Heavy Lifting

Many of us have never lived in anything but relatively high-trust economies, cultures, and ecosystems.

Sure, there are bad eggs all over the place, but in general there’s rule of law, there are punishments for those who do wrong, and there are legal and social structures that ensure the flour we buy at the store isn’t cut with sawdust and that our cars probably won’t explode as soon as we drive them off the lot.

High-trust environments are good for business, because if you don’t know whether the car you’re buying is a lemon, you’ll tend to be willing to pay a lot less for it. If that understandable tendency to assume everything is a lemon then spreads to every industry, the value of everything goes down, as does the incentive to produce higher quality stuff, because why would we pay full-flour price for a bag that very well might be half flour, half sawdust?

High-trust cultural settings also tend to result in more and better public spaces (because we assume people won’t just destroy these spaces for no reason, so they’re worth building and maintaining) and more and better interpersonal relationships (because fewer serial killers and other sorts of socially discordant can just run around doing their thing within systems that flag, punish, and/or restrain them).

Unfortunately, many of us are coming to realize that we’re living in lower-trust situations than we’ve always assumed.