At the end of the day, how to maintain high trust society in the modern world is the question of our age. It used to be that, if a nation developed under conditions where high trust was vital, it could just stay that way forever, as low-trust individuals were rare enough that they’d be caught, eventually, and shunned. Now, though, many such societies are dealing with people who come in and see free alpha in looting the commons, because they have no investment in them.
Academic cheating and lying on resumes in America, for example, skyrocketed as the American collegiate and employment systems globalized. What’s worse is that many people born there assimilated to the new norm (correctly realizing that not doing so amounted to giving their money to the people doing so). It would be an enormous shame if there were no high trust societies left on Earth after some iterations on this. Many countries (e.g. Japan) have found a solution in strictly limiting migration, but many people here are extremely opposed to that course of action, and I’m curious whether they believe it can be solved by other means.
The only other solution I can think of is something like Singapore, but that doesn’t feel like “real” high-trust. If people don’t break the law because they fear a caning, they’re still the sort of people you don’t really want in your personal life. The OP advocates not defecting in society’s multi-person prisoner’s dilemma because it’s bad for the commons, but the sort of person who defects doesn’t care about that, and there are many, many such people.
At the end of the day, how to maintain high trust society in the modern world is the question of our age. It used to be that, if a nation developed under conditions where high trust was vital, it could just stay that way forever, as low-trust individuals were rare enough that they’d be caught, eventually, and shunned. Now, though, many such societies are dealing with people who come in and see free alpha in looting the commons, because they have no investment in them.
Academic cheating and lying on resumes in America, for example, skyrocketed as the American collegiate and employment systems globalized. What’s worse is that many people born there assimilated to the new norm (correctly realizing that not doing so amounted to giving their money to the people doing so). It would be an enormous shame if there were no high trust societies left on Earth after some iterations on this. Many countries (e.g. Japan) have found a solution in strictly limiting migration, but many people here are extremely opposed to that course of action, and I’m curious whether they believe it can be solved by other means.
The only other solution I can think of is something like Singapore, but that doesn’t feel like “real” high-trust. If people don’t break the law because they fear a caning, they’re still the sort of people you don’t really want in your personal life. The OP advocates not defecting in society’s multi-person prisoner’s dilemma because it’s bad for the commons, but the sort of person who defects doesn’t care about that, and there are many, many such people.