Aleksa's Book Review: Managing Public Trust

Many people will speak about high-trust and low-trust societies: "high-trust" being societies where you can "sleep on the bench" and similar activities. This split does mean a lot for understanding the various factors going into the fibre of a society, but may be a bit too black-and-white for practical purposes and leaves no normative statements.

This book explains the difference between "trust" and "confidence" in a society. Trust is a one-on-one relationship, whereas confidence is a more systemic measure of trust. Trust, as a relationship, can be unconditional, conditional, and earned. Naturally, the former of the three is a high-risk, high-reward strategy which anybody can attest to.

The latter two are recommended as foundations for society: this surprises nobody, but the real value the book delivers is how to create incentive systems that foster such relationships at little loss to productivity (which mistrust has as a consequence). Funnily enough, it re-iterates the points I'd heard previously and those advocated by ideologues.

Social ostracism is a mighty force in the life of any one person: incentivising systemic shunning of faulty perpetrators seems to be a universally accepted, and the best way to do so (according to this book) is establishing positions that confer upon the agent a highly public persona, resulting in a higher level of dopamine hits compared to the money they receive. A solid book, but by no means out-of-the-box.
6/10