In the 80s and 90s, when I graduated and started working, my first jobs were on Capitol Hill and outside of that world (ie, among my normie friends from college and my midwestern home state), nobody cared about politics. As people have come to look at politics as a team sport, I think general social culture has become much, much worse. I feel alienated from both sides most of the time and hate the “sussing” process which I agree characterizes so much interaction. I would rather not know!
I also very much agree that Trump is a symptom, not the disease.
Yes! Certainly there was more interaction with people working for the same party, but I think most people had friends on both sides of the aisle. People even sometimes worked for members of different parties (both parties were more heterogeneous back in the day). There was some disdain, on the D side, for people like Jesse Helms, but we had our own embarrassments.
People cared a lot about policy ( and of course, this being DC, career advancement). But it was wonkier, and much less febrile, than it seems today.
Also, not sure whether this is related, the money focus has been much more intense for quite some time. Youngs I know have had to do things like go to fundraisers for members. We did stuff like voter registration/get out the vote, but it was strictly on weekends/“vacation” time. The whole “Hill” ecosystem seems to have become much more blatantly transactional (irrespective of party), though I have been out of that world for a long time.
It WAS interesting! I would not want to work there now, but it was a great first couple of jobs.
I'm a serial career changer and am now a city planner/freelance writer. I'm on a a leave of absence from my NYC bureaucrat job to deal with some family issues, and doing a research fellowship on the relationship between maintenance and ecology.
I agree based on my personal experience in those decades.
One thing I've realized is that trust really depends on how universal the value at stake is. We're generally safe handing a stranger a knife and saying "don't stab me" because the proportion of amoral, depraved dipshits is low. But I do expect people to have different reasoning or a different mental model of how the world works so I don't trust them to align with me politically.
Yes. I always think of trust on a local leave you windows return you wallet these people won't kill me way. But you are right there are different levels.
I just don't think these examples exist in real life. My theory is that for 95% of the country, their lives really wouldn't of changed under different regimes given two different timelines for each of these Presidents.
My exception in for Biden weirdly enough. This Child Tax Credit is a game changer for some people. In a good way... but its not a thing that ruins trust.
No. We know a lot of people who were personally injured by Republican policies. Very few people were really injured by Democratic policies, though; they were afraid they would be but they weren't. :sigh: It's an asymmetry between people who are afraid of actual bad things and people who are afraid of nonsense and fiction because of the scaremongers on Faux News.
First, the decline in trust correlates with the professionalization and expansion of conservative propaganda organs owned and run by plutocrats who wish to keep the public divided. Not just Fox News, but the entire conservative ecosystem which includes hundreds of radio stations, hundreds of thinktanks, and production of cut-and-paste propaganda for innumerable right-wing politicians.
Second, a smaller effect might be due to the well-known biases instilled by economics 101 courses. Smaller because only a small segment of the population actually takes these courses in high school or college.
Can you talk more about these well known biases instilled by introductory econ courses? Or link me to some reading about that, maybe? This is the first i’m hearing of this.
Can one also find similar tendencies with the humanities students, and how they are more likely to be ochlocratic (collectively narcissistic)? This would extend to the liberal media also being more polarized and sectarian.
Ah. A study of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Developed) subjects, presumably of short-term effects. Still, the credentials look good, and it adds to the growing and contradictory body of evidence. I may be wrong.
Nice work rounding up the research, but again the lack of cultural context negates the value of any conclusions.
Japan is a totally different society. Among other things, it is so safe that car accidents where someone is injured (not killed, just hurt) show up on the evening news in Tokyo. Compare that with LA where at least 5 dead and a fiery explosion is required for a 2 second mention.
I've left a computer bag (with a then $3000 laptop) on the Yamanote train line - the circle one going around central Tokyo - and was able to claim it from the termination train station the next day. In the US, it would be either stolen within seconds or blown up by Homeland Security.
Taiwan isn't quite as extrame safety as Japan, but it isn't that far away either.
I can't speak to Korea.
But overall, decline in trust is always a function of decline in prosperity. We're getting close to a generation during which the overall average of American male wages has been flat. When there isn't enough to go around, people get suspicious of others and jealous of their own prerogatives. Nor is it inaccurate to say that ongoing diversity campaigns combined with open advocacy of illegal aliens isn't helping. Let's not forget that union leaders of all races have openly stated that incoming immigrants depress existing union member wages.
Here’s a rose-colored-glasses interpretation: Is it possible the poll results are just because people’s standards have risen? I tend to think Americans’ expectations for how perfect a match their spouse should be, how non-racist a white acquaintance can be before a person of color can call them a friend, and in general how supportive friends are have gone up. (So many people in 20th-century media are SO MEAN to their supposed friends!) And consider also the evolving norms around kids committing physical violence against one another, which I think there was a viral Twitter thread about the other day. Is it possible the same dynamic applies with social trust? Maybe the changing poll numbers show people becoming more sensitive, more empathetic, and thus more shocked and discouraged by others’ failures of empathy, or failures to live up to the high standards people set for themselves.
Yes, this. Also, it would be good to compare these measures of how trustworthy people think other are with any ground-truth data we can gather about how trustworthy people in fact are, whether it's rates of fraudulent transactions, results from experiments where you leave a wallet on the sidewalk with a hidden camera pointing at it and see what people do, or whatever. In particular, as Caplan, Brennan, etc will eagerly tell you, the literature on voter ignorance says that Americans drastically overestimate the extent to which people can be trusted to make informed voting decisions.
I think the masks are an interesting real-world instance where people do trust government and others. While people might complain about the CDC and messaging, most people have also been wearing masks even today. So there's some sort of deeper core trust that remains.
First of all, nobody goes bowling alone unless they're practicing for a tournament; it's just that "Bowling With Family or Friends Instead of in An Organised League" or "Bowling Loses Popularity Compared to New Activities" makes a less snappy title.
Secondly, is media partly to blame ? Until the recent spike coinciding with Covid, murders, violence and crime in general had been dropping for years since the mid-90s, but every year people reported it was getting worse- because they watched the nightly news with its "if it bleeds it leads" coverage
As a data point: I live in Vietnam where trust levels are pretty low. I don't have any survey data showing that, just anecdotally it is clearly the case. Just as an example: when you buy something at a store (like a major, national electronics chain), you're expected to open up the box and inspect it before taking it home to make sure it is what you think you've bought.
There is, obviously, zero polarization since there are no other political parties and I've never heard anyone ever discuss politics. (Which probably sounds like a totalitarian nightmare to most Americans but actually is really, really nice to not have to listen to politics take over every aspect of every conversation.)
Yet trust is still low with no polarization.
Also, there is a ton of homogeneity since (to oversimply somewhat) everyone is the same ethnic and religious background here so even the "cultural homogeneity leads to high trust" explanation doesn't really hold much water, IMHO. If anything, the weird sectional distrusts between North and South Vietnamese over honestly trivial differences would seem to argue against that. A (North Vietnamese) friend once bought an apartment from a (North Vietnamese) elderly couple that said that would only sell to North Vietnamese.
If it’s a question of trotting out our hobby horses, my first reaction is to blame the media in general and the Internet in particular. People are taught to be afraid, be it about terrorism, crime, child abductions, or Covid mortality rates. The average Joe is lucky to be within two orders of magnitude of the actual figures. And once you sell the fear, the anger is only a putt shot away. After that, who has the bandwidth to worry about the environment, the new Gilded Age, right-wing extremism, etc, etc?
As for the issue of trust, there’s a real distinction between trusting the guy on the street to be a decent guy and follow the laws, and trusting him to vote along the spectrum of what you feel is acceptable (in the largest sense). Thirty years ago, backing the wrong horse in a presidential election took a day or two to bitterly digest. Now it’s a four-year white-knuckle ride.
Democracy needs trust. And trust needs a sense that with enough access to truth and education and dialog, that we can reach a modus vivendi. Two decades after the Internet burst upon the scene, we find ourselves in a post-truth world. At this rate, I doubt democracy has another two decades in it.
I wonder if electoral system is partly involved here. Winner-take-all systems (France, Canada, most of the East Asian examples here) push a sort of political zero-sum narrative, that you wouldn't see in more coalitional proportional systems (like superstars Sweden/Norway)
Obviously Germany cuts against this, but I don't know how the broader study looks (couldn't figure out where it was linked with cross-country comparisons). STV (or other PR) is the drum I keep banging for eternity as a solution to everything, so I'm particularly keen to confirm/deny my priors.
Met the manager of a high-end Northeast restaurant this weekend. They have literally shut down for a few weeks per quarter to keep revenues from getting so high that it'd shut off the covid emergency money. I don't trust the welfare system. A better functioning government would go a long way towards better trust in general.
You may not have solutions, but at least you characterized the landscape and the problem pretty well, with lots of interesting and well-sourced facts and data. Thanks for that. This trust issue is something I'm engaged with as well, from a sociological viewpoint. I found this really helpful and good food for thought.
You probably don't want to say so, but the answer is simple. Since the Republicans stoke hate constantly by lying constantly, are promoting racism and sexism, are supporting insurrection and terrorism, are lawless, and are trying to sabotage basic government functions (see: debt limit) -- get rid of the Republican Party and the problem is solved. The Republican Party disinformation machine is the primary cause of distrust in the US.
Shut down Faux News and Sinclair Broadcasting, shut down the worst of the crooked megachurches, arrest the criminals behind the Qanon scam, get Trump in prison where he belongs, problem will go away. What we need is exactly like de-Nazification in post-WWII Germany.
I think you and Musgrave have been very unfair to Mr Asher and priviliged-naive in missing his point. He said nothing suggesting he resented others getting freebies. He said that to change your life you must get up and do something. I remember you writing the same advice on battling depression
This has been an unusual recession when the social good called for keeping people home. Normally the issue of incentivizing people to stay home is very important - skills atrophy and connection is lost to the work force. That's nothing to with scarcity mentality, it's more about keeping laid off in and bringing people living on the margins into positive healthy meaningful activity.
There's an interpretation of the Scandinavian data which fits with the "immigration lowers trust" idea: Basically, it's that mistrust of diversity exists, but the effect is weak. What happens in this scenario is that _extremely high trust countries admit a lot more immigrants_, and then that drives a short-run decline in their trust level, but not enough to swamp the pro-immigration / pro-integration policies.
I feel like if you go spend a year in some Rust Belt mill town in decline a la Mare of Easttown with falling employment, rising drug usage, declining church attendance and stagnant educational attainment you probably won't trust the government by the end of it either.
The really bizarre part is that so many people in areas like that keep voting for the exact party which offshored their jobs to China (the Republicans). False consciousness, promoted by right-wing disinformation and "divide and conquer" campaigns like Faux News.
Yep. Basically echoed my reply to your tweet yesterday.
I would like to see a survey on how much people think about politics today vs in the past.
In the 80s or 90s politics was an abstract thing. When I met someone new, the last thing I thought about was who they voted for.
Nowadays, I feel like the first thing people do is try and suss out ot signal which team they are on.
I know it’s easy to blame Trump, but the dude is just a symptom… a malignant symptom, but one just the same.
All I can say is I’m an exception. I generally find people trustworthy.
Me too!
In the 80s and 90s, when I graduated and started working, my first jobs were on Capitol Hill and outside of that world (ie, among my normie friends from college and my midwestern home state), nobody cared about politics. As people have come to look at politics as a team sport, I think general social culture has become much, much worse. I feel alienated from both sides most of the time and hate the “sussing” process which I agree characterizes so much interaction. I would rather not know!
I also very much agree that Trump is a symptom, not the disease.
I have a question. Did you guys working on Capitol Hill even care that much? I mean, did you associate with the opposite side outside of work?
Yes! Certainly there was more interaction with people working for the same party, but I think most people had friends on both sides of the aisle. People even sometimes worked for members of different parties (both parties were more heterogeneous back in the day). There was some disdain, on the D side, for people like Jesse Helms, but we had our own embarrassments.
People cared a lot about policy ( and of course, this being DC, career advancement). But it was wonkier, and much less febrile, than it seems today.
Also, not sure whether this is related, the money focus has been much more intense for quite some time. Youngs I know have had to do things like go to fundraisers for members. We did stuff like voter registration/get out the vote, but it was strictly on weekends/“vacation” time. The whole “Hill” ecosystem seems to have become much more blatantly transactional (irrespective of party), though I have been out of that world for a long time.
It sounds like an interesting job. I think I would of enjoyed it. What do you do now?
It WAS interesting! I would not want to work there now, but it was a great first couple of jobs.
I'm a serial career changer and am now a city planner/freelance writer. I'm on a a leave of absence from my NYC bureaucrat job to deal with some family issues, and doing a research fellowship on the relationship between maintenance and ecology.
I agree based on my personal experience in those decades.
One thing I've realized is that trust really depends on how universal the value at stake is. We're generally safe handing a stranger a knife and saying "don't stab me" because the proportion of amoral, depraved dipshits is low. But I do expect people to have different reasoning or a different mental model of how the world works so I don't trust them to align with me politically.
Yes. I always think of trust on a local leave you windows return you wallet these people won't kill me way. But you are right there are different levels.
I just don't think these examples exist in real life. My theory is that for 95% of the country, their lives really wouldn't of changed under different regimes given two different timelines for each of these Presidents.
My exception in for Biden weirdly enough. This Child Tax Credit is a game changer for some people. In a good way... but its not a thing that ruins trust.
No. We know a lot of people who were personally injured by Republican policies. Very few people were really injured by Democratic policies, though; they were afraid they would be but they weren't. :sigh: It's an asymmetry between people who are afraid of actual bad things and people who are afraid of nonsense and fiction because of the scaremongers on Faux News.
Two ideas.
First, the decline in trust correlates with the professionalization and expansion of conservative propaganda organs owned and run by plutocrats who wish to keep the public divided. Not just Fox News, but the entire conservative ecosystem which includes hundreds of radio stations, hundreds of thinktanks, and production of cut-and-paste propaganda for innumerable right-wing politicians.
Second, a smaller effect might be due to the well-known biases instilled by economics 101 courses. Smaller because only a small segment of the population actually takes these courses in high school or college.
Can you talk more about these well known biases instilled by introductory econ courses? Or link me to some reading about that, maybe? This is the first i’m hearing of this.
The Moral Effects of Economic Teaching
https://www.uv.es/sasece/docum2015/Etzioni-2015-Sociological_Forum.pdf
The games economists play: Why economics students behave more selfishly than other students
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5584942/
Why Are Economics Students More Selfish than the Rest?
http://ftp.iza.org/dp4625.pdf
I've encountered this idea several times in the past. A few minutes of googling with terms "intro economics selfishness" found these near the top.
Can one also find similar tendencies with the humanities students, and how they are more likely to be ochlocratic (collectively narcissistic)? This would extend to the liberal media also being more polarized and sectarian.
A recent study failed to find any discernible effect of studying economics on self-interest:
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/304/
Ah. A study of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Developed) subjects, presumably of short-term effects. Still, the credentials look good, and it adds to the growing and contradictory body of evidence. I may be wrong.
Nice work rounding up the research, but again the lack of cultural context negates the value of any conclusions.
Japan is a totally different society. Among other things, it is so safe that car accidents where someone is injured (not killed, just hurt) show up on the evening news in Tokyo. Compare that with LA where at least 5 dead and a fiery explosion is required for a 2 second mention.
I've left a computer bag (with a then $3000 laptop) on the Yamanote train line - the circle one going around central Tokyo - and was able to claim it from the termination train station the next day. In the US, it would be either stolen within seconds or blown up by Homeland Security.
Taiwan isn't quite as extrame safety as Japan, but it isn't that far away either.
I can't speak to Korea.
But overall, decline in trust is always a function of decline in prosperity. We're getting close to a generation during which the overall average of American male wages has been flat. When there isn't enough to go around, people get suspicious of others and jealous of their own prerogatives. Nor is it inaccurate to say that ongoing diversity campaigns combined with open advocacy of illegal aliens isn't helping. Let's not forget that union leaders of all races have openly stated that incoming immigrants depress existing union member wages.
Here’s a rose-colored-glasses interpretation: Is it possible the poll results are just because people’s standards have risen? I tend to think Americans’ expectations for how perfect a match their spouse should be, how non-racist a white acquaintance can be before a person of color can call them a friend, and in general how supportive friends are have gone up. (So many people in 20th-century media are SO MEAN to their supposed friends!) And consider also the evolving norms around kids committing physical violence against one another, which I think there was a viral Twitter thread about the other day. Is it possible the same dynamic applies with social trust? Maybe the changing poll numbers show people becoming more sensitive, more empathetic, and thus more shocked and discouraged by others’ failures of empathy, or failures to live up to the high standards people set for themselves.
Yes, this. Also, it would be good to compare these measures of how trustworthy people think other are with any ground-truth data we can gather about how trustworthy people in fact are, whether it's rates of fraudulent transactions, results from experiments where you leave a wallet on the sidewalk with a hidden camera pointing at it and see what people do, or whatever. In particular, as Caplan, Brennan, etc will eagerly tell you, the literature on voter ignorance says that Americans drastically overestimate the extent to which people can be trusted to make informed voting decisions.
Hard to test, but at the same time, we can measure crime rate (adjusted for SES).
I think the masks are an interesting real-world instance where people do trust government and others. While people might complain about the CDC and messaging, most people have also been wearing masks even today. So there's some sort of deeper core trust that remains.
First of all, nobody goes bowling alone unless they're practicing for a tournament; it's just that "Bowling With Family or Friends Instead of in An Organised League" or "Bowling Loses Popularity Compared to New Activities" makes a less snappy title.
Secondly, is media partly to blame ? Until the recent spike coinciding with Covid, murders, violence and crime in general had been dropping for years since the mid-90s, but every year people reported it was getting worse- because they watched the nightly news with its "if it bleeds it leads" coverage
As a data point: I live in Vietnam where trust levels are pretty low. I don't have any survey data showing that, just anecdotally it is clearly the case. Just as an example: when you buy something at a store (like a major, national electronics chain), you're expected to open up the box and inspect it before taking it home to make sure it is what you think you've bought.
There is, obviously, zero polarization since there are no other political parties and I've never heard anyone ever discuss politics. (Which probably sounds like a totalitarian nightmare to most Americans but actually is really, really nice to not have to listen to politics take over every aspect of every conversation.)
Yet trust is still low with no polarization.
Also, there is a ton of homogeneity since (to oversimply somewhat) everyone is the same ethnic and religious background here so even the "cultural homogeneity leads to high trust" explanation doesn't really hold much water, IMHO. If anything, the weird sectional distrusts between North and South Vietnamese over honestly trivial differences would seem to argue against that. A (North Vietnamese) friend once bought an apartment from a (North Vietnamese) elderly couple that said that would only sell to North Vietnamese.
If it’s a question of trotting out our hobby horses, my first reaction is to blame the media in general and the Internet in particular. People are taught to be afraid, be it about terrorism, crime, child abductions, or Covid mortality rates. The average Joe is lucky to be within two orders of magnitude of the actual figures. And once you sell the fear, the anger is only a putt shot away. After that, who has the bandwidth to worry about the environment, the new Gilded Age, right-wing extremism, etc, etc?
As for the issue of trust, there’s a real distinction between trusting the guy on the street to be a decent guy and follow the laws, and trusting him to vote along the spectrum of what you feel is acceptable (in the largest sense). Thirty years ago, backing the wrong horse in a presidential election took a day or two to bitterly digest. Now it’s a four-year white-knuckle ride.
Democracy needs trust. And trust needs a sense that with enough access to truth and education and dialog, that we can reach a modus vivendi. Two decades after the Internet burst upon the scene, we find ourselves in a post-truth world. At this rate, I doubt democracy has another two decades in it.
I wonder if electoral system is partly involved here. Winner-take-all systems (France, Canada, most of the East Asian examples here) push a sort of political zero-sum narrative, that you wouldn't see in more coalitional proportional systems (like superstars Sweden/Norway)
Obviously Germany cuts against this, but I don't know how the broader study looks (couldn't figure out where it was linked with cross-country comparisons). STV (or other PR) is the drum I keep banging for eternity as a solution to everything, so I'm particularly keen to confirm/deny my priors.
Met the manager of a high-end Northeast restaurant this weekend. They have literally shut down for a few weeks per quarter to keep revenues from getting so high that it'd shut off the covid emergency money. I don't trust the welfare system. A better functioning government would go a long way towards better trust in general.
You may not have solutions, but at least you characterized the landscape and the problem pretty well, with lots of interesting and well-sourced facts and data. Thanks for that. This trust issue is something I'm engaged with as well, from a sociological viewpoint. I found this really helpful and good food for thought.
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You probably don't want to say so, but the answer is simple. Since the Republicans stoke hate constantly by lying constantly, are promoting racism and sexism, are supporting insurrection and terrorism, are lawless, and are trying to sabotage basic government functions (see: debt limit) -- get rid of the Republican Party and the problem is solved. The Republican Party disinformation machine is the primary cause of distrust in the US.
Shut down Faux News and Sinclair Broadcasting, shut down the worst of the crooked megachurches, arrest the criminals behind the Qanon scam, get Trump in prison where he belongs, problem will go away. What we need is exactly like de-Nazification in post-WWII Germany.
I think you and Musgrave have been very unfair to Mr Asher and priviliged-naive in missing his point. He said nothing suggesting he resented others getting freebies. He said that to change your life you must get up and do something. I remember you writing the same advice on battling depression
This has been an unusual recession when the social good called for keeping people home. Normally the issue of incentivizing people to stay home is very important - skills atrophy and connection is lost to the work force. That's nothing to with scarcity mentality, it's more about keeping laid off in and bringing people living on the margins into positive healthy meaningful activity.
There's an interpretation of the Scandinavian data which fits with the "immigration lowers trust" idea: Basically, it's that mistrust of diversity exists, but the effect is weak. What happens in this scenario is that _extremely high trust countries admit a lot more immigrants_, and then that drives a short-run decline in their trust level, but not enough to swamp the pro-immigration / pro-integration policies.
I feel like if you go spend a year in some Rust Belt mill town in decline a la Mare of Easttown with falling employment, rising drug usage, declining church attendance and stagnant educational attainment you probably won't trust the government by the end of it either.
The really bizarre part is that so many people in areas like that keep voting for the exact party which offshored their jobs to China (the Republicans). False consciousness, promoted by right-wing disinformation and "divide and conquer" campaigns like Faux News.
Agree. For better or worse, one group is getting rich and the other is in decline. MAGA has lot of contrarianism in it...