Trust in Government Is Not a Nicety, It Is the Thing That Makes a State Work

People talk about trust in government as a kind of civic virtue, something it would be nice to have more of, like volunteering. I think this misdescribes it badly. Trust is not a decoration on top of a functioning state. It is the mechanism by which a state functions at all, and once you list what it actually buys, the list turns out to be nearly everything.

What Trust Buys

Start with the most basic item. Money is trust. A banknote is a promise, and a promise is only worth what the promiser is believed to be. Every episode of hyperinflation in history is, at bottom, a collapse of trust in the issuer, and every episode of ordinary inflation chips at that trust a little: the government said the note was worth something, and it turned out to be worth less.

Now go down the list of things a state asks of its citizens and notice that every one of them runs on the same fuel.

• Defence. A state that wants people to take up arms for it needs them to believe the cause is what the state says it is. An army of people who assume they are being lied to does not fight well, and there are plenty of historical examples of exactly that.
• Taxes. People pay taxes willingly when they believe the money will be spent roughly as promised. When they do not, they evade, and the state has to spend more on enforcement, which the evaders then resent, which lowers trust further.
• Public health. Vaccination is the cleanest case. You are asked to inject something into your child on the word of an institution. If you do not trust the institution, no amount of data will move you, because the data comes from the same institution.
• Explanations. When something happens, a bridge falls or a price spikes or a war starts, the government explains why. Whether the explanation is accepted depends on nothing but the credibility of the speaker.
• Ordinary compliance. Wearing a seatbelt. Keeping to the speed limit. Trusting the police officer who stops you. Accepting what the school teaches your child about evolution. Obeying any law you have not personally examined, which is nearly all of them.

Strip trust away and every one of these becomes a coercion problem. The state can still get compliance, but it has to buy it with force, and force is expensive, visible, and corrosive of the very trust it is substituting for.

The Swiss Fine

Here is the observation that made the point concrete for me. Traffic fines in Switzerland are among the highest anywhere. Fines of that size, in most countries, would produce fury, evasion and a thriving trade in avoiding them.

The Swiss pay. I think the reason is that the Swiss stand in a different relation to their government than most people do to theirs. They vote directly on a great many questions, at every level. That produces two things.

First, less animosity. It is hard to hate a government you are a part of. The fine is not a foreign power taking your money; it is a rule you, collectively, set.

Second, a reasonable belief about where the money goes. Swiss public finance is transparent to an unusual degree, and the spending was itself the subject of votes. So the person paying the fine has a fair expectation that the money will be spent on something they had a say in.

Trust, in other words, is not a mood. It is a product of structure. People trust institutions they can see into and can act upon, and distrust those they cannot.

Why Our System Earns So Little of It

Which brings me to the uncomfortable half of the argument. Representative government, as we practise it, is structurally bad at generating trust, and I do not think this is an accident of who gets elected.

The public cannot see into the decisions. It cannot act on most of them. It is asked to pick a bundle of people every few years and then to accept, for years at a time, whatever those people do, with no mechanism for saying no to any particular item. Meanwhile the people chosen are, as I have argued before, rewarded for a certain looseness with the truth, and the public knows it.

So the public does what a rational agent does with an opaque counterparty that has lied before: it discounts everything. The vaccine, the tax, the explanation for the war. And because the discounting is general rather than specific, it spills over onto everything the institution touches, including the things it is right about.

A Datum That Should Frighten You

A figure I have seen quoted is that a large share of students at an elite American medical school say they will not vaccinate their own children. I cannot vouch for the number, and it does not matter whether it is exactly right. The point is who these people are. They have the training to read the trials. They are not the ignorant.

Their mistrust is not mistrust of the science. It is mistrust of government and industry, the two institutions that stand between the science and the syringe, and it has been earned by a long record of both saying things that turned out to be false. The pandemic made the same pattern visible to everyone at once, and the Iraq war had already made it for the generation before.

Journalism belongs on the same list. It was supposed to be the institution that checked the other two, and it is now trusted about as little as they are, for the same reason.

The Conclusion Nobody in Power Wants

If trust is what makes a state work, and if trust is a product of structure, then the remedy is structural. Not better communication, not a new spokesperson, not a campaign to restore confidence. Those treat trust as a mood, and moods do not survive contact with the next lie.

The remedy is to give people the two things the Swiss have: sight into the decisions, and a hand in making them. Government, industry and journalism must reform, not because reform is virtuous, but because institutions that cannot be trusted end up governing by force, and governing by force is the most expensive way there is to run a country.