
      Perhaps it's the legacy of colonialism which gives rise to the "low-trust" structure of modern India?
    - hga 11y ago
      A country with rather rigid castes and 40,000 endogamous groups is likely never going to be high trust. "Colonialism" if anything cut against these two facts. Don't know about China, but they do have an issue with colonialism going back centuries and centuries, even if the Han culture eventually "conquered" the invaders.
    - scarmig 11y ago
      It needs a bit more than that. All the Americas were colonized, and most (but not all) are doing better than India. Indonesia is roughly twice as rich per capita. South Africa is even richer. And Malaysia even richer than it. Algeria, Libya. Korea and Taiwan were both colonized and much more exposed to WW2, and they're very well off. The poorest countries in the world were mostly colonized, but that's because most of the world has been victims of colonialism. And the effects of colonialism reverberate to the present day. But it's not really powerful IMO as an explanatory variable for differences in human development in the non-European world.
- hga 11y ago
  Add Japan to the list of "the west" about this; obviously not all that western, but famously a high trust society, which also obviously had made a fantastic difference in their economic growth.
- r0naa 11y ago
  I think your read the parent comment wrong. OP is specifically talking about devolving from a high-trust environment to a lower (or low) one. China (afaik) is just an environment with low social trust. That's an interesting counter-argument to OP's last assertion (with whom I agree) since China has +10% economic /year while having really poor social trust standards.
jerf 11y ago
Cultural diversity and high-trust are somewhat at odds with one another, because one of the very ways that cultures are diverse is the parameters of the trust they expect. Even two high-trust cultures can interact poorly with each other when the contract is too different. Take the innocuous example of tipping. In one culture, waiters are tipped X%, in another, it's just in the food prices. Clearly, neither is absolutely right or wrong, yet in both directions, awkwardness ensures when the signals are crossed. Signals can cross in much less innocuous ways. It's one of the things I think the "melting pot" idea got right, and I tend to agree a lot of people who didn't really understand it did indeed jettison it too quickly and with too much excitement... layering on a minimal, high-level culture that defines things like the trust parameters, which are often not absolutely right or wrong like the tipping example above, while leaving religion, dress style, foods, cultural celebrations, all the really important elements of a culture vary beneath that umbrella was actually a really cool idea. (In practice, perhaps it was not quite minimal enough, but I think we'd have been better off addressing that directly rather than throwing out the whole idea.)
- Chinjut 11y ago
  The melting pot idea's been thrown out? That's news to me.
  - bradleyjg 11y ago
    In the melting pot metaphor each new wave joins the homogenized culture -- adding something to it, but also losing what made them distinctive. In the salad bowl metaphor, each wave keeps what makes them distinctive while physically mixing with all the other groups.
    - hga 11y ago
      To give you a concrete example of how this has changed, my mother was born in the mid-30s to a Cajun (French in Louisiana, by way of "Arcadia" in Canada) family, and prior to attending the public school system spoke no English. And English was all that was spoken at school, and not learning it was not an option. Compare to bilingual education.
michaelochurch 11y ago
High-trust and low-trust understate the severity of the phase change, which is more accurately described as a shift from trust-density to trust-sparsity. You go from a state where people spawn with the "bozo bit" off to one where they spawn with it on. You get a completely different political dynamic when that happens. Obviously, trust has varying degrees and context. In Japan, you can leave your laptop at a cafe; in the U.S., you probably wouldn't. That doesn't mean that we're "low trust" or trust-sparse. We might generally trust most people to be decent while aware of the ~0.05% (?) chance per person (that someone steals the computer. What is changing is trust with regard to competence. People were never so foolish as to trust all others without limits, but there used to be an assumption of competence in the professional world. Institutions like universities are less trusted, and so are people in general when it comes to basic competence and readiness for autonomy. It would be unthinkable, 20 years ago, that CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today. Right now we are in an era of organizational decline. It's not necessarily catastrophic; it might not even be bad. What it does mean is that institutions (universities, professional organizations, corporations, and even unions) have lost their role as central brokers of trust. It raises interesting questions. Thus far, most of the successful startups have been beneficiaries of institutional decline (and, again, some of those institutions deserved to break down, so I'm not moralizing) and there doesn't seem to be any economic reward to build institutions (as opposed to mere corporations, smaller in scope) up... so it doesn't happen.
- Nacraile 11y ago
  > CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today. If that's been your experience with Agile, you've have the misfortune of seeing Agile done horribly wrong in a patholgically unhealthy workplace. You may also be romanticizing a bit about old school way of doing things (I have a co-worker who used to work at a major jet engine manufacturer. They were expected to be sitting at their desks when the bell (literally!) rang at 8:30 am. They were expected to wait for the bell to ring break time in before they went to the washroom. As a programmer! Scrum ceremonies aren't sounding so bad). Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time, and it isn't supposed to be a vehicle for top-down micro-management. If it's either of these things for you, the problem is your organization, not your specific process. In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team. It's a well defined point for people to raise general questions if they've run into ambiguity, or cast a wide net if they've run into impediment. To-do lists are de-emphasized; it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing.
yourapostasy 11y ago
Excellent point. Beyond the high- versus low-trust gradient you pointed out is the time element. Our ongoing degeneration into a low-trust state is highly corrosive and even regressive to develop complex, multifaceted economic structures, which differentiate themselves from simpler structures by their exhibited time preferences. When you select for low-trust options in a previously high-trust environment, you also select for shorter timeframes of activity. Those shorter timeframes directly manifest as fewer options; there simply isn't enough time to let beneficial compounding effects ramp up and hence open up more options by supplying more per unit resources over time. The cognitive load to manage these shorter timeframe activities also goes up per unit returned equity/resources/margin versus a longer timeframe; I wouldn't be surprised if it goes up non-linearly in most cases. None of these effects are reported upon, tracked, or even detected in accounting systems today, except at terminal end stages. The current dominant business culture is yield chasing with this behavior, and that has historically ended poorly.

angelbob 11y ago

What do you see in contrast to "the west"? I'm just curious what you're comparing the US (and possibly Western Europe) to. I don't see China as being a tremendously high-trust social environment, for instance.

jpt4 11y ago
> What do you see in contrast to "the west"? The West of a previous time, presumably.
- r0naa 11y ago
  OP will correct me if I am mistaken but I read it that way: The "surprise/shock" that results from dealing with a cheating/dishonest entity is an instance of the confrontation between past and new Western standards for social trust. People are adapting to the fact that you cannot trust social entities as much as you did in the past. I would like to add that this is almost certainly a consequence of having governments that don't respect their own laws and broke the sacred trust between them and their citizens. Politcians and government are leading by example, whether they like it or not.
  - PopeOfNope 11y ago
    Media plays a part as well. It's hard to trust your neighbors when you're constantly seeing and hearing about people doing horrific things to each other on the nightly news.
carsongross 11y ago
I agree regarding China, and I think it will end up limiting economic growth there once they get past the industrialization bump. (I believe they are past it.) I contrast the west with, for example, Russia, which has a very intelligent work-force and extensive natural resources, but has been unable to break out of the corruption and lack of trust endemic to their culture. India is another example: there is no reason they shouldn't be a first world country looking only at their human and natural capital. The middle east is lousy with countries with incredibly intelligent peoples stuck in second-world (at best) conditions. And so on.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  Isn't colonialism is a much better explanation in the case of India and, to a lesser extent China?
  - meatysnapper 11y ago
    No, it's poor to non-existent property rights and corruption. Look at Venezuela vs Chile for an example of two very similar countries with wildly differing property rights.
  - Chinjut 11y ago
    Perhaps it's the legacy of colonialism which gives rise to the "low-trust" structure of modern India?
  - hga 11y ago
    A country with rather rigid castes and 40,000 endogamous groups is likely never going to be high trust. "Colonialism" if anything cut against these two facts. Don't know about China, but they do have an issue with colonialism going back centuries and centuries, even if the Han culture eventually "conquered" the invaders.
  - scarmig 11y ago
    It needs a bit more than that. All the Americas were colonized, and most (but not all) are doing better than India. Indonesia is roughly twice as rich per capita. South Africa is even richer. And Malaysia even richer than it. Algeria, Libya. Korea and Taiwan were both colonized and much more exposed to WW2, and they're very well off. The poorest countries in the world were mostly colonized, but that's because most of the world has been victims of colonialism. And the effects of colonialism reverberate to the present day. But it's not really powerful IMO as an explanatory variable for differences in human development in the non-European world.
hga 11y ago
Add Japan to the list of "the west" about this; obviously not all that western, but famously a high trust society, which also obviously had made a fantastic difference in their economic growth.
r0naa 11y ago
I think your read the parent comment wrong. OP is specifically talking about devolving from a high-trust environment to a lower (or low) one. China (afaik) is just an environment with low social trust. That's an interesting counter-argument to OP's last assertion (with whom I agree) since China has +10% economic /year while having really poor social trust standards.

jerf 11y ago

Cultural diversity and high-trust are somewhat at odds with one another, because one of the very ways that cultures are diverse is the parameters of the trust they expect. Even two high-trust cultures can interact poorly with each other when the contract is too different. Take the innocuous example of tipping. In one culture, waiters are tipped X%, in another, it's just in the food prices. Clearly, neither is absolutely right or wrong, yet in both directions, awkwardness ensures when the signals are crossed. Signals can cross in much less innocuous ways. It's one of the things I think the "melting pot" idea got right, and I tend to agree a lot of people who didn't really understand it did indeed jettison it too quickly and with too much excitement... layering on a minimal, high-level culture that defines things like the trust parameters, which are often not absolutely right or wrong like the tipping example above, while leaving religion, dress style, foods, cultural celebrations, all the really important elements of a culture vary beneath that umbrella was actually a really cool idea. (In practice, perhaps it was not quite minimal enough, but I think we'd have been better off addressing that directly rather than throwing out the whole idea.)

Chinjut 11y ago
The melting pot idea's been thrown out? That's news to me.
- bradleyjg 11y ago
  In the melting pot metaphor each new wave joins the homogenized culture -- adding something to it, but also losing what made them distinctive. In the salad bowl metaphor, each wave keeps what makes them distinctive while physically mixing with all the other groups.
  - hga 11y ago
    To give you a concrete example of how this has changed, my mother was born in the mid-30s to a Cajun (French in Louisiana, by way of "Arcadia" in Canada) family, and prior to attending the public school system spoke no English. And English was all that was spoken at school, and not learning it was not an option. Compare to bilingual education.

michaelochurch 11y ago

High-trust and low-trust understate the severity of the phase change, which is more accurately described as a shift from trust-density to trust-sparsity. You go from a state where people spawn with the "bozo bit" off to one where they spawn with it on. You get a completely different political dynamic when that happens. Obviously, trust has varying degrees and context. In Japan, you can leave your laptop at a cafe; in the U.S., you probably wouldn't. That doesn't mean that we're "low trust" or trust-sparse. We might generally trust most people to be decent while aware of the ~0.05% (?) chance per person (that someone steals the computer. What is changing is trust with regard to competence. People were never so foolish as to trust all others without limits, but there used to be an assumption of competence in the professional world. Institutions like universities are less trusted, and so are people in general when it comes to basic competence and readiness for autonomy. It would be unthinkable, 20 years ago, that CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today. Right now we are in an era of organizational decline. It's not necessarily catastrophic; it might not even be bad. What it does mean is that institutions (universities, professional organizations, corporations, and even unions) have lost their role as central brokers of trust. It raises interesting questions. Thus far, most of the successful startups have been beneficiaries of institutional decline (and, again, some of those institutions deserved to break down, so I'm not moralizing) and there doesn't seem to be any economic reward to build institutions (as opposed to mere corporations, smaller in scope) up... so it doesn't happen.

Nacraile 11y ago
> CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today. If that's been your experience with Agile, you've have the misfortune of seeing Agile done horribly wrong in a patholgically unhealthy workplace. You may also be romanticizing a bit about old school way of doing things (I have a co-worker who used to work at a major jet engine manufacturer. They were expected to be sitting at their desks when the bell (literally!) rang at 8:30 am. They were expected to wait for the bell to ring break time in before they went to the washroom. As a programmer! Scrum ceremonies aren't sounding so bad). Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time, and it isn't supposed to be a vehicle for top-down micro-management. If it's either of these things for you, the problem is your organization, not your specific process. In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team. It's a well defined point for people to raise general questions if they've run into ambiguity, or cast a wide net if they've run into impediment. To-do lists are de-emphasized; it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing.

yourapostasy 11y ago

Excellent point. Beyond the high- versus low-trust gradient you pointed out is the time element. Our ongoing degeneration into a low-trust state is highly corrosive and even regressive to develop complex, multifaceted economic structures, which differentiate themselves from simpler structures by their exhibited time preferences. When you select for low-trust options in a previously high-trust environment, you also select for shorter timeframes of activity. Those shorter timeframes directly manifest as fewer options; there simply isn't enough time to let beneficial compounding effects ramp up and hence open up more options by supplying more per unit resources over time. The cognitive load to manage these shorter timeframe activities also goes up per unit returned equity/resources/margin versus a longer timeframe; I wouldn't be surprised if it goes up non-linearly in most cases. None of these effects are reported upon, tracked, or even detected in accounting systems today, except at terminal end stages. The current dominant business culture is yield chasing with this behavior, and that has historically ended poorly.