29 December

This whole article is a wonderful read. It’s about the trends in trust, worldwide. I think you can explain an awful lot of the problems we see by looking at how our trust in each other, and in institutions, is changing. (And some amazing insights, such as in Europe, people trust the police more than they trust each other. In the US, nobody is trusting anybody. That explains the guns better than anything.) Some countries are holding the line, usually those with strong public sectors. Others are dragging us towards a cowboy model, the Wild West, where each person sits at home with their armoury of weapons. It’s not a chicken and egg question, it’s the deliberate attack on trust that is causing our other problems. The free market ideas of the past decades.