I am glad Arnold re-linked to this recently. Since I happen to be actively reading the book "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause" by Benjamin Nathans about the many facets and people of the Soviet dissident movement, this post made me think about accountability and trust in totalitarian regimes. In this extreme setting, accountability is not merely weakened, it is thwarted for malign state purposes. A prime example of this manipulation is maintaining a massive network of informants to rat out their family, friends, and colleagues for any number of infractions, real or imagined. The incentives of rewards and recognition granted by the state (that may include that vacated apartment of the neighbor you just sold out) were perverse and broke down cooperative trust. In such a society, it isn't that trust disappears, it is that very strong bonds of trust is forged with a relatively large passing of time and high amounts of contact within necessarily small networks.
As the dissidence movement was taking more emergent order robust shape in the Khrushchev "thaw" years and beyond, the harm done to trust was evident in scenarios in which dissidents didn't trust meeting with people with whom they didn't deeply know or trust already, and citizens at large who might be inherently interested in a public demonstration or a private gathering in some Moscow kitchen to read the latest samizdat literature, but how to receive an invite if they weren't already connected to this movement and trusted within it? How to trust that such a gathering wasn't a KGB trap in the first place or that informants wouldn't be in the mix?
When such trust is broken by such long-standing practices of abuse of accountability by the state, I marvel that dissident movements and opposition occurs at all, and moves from the territory of cooperation based on trust to cooperation based on courage.
And obviously, such a society is going to be fundamentally broken in its political and economic foundations.
A very good post, thank you from Japan, another of those societies often described as "high trust" while it's just high reciprocal control and high probability of being sanctioned if one misbehaves. Good idea to repost old essays (I started following recently and had not read this). Thanks.
It may be that there is a set amount of trust in a society, and it can either be concentrated or dispersed. In some societies there is a high degree of solidarity within a family, clan, and or tribe; and almost none outside. By contrast, in the modern West, trust and solidarity is dispersed; which is why the brother of Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) could inform the authorities about his suspicions, something almost unthinkable in a more traditional society.
You seem to be confusing trust in people with trust in institutions. If you have person A and person B and an accountability system C, you can judge their trust in each other based on what they would do without C. Would A borrow money to B without a receipt and without witnesses? That's high trust. Accountability systems is what you put in place because people don't trust each other.
Also, what or whom is it you trust? Do you trust the outcome, D?
When people ask: do you trust the media, or the courts, or scientists, or some other institution with checks and balances, it is not the people in those institutions they think of. If they trust any of these institutions, it's because they know that there are checks and balance systems in place, which let them trust the outcome D.
I don't trust journalists, but I might trust the content in an article I read because there (presumably) is a system of fact checkers involved. And other newspapers that would love to point out faults in their competitors articles. If those systems don't exist, there is no reason to trust D.
Do you trust lawyers? Prosecutors? Judges? Maybe not, but if you put them against each other, you might still trust D (the verdict in a case, for instance).
Unfortunatly, the universities have become monocultures, which means the system is broken. So should you trust scientists? I only trust them in areas that are politically neutral, which is mostly the natural sciences (biology is in danger, though).
Like I said, if A trust B, he/she doesn't need C. Why do they trust each other? Mostly, people trust people they know, and if they don't know them, they are more likely to trust people who are similar to themselves. A wouldn't cheat B, so B probably won't cheat A. Similarity has a lot of dimensions, and one of them is ethnicity. Homogeneous societies have more trust, but it is possible to build trust among different ethnicities as well. Culture is important.
Finally, one thing that needs to be said is that there is a flip side to high trust societies. When we trust people, we can get fooled. Germany in the 30s and 40s was a high trust society. People trust that their own soldiers, people they know, won't commit crimes. But they do.
Sweden, where I live, used to be a high trust society, and in many ways it still is. If you knew things about Sweden, you would know that in reality there is little accountability. We don't think we need institutions that constrain our law enforcement agencies etc. We believe in the goodness of power. This has many perverse effects, but I won't bother you with that here. Trusting people is efficient, but it is not just efficient when we do good things but also when we murder.
This essay about trust and accountability is reminiscent of Ronald Coase's theory of the firm and Oliver Williamson's theory of corporations. Coase and Williamson aren't concerned as much about trust as accountability as such, but their approach is consistent with such concerns. They hypothesize about why firms exist and why individuals agree to cooperate in large organizations rather than continuing to operate as individual agents. A large part of their explanation stems from economies of scale and the Pareto improvements available from close cooperation. But part of the reason implicitly if not explicitly has to do with trust and accountability. It's why lawyers and auditors operate as small-ish partnerships rather than as large corporations - their firms need to be trustworthy and partners need to be accountable to each other and to their clients. Large corporations can maintain accountability in other ways that enable large sized organizations to function.
I think today's (yesterday's, actually) topic is very interesting but I'm not sure it's a good topic for such a short piece. There's too much that gets left unsaid. More specifically, too much room for misunderstanding. Sorry if what follows is the result of misunderstanding what was meant.
I had difficulty getting past the first sentence, much less the first paragraph. Trust and cooperation are not the same thing. They are typically if not always correlated but either can exist without much of the other. There are also different types of trust and cooperation. They can and do differ towards government, corporations, known and unknown persons, and others groups. And one can think people and institutions are generally untrustworthy while thinking everyone they deal with on a daily basis isn't like that.
While cooperation is good, it doesn't mean the cooperative people are good. And being uncooperative definitely doesn't mean that those people are bad. I get that you probably don't mean all types of cooperation but even more narrowly defined I don't see how that changes any of this.
I don’t really know what you mean by inherent so maybe I’m missing what you meant to convey. I don't know if high-trust or cheating tells us anything about genetic characteristics but they can certainly be the result of cultural upbringing and culture more generally. It is culture that tells us what is right or wrong. It is culture that largely decides what our laws will be and it plays an even bigger role in which laws will be enforced and how vigorously. Culture is extremely important to both trust and cooperation. Humans are social creatures and as such, much of what we do is to gain the approval of those around us. Yes, we often do "the right thing" simply because we know it to be right (as culture has informed us) but we also do the right thing to gain approval of others. And yes, sometimes we do the right thing to avoid criminal punishment. Why do men open and hold doors for women to pass? (ignoring for the moment that some women of today find this offensive.) why do people in one city obey crosswalk signs and in another ignore them? (it’s not fear of a fine.) We are all cheaters or at least wanna-be cheaters some of the time but culture and the desire for acceptance decreases how much we cheat as much or more than laws and criminal prosecution.
You don’t define what you mean by accountability but since you have largely dismissed learned culture as part of minimizing cheaters, it seems fair to assume you don't think culture is part of accountability. On this basis, I suggest that the fact that much of our service economy runs on verbal agreements with rather weak contractual guarantees is because the accountability is largely cultural. It’s not the only reason but it is important. Maybe a better example is the diamond trade that was long (and still?) dominated by Jews who operated on a cultural trust stronger than within the larger society. This trust based on shared background gave them an advantage when trading, especially across large distances.
I’ve gone on too long but given my definition of accountability, I see little difference in outcome between high trust and high accountability. They are not only highly correlated but too intertwined to separate.
Oh drats, one more thing. If you really want a high-accountability society, we can go back to living in isolated tribes no larger than 100 where everyone knows everyone else and cheaters can’t hide in anonymity. Instituting some version of that inability to hide in a larger society is difficult and discussing ways we might do it better would be a big effort but hopefully mention of tribes helps you see the challenge and approaches to addressing it.
Arnold, one of your longstanding aphorisms is: "standard banking is adjacent to government and crypto is adjacent to crime." It looks like SBF/FTX were very adjacent to government, which looks to have been happy to play along, very adjacent to crime.
I suspect that you cannot use 'fear of being punished' as the glue that holds together a high trust society. The sort of people who do not value being virtuous for its own sake are the sort of people whom you 'cannot trust any further than you can throw them'. Certain religious communities have managed to create high-trust social groups by withdrawing from the larger world and, to the extent it is possible, only transacting with members of the community. These communities can handle significant disagreement over 'what does it mean to be virtuous' and significant sinfulness -- but they fall apart when people stop trying to be virtuous. These communities often have a very significant number of people who have joined not out of faith, or shared religious beliefs, but simply because they recognise that 'these are good people', and they want to be part of this community.
It used to be that scientific and academic professions and professional institutions worked the same way. Now, it seems, that the deconstructionists have completely undermined the virtue of being truthful. And they are out there holding people accountable -- but not to the truth, but to academic consensus, even if false. There are a lot of virtuous and would-be virtuous people out there who would really like to produce new virtuous institutions, and then compete against the ones that they left, and drive them out of business. But how to bell this particular cat?
“a high-trust society is one that has an effective process in place for detecting and punishing cheaters.”
Then would a country with pervasive surveillance, and swift punishment be by your definition high trust? Let’s imagine a current, or better, a future country like a China or a Middle Eastern theocracy only with technologically much enhanced powers to detect and punish norm violators. Perhaps those imaginary societies would be high trust by your definition, but they don’t sound like the desirable and pleasant places to live that one commonly associates with the description high trust society.
Let me suggest a somewhat opposite idea. Perhaps societies that expend great effort on rule creation, effective violation detection and punishment, expend that effort because they are in fact low trust societies. This idea is closer to my understanding of what people are getting at when they use the words ‘high trust’. I have lived in societies where it wasn’t uncommon for individuals to consider it personally foolish to abide by a rule if one could violate that rule to personal advantage and also be sure that no adverse consequences would result. Someone with a different cultural bent might decide not to violate a rule for personal gain because his morals were against it, for example: ‘that’s not the way I choose to do business’. I’ve also seen it commonly suggested that high trust societies, are characterized, not just by, the above mentioned, moral restraint, but also the punitive expectation of the same in others. Reusing the example above: ‘I wont deal with people that do business that way, even if it might cost me a bit more’.
You seem to focus on economic idea that incentives matter. So detection and punishment provide incentives leading to greater trust within society. I have always thought that the idea, high trust, focuses on the economic idea of transaction costs. So endogenous levels of trust enable interactions with lower overheads of detection and punishment. Both points are true and I would suggest that in practice lower transaction costs via trust have created better conditions for human flourishing than stronger incentives via punishment.
Regarding the crypto currency quote, Izra’s point about ‘trusted services’ is noted but I am not satisfied that he has offered a value free discussion of trust and crypto currencies. In the interest of completeness, I would observe that crypto currency services have selected trade-offs that place trust into the service as follows: (1) trust in sovereign management of a currency has been replaced by trust in management by an auditable computer algorithm. The idea is that individuals can have higher trust in the policies of the algorithm than policies driven by the passions and pressures of government functionaries. (2) Trust in institutional custodianship has been replaced by trust in personal custodianship. The idea is that personally holding ones digital property (hopefully in a hardware wallet) means one doesn’t have to trust a holding institution to remain solvent (FTX) or trust a government to abstain from managing rules in a self-interested way that appropriates private assets. (I do not associate any value judgements to trade-offs.)
Otherwise regarding "if someone tries to screw me over or steal my stuff..." then the technology to deal with that contingency is a system called law enforcement. That system protects property rights, and, as far as I know, its competency is not a function of the decentralization or centralization of the thing that issues the property. After all, there are decentralized systems that issue all kinds of property. Some issue crypto currency; some issue the variety of real-world currencies; some issue cars, some houses and whatever. And when someone tries to screw you over and take, say your car, we rationally appeal a competent legal system that we trust to enforce those property rights, rather than say General Motors.
A totalitarian surveillance society is not high trust. Those in power can cheat with impunity. That is the problem posed by political power. People with power do not want to be held accountable, and they are skilled at avoiding accountability. But if they don't have accountability they are not trusted. Only feared.
I was once in Sharm el Sheik. There were armed guards, police officers and military everywhere. According to the author, this would mean I could trust the people, since the accountability system was clearly and visibly in place. I have never felt so vulnerable to terrorist attacks. I couldn't trust people enough to be at a new years eve party. The soldiers reminded me of the risk and made me feel suspicious against the people around me.
Cancel culture represents a form of accountability. If you associate with, host, publish or have any other dalliance with someone deemed ideologically inappropriate or express views much outside of the 'correct' ones, you will be publicly vilified, potentially fired, removed from social media and other tech platforms etc.
Does this lead to high trust levels by those that share the appropriate ideology? Maybe. They could trust that people they associate with are unlikely to say anything too alarming to them, that they are unlikely to see views expressed in their chosen media outlets that go against the prevailing view, or hear such views at work. Perhaps what we are seeing with Twitter currently is a breakdown of trust and the mechanisms around it that underpinned a key part of this construct.
I think this points to a weakness in Arnold’s accountability theory: accountability without shared principles of behavior to guide it makes for low trust, because one can’t predict outcomes ahead of time. When the closest thing to principle is “don’t offend me” there can’t be trust because you never know what will trigger adverse responses.
One thing I have noticed from the apostates from the left like Weiss, Wolfe and their ilk is how surprised they were about how welcoming the outsiders were, even if they disagreed. I expect many in the woke church don’t realize how normal people behave, how strange it is to cancel someone for disagreements or something you said a few decades back.
I suggest that all people elected or selected to a high authority position must sign and make public a Negative Confession, both at the end of their mandate and every time they are reelected or reappointed. Read https://www.worldhistory.org/The_Negative_Confession/
An interesting idea. Probably falls apart with people's natural inclinations to deceive and to self-deceive. Probably would not have deterred Sam Bankman-Fried.
My answer to your challenge is that prosecutors seem to have very little accountability but are highly trusted. As you said, sometimes "soft on crime" prosecutors lose elections, but there are a vanishingly small number of cases where a prosecutor was severely punished for the atrocity of depriving an innocent person of their liberty.
In some sense I think accountability is overrated. Developing some technological system that is highly resistant to many forms of cheating is far superior to developing a system that is completely open to cheating and then relying on a separate social system (likely with its own vulnerabilities) to provide accountability.
On: "I challenge you to point to an institution or segment of society that is accorded high trust with little accountability, or vice-versa."
Over the last half a century the teachers unions are still trusted by a large number of people while they have been very effective and preventing any measuring (aka testing) or allowing accountability of their results.
They use a lot of political muscle to get their way. To me, this is a sign that they are not trusted. If you're trusted, you do not need to use coercion.
It seems that they are smooth enough operators the general public doesn't understand how they get their people on the school boards who are then negotiating with themselves against the tax payers and students interest. The publics main contact is with the individual teacher, not the teachers in the rubber room or shoved into the worse schools that are incompetent and can't be fired.
As a practical matter, you may want a different word than 'accountability'. The reason I like the expression 'high trust' and dislike 'high accountability' is that once people start talking about accountability, what we end up with is a system whereby the usual suspects are scapegoated and
take the blame. This I know is not what you want. But the thing that erodes trust the most in my experience is discovering that people have lied to you, most especially if they did so as part of a cover-up. But when you investigate why cover-ups happen, you often find it is to hide the most minor of transgressions. People do not feel free to admit the most inconsequential of sins because they think the accountability police will unleash all sorts of hell upon them. The accountability police is disproportionately formed of people who love humiliating others and making them suffer -- it is why
they sign up for such things.
So, if you want real accountability the first thing you may need to do excuse such people from your process. This has turned out to be very difficult to implement in practice. Teaching people how to admit minor wrong doing and have it not matter very much is a hard lesson, especially if you do not wish to instead teach 'the well connected people can get away with anything' which is a different serious risk.
Like you I prefer the sound of High-Trust but in a world full of strangers there must be better mechanisms than just assuming everyone wants to be good. Those we choose to be the guardians must have a higher standard of accountability - that is why we have them swear an oath to be ‘better -more noble- than the average’.
This is why the incoming Trump administration is such a blight upon America. They do not want a rule of law that they will be held accountable to at all. As Orwell said: “…some animals are more equal than others”. They will set an execrable example for the next generation to follow - leading to further decay of accountability if for no other reason than perpetuating the belief that being good is only for suckers. We will all suffer — costing us money and peace of mind — if more people adopt that low standard of behavior.
I do believe that we would be better off if we could have some way for public figures to admit wrong doing and accept blame where we will allow them to become better people by this act of contrition and feel certain that it would not ruin their career if they do.
I read many “high trust societies” as having high trust, but not within the nation or society generally. But rather with their close kin group.
Even if there was effective enforcement mechanisms for acts like nepotism or tribal favoritism, these mechanisms would either be undervalued (and no one would care about informal their social sanctions) or they would be considered illegitimate and soon eliminated. I think economists give institutions too much explanatory power at the expense of underlying culture and values.
A high-accountability society is indeed what we need. But a society is only as accountable as the least rigorous of its institutions permit; and there are groups, including some racial, religious, ethnic, and/or political groups, which seek in an organized manner to take over a society's institutions in order to protect the group's loyal members from accountability when they cheat or bully non-members of that group. The "woke" are a major current example.
It seems to me that when a society begins to be taken over by these groups who undermine accountability, it becomes necessary for the remaining honest people to defend themselves against the subset of society's institutions that have been subverted -- either by segregation, to form a smaller but safe society, or to escalate the problem by undermining their own accountability to the now-corrupt institutions. This is where the Right find ourselves in today's western countries, and it is why I feel it worthwhile to push to re-legalize voluntary segregation. Because it's the best alternative left to us, the second best being secession movements.
I am glad Arnold re-linked to this recently. Since I happen to be actively reading the book "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause" by Benjamin Nathans about the many facets and people of the Soviet dissident movement, this post made me think about accountability and trust in totalitarian regimes. In this extreme setting, accountability is not merely weakened, it is thwarted for malign state purposes. A prime example of this manipulation is maintaining a massive network of informants to rat out their family, friends, and colleagues for any number of infractions, real or imagined. The incentives of rewards and recognition granted by the state (that may include that vacated apartment of the neighbor you just sold out) were perverse and broke down cooperative trust. In such a society, it isn't that trust disappears, it is that very strong bonds of trust is forged with a relatively large passing of time and high amounts of contact within necessarily small networks.
As the dissidence movement was taking more emergent order robust shape in the Khrushchev "thaw" years and beyond, the harm done to trust was evident in scenarios in which dissidents didn't trust meeting with people with whom they didn't deeply know or trust already, and citizens at large who might be inherently interested in a public demonstration or a private gathering in some Moscow kitchen to read the latest samizdat literature, but how to receive an invite if they weren't already connected to this movement and trusted within it? How to trust that such a gathering wasn't a KGB trap in the first place or that informants wouldn't be in the mix?
When such trust is broken by such long-standing practices of abuse of accountability by the state, I marvel that dissident movements and opposition occurs at all, and moves from the territory of cooperation based on trust to cooperation based on courage.
And obviously, such a society is going to be fundamentally broken in its political and economic foundations.
A very good post, thank you from Japan, another of those societies often described as "high trust" while it's just high reciprocal control and high probability of being sanctioned if one misbehaves. Good idea to repost old essays (I started following recently and had not read this). Thanks.
It may be that there is a set amount of trust in a society, and it can either be concentrated or dispersed. In some societies there is a high degree of solidarity within a family, clan, and or tribe; and almost none outside. By contrast, in the modern West, trust and solidarity is dispersed; which is why the brother of Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) could inform the authorities about his suspicions, something almost unthinkable in a more traditional society.
You seem to be confusing trust in people with trust in institutions. If you have person A and person B and an accountability system C, you can judge their trust in each other based on what they would do without C. Would A borrow money to B without a receipt and without witnesses? That's high trust. Accountability systems is what you put in place because people don't trust each other.
Also, what or whom is it you trust? Do you trust the outcome, D?
When people ask: do you trust the media, or the courts, or scientists, or some other institution with checks and balances, it is not the people in those institutions they think of. If they trust any of these institutions, it's because they know that there are checks and balance systems in place, which let them trust the outcome D.
I don't trust journalists, but I might trust the content in an article I read because there (presumably) is a system of fact checkers involved. And other newspapers that would love to point out faults in their competitors articles. If those systems don't exist, there is no reason to trust D.
Do you trust lawyers? Prosecutors? Judges? Maybe not, but if you put them against each other, you might still trust D (the verdict in a case, for instance).
Unfortunatly, the universities have become monocultures, which means the system is broken. So should you trust scientists? I only trust them in areas that are politically neutral, which is mostly the natural sciences (biology is in danger, though).
Like I said, if A trust B, he/she doesn't need C. Why do they trust each other? Mostly, people trust people they know, and if they don't know them, they are more likely to trust people who are similar to themselves. A wouldn't cheat B, so B probably won't cheat A. Similarity has a lot of dimensions, and one of them is ethnicity. Homogeneous societies have more trust, but it is possible to build trust among different ethnicities as well. Culture is important.
Finally, one thing that needs to be said is that there is a flip side to high trust societies. When we trust people, we can get fooled. Germany in the 30s and 40s was a high trust society. People trust that their own soldiers, people they know, won't commit crimes. But they do.
Sweden, where I live, used to be a high trust society, and in many ways it still is. If you knew things about Sweden, you would know that in reality there is little accountability. We don't think we need institutions that constrain our law enforcement agencies etc. We believe in the goodness of power. This has many perverse effects, but I won't bother you with that here. Trusting people is efficient, but it is not just efficient when we do good things but also when we murder.
This essay about trust and accountability is reminiscent of Ronald Coase's theory of the firm and Oliver Williamson's theory of corporations. Coase and Williamson aren't concerned as much about trust as accountability as such, but their approach is consistent with such concerns. They hypothesize about why firms exist and why individuals agree to cooperate in large organizations rather than continuing to operate as individual agents. A large part of their explanation stems from economies of scale and the Pareto improvements available from close cooperation. But part of the reason implicitly if not explicitly has to do with trust and accountability. It's why lawyers and auditors operate as small-ish partnerships rather than as large corporations - their firms need to be trustworthy and partners need to be accountable to each other and to their clients. Large corporations can maintain accountability in other ways that enable large sized organizations to function.
I think today's (yesterday's, actually) topic is very interesting but I'm not sure it's a good topic for such a short piece. There's too much that gets left unsaid. More specifically, too much room for misunderstanding. Sorry if what follows is the result of misunderstanding what was meant.
I had difficulty getting past the first sentence, much less the first paragraph. Trust and cooperation are not the same thing. They are typically if not always correlated but either can exist without much of the other. There are also different types of trust and cooperation. They can and do differ towards government, corporations, known and unknown persons, and others groups. And one can think people and institutions are generally untrustworthy while thinking everyone they deal with on a daily basis isn't like that.
While cooperation is good, it doesn't mean the cooperative people are good. And being uncooperative definitely doesn't mean that those people are bad. I get that you probably don't mean all types of cooperation but even more narrowly defined I don't see how that changes any of this.
I don’t really know what you mean by inherent so maybe I’m missing what you meant to convey. I don't know if high-trust or cheating tells us anything about genetic characteristics but they can certainly be the result of cultural upbringing and culture more generally. It is culture that tells us what is right or wrong. It is culture that largely decides what our laws will be and it plays an even bigger role in which laws will be enforced and how vigorously. Culture is extremely important to both trust and cooperation. Humans are social creatures and as such, much of what we do is to gain the approval of those around us. Yes, we often do "the right thing" simply because we know it to be right (as culture has informed us) but we also do the right thing to gain approval of others. And yes, sometimes we do the right thing to avoid criminal punishment. Why do men open and hold doors for women to pass? (ignoring for the moment that some women of today find this offensive.) why do people in one city obey crosswalk signs and in another ignore them? (it’s not fear of a fine.) We are all cheaters or at least wanna-be cheaters some of the time but culture and the desire for acceptance decreases how much we cheat as much or more than laws and criminal prosecution.
You don’t define what you mean by accountability but since you have largely dismissed learned culture as part of minimizing cheaters, it seems fair to assume you don't think culture is part of accountability. On this basis, I suggest that the fact that much of our service economy runs on verbal agreements with rather weak contractual guarantees is because the accountability is largely cultural. It’s not the only reason but it is important. Maybe a better example is the diamond trade that was long (and still?) dominated by Jews who operated on a cultural trust stronger than within the larger society. This trust based on shared background gave them an advantage when trading, especially across large distances.
I’ve gone on too long but given my definition of accountability, I see little difference in outcome between high trust and high accountability. They are not only highly correlated but too intertwined to separate.
Oh drats, one more thing. If you really want a high-accountability society, we can go back to living in isolated tribes no larger than 100 where everyone knows everyone else and cheaters can’t hide in anonymity. Instituting some version of that inability to hide in a larger society is difficult and discussing ways we might do it better would be a big effort but hopefully mention of tribes helps you see the challenge and approaches to addressing it.
Re: FTX, corruption, and lack of accountability.
Arnold, one of your longstanding aphorisms is: "standard banking is adjacent to government and crypto is adjacent to crime." It looks like SBF/FTX were very adjacent to government, which looks to have been happy to play along, very adjacent to crime.
I suspect that you cannot use 'fear of being punished' as the glue that holds together a high trust society. The sort of people who do not value being virtuous for its own sake are the sort of people whom you 'cannot trust any further than you can throw them'. Certain religious communities have managed to create high-trust social groups by withdrawing from the larger world and, to the extent it is possible, only transacting with members of the community. These communities can handle significant disagreement over 'what does it mean to be virtuous' and significant sinfulness -- but they fall apart when people stop trying to be virtuous. These communities often have a very significant number of people who have joined not out of faith, or shared religious beliefs, but simply because they recognise that 'these are good people', and they want to be part of this community.
It used to be that scientific and academic professions and professional institutions worked the same way. Now, it seems, that the deconstructionists have completely undermined the virtue of being truthful. And they are out there holding people accountable -- but not to the truth, but to academic consensus, even if false. There are a lot of virtuous and would-be virtuous people out there who would really like to produce new virtuous institutions, and then compete against the ones that they left, and drive them out of business. But how to bell this particular cat?
“a high-trust society is one that has an effective process in place for detecting and punishing cheaters.”
Then would a country with pervasive surveillance, and swift punishment be by your definition high trust? Let’s imagine a current, or better, a future country like a China or a Middle Eastern theocracy only with technologically much enhanced powers to detect and punish norm violators. Perhaps those imaginary societies would be high trust by your definition, but they don’t sound like the desirable and pleasant places to live that one commonly associates with the description high trust society.
Let me suggest a somewhat opposite idea. Perhaps societies that expend great effort on rule creation, effective violation detection and punishment, expend that effort because they are in fact low trust societies. This idea is closer to my understanding of what people are getting at when they use the words ‘high trust’. I have lived in societies where it wasn’t uncommon for individuals to consider it personally foolish to abide by a rule if one could violate that rule to personal advantage and also be sure that no adverse consequences would result. Someone with a different cultural bent might decide not to violate a rule for personal gain because his morals were against it, for example: ‘that’s not the way I choose to do business’. I’ve also seen it commonly suggested that high trust societies, are characterized, not just by, the above mentioned, moral restraint, but also the punitive expectation of the same in others. Reusing the example above: ‘I wont deal with people that do business that way, even if it might cost me a bit more’.
You seem to focus on economic idea that incentives matter. So detection and punishment provide incentives leading to greater trust within society. I have always thought that the idea, high trust, focuses on the economic idea of transaction costs. So endogenous levels of trust enable interactions with lower overheads of detection and punishment. Both points are true and I would suggest that in practice lower transaction costs via trust have created better conditions for human flourishing than stronger incentives via punishment.
Regarding the crypto currency quote, Izra’s point about ‘trusted services’ is noted but I am not satisfied that he has offered a value free discussion of trust and crypto currencies. In the interest of completeness, I would observe that crypto currency services have selected trade-offs that place trust into the service as follows: (1) trust in sovereign management of a currency has been replaced by trust in management by an auditable computer algorithm. The idea is that individuals can have higher trust in the policies of the algorithm than policies driven by the passions and pressures of government functionaries. (2) Trust in institutional custodianship has been replaced by trust in personal custodianship. The idea is that personally holding ones digital property (hopefully in a hardware wallet) means one doesn’t have to trust a holding institution to remain solvent (FTX) or trust a government to abstain from managing rules in a self-interested way that appropriates private assets. (I do not associate any value judgements to trade-offs.)
Otherwise regarding "if someone tries to screw me over or steal my stuff..." then the technology to deal with that contingency is a system called law enforcement. That system protects property rights, and, as far as I know, its competency is not a function of the decentralization or centralization of the thing that issues the property. After all, there are decentralized systems that issue all kinds of property. Some issue crypto currency; some issue the variety of real-world currencies; some issue cars, some houses and whatever. And when someone tries to screw you over and take, say your car, we rationally appeal a competent legal system that we trust to enforce those property rights, rather than say General Motors.
A totalitarian surveillance society is not high trust. Those in power can cheat with impunity. That is the problem posed by political power. People with power do not want to be held accountable, and they are skilled at avoiding accountability. But if they don't have accountability they are not trusted. Only feared.
I was once in Sharm el Sheik. There were armed guards, police officers and military everywhere. According to the author, this would mean I could trust the people, since the accountability system was clearly and visibly in place. I have never felt so vulnerable to terrorist attacks. I couldn't trust people enough to be at a new years eve party. The soldiers reminded me of the risk and made me feel suspicious against the people around me.
Cancel culture represents a form of accountability. If you associate with, host, publish or have any other dalliance with someone deemed ideologically inappropriate or express views much outside of the 'correct' ones, you will be publicly vilified, potentially fired, removed from social media and other tech platforms etc.
Does this lead to high trust levels by those that share the appropriate ideology? Maybe. They could trust that people they associate with are unlikely to say anything too alarming to them, that they are unlikely to see views expressed in their chosen media outlets that go against the prevailing view, or hear such views at work. Perhaps what we are seeing with Twitter currently is a breakdown of trust and the mechanisms around it that underpinned a key part of this construct.
I think this points to a weakness in Arnold’s accountability theory: accountability without shared principles of behavior to guide it makes for low trust, because one can’t predict outcomes ahead of time. When the closest thing to principle is “don’t offend me” there can’t be trust because you never know what will trigger adverse responses.
One thing I have noticed from the apostates from the left like Weiss, Wolfe and their ilk is how surprised they were about how welcoming the outsiders were, even if they disagreed. I expect many in the woke church don’t realize how normal people behave, how strange it is to cancel someone for disagreements or something you said a few decades back.
I suggest that all people elected or selected to a high authority position must sign and make public a Negative Confession, both at the end of their mandate and every time they are reelected or reappointed. Read https://www.worldhistory.org/The_Negative_Confession/
Arnold, if you like the idea, please develop it.
An interesting idea. Probably falls apart with people's natural inclinations to deceive and to self-deceive. Probably would not have deterred Sam Bankman-Fried.
The NC seems pointless. If you have an omniscient judge to evaluate it, it is redundant; if you don't it is untrustworthy and useless.
NC should be developed into a weapon to destroy the reputation of liars
My answer to your challenge is that prosecutors seem to have very little accountability but are highly trusted. As you said, sometimes "soft on crime" prosecutors lose elections, but there are a vanishingly small number of cases where a prosecutor was severely punished for the atrocity of depriving an innocent person of their liberty.
In some sense I think accountability is overrated. Developing some technological system that is highly resistant to many forms of cheating is far superior to developing a system that is completely open to cheating and then relying on a separate social system (likely with its own vulnerabilities) to provide accountability.
On: "I challenge you to point to an institution or segment of society that is accorded high trust with little accountability, or vice-versa."
Over the last half a century the teachers unions are still trusted by a large number of people while they have been very effective and preventing any measuring (aka testing) or allowing accountability of their results.
They use a lot of political muscle to get their way. To me, this is a sign that they are not trusted. If you're trusted, you do not need to use coercion.
It seems that they are smooth enough operators the general public doesn't understand how they get their people on the school boards who are then negotiating with themselves against the tax payers and students interest. The publics main contact is with the individual teacher, not the teachers in the rubber room or shoved into the worse schools that are incompetent and can't be fired.
As a practical matter, you may want a different word than 'accountability'. The reason I like the expression 'high trust' and dislike 'high accountability' is that once people start talking about accountability, what we end up with is a system whereby the usual suspects are scapegoated and
take the blame. This I know is not what you want. But the thing that erodes trust the most in my experience is discovering that people have lied to you, most especially if they did so as part of a cover-up. But when you investigate why cover-ups happen, you often find it is to hide the most minor of transgressions. People do not feel free to admit the most inconsequential of sins because they think the accountability police will unleash all sorts of hell upon them. The accountability police is disproportionately formed of people who love humiliating others and making them suffer -- it is why
they sign up for such things.
So, if you want real accountability the first thing you may need to do excuse such people from your process. This has turned out to be very difficult to implement in practice. Teaching people how to admit minor wrong doing and have it not matter very much is a hard lesson, especially if you do not wish to instead teach 'the well connected people can get away with anything' which is a different serious risk.
Like you I prefer the sound of High-Trust but in a world full of strangers there must be better mechanisms than just assuming everyone wants to be good. Those we choose to be the guardians must have a higher standard of accountability - that is why we have them swear an oath to be ‘better -more noble- than the average’.
This is why the incoming Trump administration is such a blight upon America. They do not want a rule of law that they will be held accountable to at all. As Orwell said: “…some animals are more equal than others”. They will set an execrable example for the next generation to follow - leading to further decay of accountability if for no other reason than perpetuating the belief that being good is only for suckers. We will all suffer — costing us money and peace of mind — if more people adopt that low standard of behavior.
I do believe that we would be better off if we could have some way for public figures to admit wrong doing and accept blame where we will allow them to become better people by this act of contrition and feel certain that it would not ruin their career if they do.
I read many “high trust societies” as having high trust, but not within the nation or society generally. But rather with their close kin group.
Even if there was effective enforcement mechanisms for acts like nepotism or tribal favoritism, these mechanisms would either be undervalued (and no one would care about informal their social sanctions) or they would be considered illegitimate and soon eliminated. I think economists give institutions too much explanatory power at the expense of underlying culture and values.
A high-accountability society is indeed what we need. But a society is only as accountable as the least rigorous of its institutions permit; and there are groups, including some racial, religious, ethnic, and/or political groups, which seek in an organized manner to take over a society's institutions in order to protect the group's loyal members from accountability when they cheat or bully non-members of that group. The "woke" are a major current example.
It seems to me that when a society begins to be taken over by these groups who undermine accountability, it becomes necessary for the remaining honest people to defend themselves against the subset of society's institutions that have been subverted -- either by segregation, to form a smaller but safe society, or to escalate the problem by undermining their own accountability to the now-corrupt institutions. This is where the Right find ourselves in today's western countries, and it is why I feel it worthwhile to push to re-legalize voluntary segregation. Because it's the best alternative left to us, the second best being secession movements.