Name: Trust
ISBN: 9780684825250

Trust

In Trust, a sweeping assessment of the emerging global economic order "after History," Fukuyama examines a wide range of national cultures in order to divine the hidden principles that make a good and prosperous society, and his findings strongly challenge the orthodoxies of both left and right. In fact, economic life is pervaded by culture and depends, Fukuyama maintains, on moral bonds of social trust. This is the unspoken, unwritten bond between fellow citizens that facilitates transactions, empowers individual creativity, and justifies collective action. In the global struggle for economic predominance that is now upon us - a struggle in which cultural differences will become the chief determinant of national success - the social capital represented by trust will be as important as physical capital. But trust varies greatly from one society to another, and a map of how social capital is distributed around the world yields many surprises. The greatness of this country, he maintains, was built not on its imagined ethos of individualism but on the cohesiveness of its civil associations and the strength of its communities. But Fukuyama warns that our drift into a more and more extreme rights-centered individualism - a radical departure from our past communitarian tradition - holds more peril for the future of America than any competition from abroad.

What Hacker News says

CGMthrowawayNov 2025

There's a lot of research in this area. You might not like the conclusions.

Fukuyama (Trust) or Putnam (Bowling Alone) might be a good place to start, or here is a public paper by Putnam: https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....

Here's another prominent paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

Uslaner (2002) makes a distinction between moralistic trust ("Can people be trusted?") and strategic trust ("Can THIS person be trusted?") that you may find interesting.

There is also Yamagashi's Paradox: Japanese cooperate more, but trust less. Americans trust more, but defect more in specific situations.

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131012Sep 2025

Trust by Francis Fukuyama explores this relation if you want more meat than comments on a board.

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piva00Nov 2023

Francis Fukuyama wrote a book about it, called "Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity". Even though it's the same Fukuyama who declared the end of history the book has some insights into the phenomena [1].

[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1996-0...

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buttersbrianNov 2022

Trust is arguably the most expensive thing in society.

For those looking for a fun read about trust read some Francis Fukuyama.

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LucianLMZSep 2017

In no particular order and probably not remembering all:

The signal and the noise - Nate Silver;

Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb;

Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb;

1984 - Orwell;

Man's search for meaning - Viktor Frankl;

Diplomacy - Henry Kissinger (not only international politics but also deep-thinking strategy that can be used anywhere);

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius;

Superforecasting - Philip Tetlock;

Propaganda - Edward Bernays;

Pitch anything - Oren Klaff;

Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond;

How to win friends and influence people& Stop worrying (both by Dale Carnegie);

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins;

Trust - Francis Fukuyama;

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yaixApr 2012

There are thousands of ways to implement Microcredit, and some implementations have been in ways that were already proven to not work very well. But to make money.

Yunnus/Grameen had some good ideas (read his book) that are not really about the money they give out to poor people. The money is only a way to get the poor people to come to the meetings regularly and follow certain important principles, like "all my children go to school" or "we eat every day three meals" or "we will try to build a stable home made of bricks/tin roof" etc.

Seems trivial, but those are important steps. Not to mention the fact that many Grameen credits are given to groups that mutually guarantee their credit! If one person fails to pay back, the others have to pay back for this person. People learn by that to work together and to trust each other (building social capital, the very basis of every lasting economic development, read "F.Fukuyama, Trust - Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity" for example).

Just handing out little credits will of course not help a lot, but in some situations it may help, so its worthwhile anyway.

A next important step would be to make laws in all countries that banks /have to/ give one free savings accounts to everybody. No credit account of course, but a right to have a bank account would be an important and easy to implement step.

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