Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
You have to understand how gears shift from there. Trust is essential for business transactions and specifically for long term investments. You can’t make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust (a lot of money on a leap means if you don’t trust the other side or the government to keep conditions stable, you won’t see a return).

Now if you are in a high trust society, you may have a lot of leveraged businesses or governments who have gotten loans or permission to do something based on past trust history. If the trust degrades systematically Investors may want returns faster, or interest rates go up, or partnerships don’t happen. That’s why low trust places don’t grow as fast - trust is the oil for growth engines and lack of it is sand for the same.

Corruption also does a lot of small-profit-for-the-corrupt that leads to massive damage to the overall society via second and third order effects. (example: someone stealing copper cables that stop electricity to entire cities for a while).

loading story #47399860
loading story #47399587
loading story #47399397
Did you meant to write "You *can't* make massive leaps in technology or medicine" instead of *can*?
loading story #47399676
loading story #47399526
loading story #47399459
loading story #47400002
Are we living in the same reality?

Look at how business works in the rich west works. Everything is formalized with contracts, risk is portioned out and offloaded to every party under the sun. You bring in people with licenses and accreditation, 3rd party consultants, etc, etc. All of this work and expense is incurred so that if things go wrong then the parties all have precisely defined ways in which they can (expensively) drag the matter through a courtroom and whatever comes of that will be enforced with state violence.

Contrast with (certain parts of) the far east and eastern europe. The west is the low trust environment.

loading story #47398571
loading story #47398607
loading story #47398598
loading story #47399132
loading story #47399043
loading story #47398812
loading story #47399966