Bolstering confidence

From Making policy for a low-trust world by Matthew Yglesias.  

I don't want to make too much of the claim that America is becoming a low-trust society.  We have historically been high-trust and in many, many arenas we still are.  Our politicians and many major institutions have had a rough ride, deservedly so.  They have not been trustworthy and therefore are not trusted.  But that is quite different from an environment of unwarranted distrust.

Americans usually, under most circumstances, are perfectly willing to extend trust to others.  

But because it is politicians and institutions which have demonstrated such obvious untrustworthiness, Yglesias' thoughts are timely and pertinent.  It is worth reading the whole essay but I think there are a couple of very strong sections.

The United States of America has become a country with low and falling levels of social trust. This is in some ways a rational response to elite failures, in some ways an inevitable consequence of the public becoming better educated, in some ways an unavoidable side effect of better information technology, and in some ways a deplorable thing that we should try to reverse.

But something I’ve become increasingly convinced of is that policymakers need to acknowledge that it’s a real feature of the landscape and adjust their decision-making accordingly.

In particular, they need to adjust it in an appropriate way. A very large share of the people involved in politics and government are lawyers, and their lawyerly instinct about the problem seems to be that you need to layer on more layers of process. If people are worried about the discretionary use of power, you need to make sure the decision-makers go through an elaborate compliance checklist. But as Princess Leia tried to explain to Grand Moff Tarkin, “the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

When you try to address low trust through compliance, you end up where Andrew Cuomo is — he’s creating an elaborate checklist for vaccine prioritization which is hard to follow, so he’s ramping up penalties for people who don’t comply, which is slowing vaccine administration and further eroding trust.

But the same basic problem pops up everywhere from fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing to bike lanes.

The correct way to respond to a low-trust environment is not to double down on proceduralism, but to commit yourself to the “it does exactly what it says on the tin” principle and implement policies that have the following characteristics:

It’s easy for everyone, whether they agree with you or disagree with you, to understand what it is you say you are doing.

It’s easy for everyone to see whether or not you are, in fact, doing what you said you would do.

It’s easy for you and your team to meet the goal of doing the thing that you said you would do.

That’s not a guarantee of political or policy success. Maybe you will pick terrible ideas and be a huge failure anyway. But this triad for success under conditions of distrust at least creates the possibility of success, where people will look back and decide that what you did worked. Committing yourself to that triad may involve some waste and inefficiency relative to a more theoretically optimal scheme with more means-testing.  

A few years ago, I was involved in a four month public consultation on a proposal from a group known as South Fork Conservancy.  They were proposing to build a series or connecting trails through the neighborhood and were conducting this community process to get a rubber stamp of approval.

But this is a community of engineers and management consultants and lawyers and business owners and professionals.  They tend to be alert and questioning.  And very soon distrusting.

Whenever a question was advanced to SFC, they had only glib answers intended to assuage the questioner but not the address the question.  SFC fanned out into the neighborhood trying to foment division among questioning neighbors.  When it became clear that SFC was actually a development front and not a conservation group, distrust really mounted.

But Yglesias's three positions were the center of the issue.  SFC did not do "exactly what it says on the tin."  They could not describe their project in detail.  They could not forecast how it would affect neighbors.  They could not estimate the affect on the environment or on neighbors.  They simply did not want to say what was on the tin.  Their proposition was rejected but they proceeded elsewhere.  And it quickly became apparent that they were not doing what they claimed they were doing.  Building on stream banks, building in wetlands, etc.  They were not about conservation.  

And here they are a decade later, still trying to push their deception.  Not easy on their team but highly remunerative to their backers.

Yglesias makes the point that the basis of trust is trustworthiness.

Of course, if you bypass community consultation and do something that turns out to not work, you’ll look like an idiot. But if your departments of public works and transportation are staffed by people who don’t know what they’re doing, that’s the problem, not a lack of community trust. After all, the community shouldn’t trust you if you don’t know what you’re doing. The point is that there’s no magic process that makes this work. What you need is a team that is worthy of trust, then it needs to act like it deserves to be trusted, and then it needs to deliver something good.

Further, he points out some contextual developments which impinge on collective decision making.

My hope is that if policymakers take the phenomenon of low trust seriously, they will be able to design policies that actually bolster trust.

But part of taking it seriously, I think, is to recognize just how much the world has changed. In the 1950s and 1960s, most people hadn’t finished high school and college graduates were a tiny elite group. 

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Elites at that time were less educated, too. But the change there is smaller. William McChesney Martin didn’t have a PhD in economics the way most recent Fed chairs have (Jay Powell has a JD), but he did several years of grad school at Columbia before World War II. So the gap between the elite and the masses has just narrowed a lot — today’s “working class” defined in educational terms is people who would actually have been in the top half of the educational distribution back in Martin’s day, and you have a huge mass constituency of college graduates.

That combines with a very open media ecosystem where it’s just inevitable that anything that happens will end up subject to scrutiny, some of it crazy and some of it sophisticated and almost all of it coming from people who feel that they are qualified to participate in serious discussions. Today’s elites seem less remote, less mysterious, and less impressive. They also aren’t coming off the back of leading the country to victory in a World War, and they are navigating a landscape with much more polarized politics and much higher expectations from historically marginalized people.

The temptation is to respond to that by taking refuge in process and complexity.

But fundamentally, it doesn’t work. And beyond that, trying to turn everything into a giant national community meeting where we address everyone’s concerns really isn’t going to work. A much more realistic goal is for policymakers to be able to say they clearly achieved what they set out to achieve. We said the buses were going to go faster, we made this change, and now they are faster. We said you’d get $2,000 and now you have $2,000. We said you could get a shot if you were old, and now you’ve got your shot.

And I think this applies to other areas of policy. “There’s going to be a government program that covers people’s medical bills” has a lot more does-what-it-says-on-the-tin power than “we’re going to set up a system of regulated, subsidized exchanges where….”

Of course, even if you pick a goal, hit your goal, and are clearly seen to have hit your goal, that’s no guarantee that everybody will like it. But that’s fine. It’s a democracy. If the voters decide they want something else, then they’ll get something else. But with clear, well-defined, and achievable goals, you at least have a fighting chance of success. 

 Indeed.

And obfuscating responsibility is often a primary defense mechanism of any institution or psychological response of any individual.