Before I get off the subject of infrastructure, I want to make a more general point about the nature of governance at this point in the 21st century,

Infrastructure, Governance, and Trust

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2021-06-09 04:30:06

Before I get off the subject of infrastructure, I want to make a more general point about the nature of governance at this point in the 21st century, which has to do with social trust. I wrote a whole book on this subject back in the 1990s, but a lot has changed since then.

It is a well-known fact that levels of trust in governments have been dropping almost everywhere in the world, not just in recent years but over the last several decades (see Ethan Zuckerman on this point). In some cases this is because they have screwed up big time—the Iraq invasion, euro crisis, and disastrous handling of covid in the US and Brazil come to mind. Some of that mistrust is exaggerated and pathological, as is the case of conspiracy theories so prevalent on the American right today. But I don’t think it’s the case that governments are doing worse across the board in ways that merit the bad ratings they get; there’s something much more complicated going on. Countries like Chile and South Korea, which by objective standards are doing well in the global league tables, are nonetheless part of the same broad phenomenon.

There are many reasons for this decline in trust, and in some cases they reflect ways in which the world is getting better. Levels of education are higher in very many countries when compared to 50 years ago, and educated people tend to think more critically. They don’t automatically believe what they are told by people in positions of authority. Many countries, beginning with the United States, have become more diverse. Trust in the old days was based on old boy networks of well-to-do white men with similar backgrounds and social networks; trust comes less readily in a more diverse but also more equal society. Finally, we have much more access to much more information than ever before, thanks to the rise of the internet and a general demand for transparency. It is doubtful that sexual abuse by Catholic priests is more prevalent today than in previous centuries; we just know a lot more about the inner workings of the sausage factory than we used to. Indeed, as I’ve noted in previous posts, we have too much information today, much of it of very low quality that undermines our trust in what should be respected authorities.