Good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods differ in many ways, but the most important may be the trust gap. You can tell a place is nice to live in because children leave their bikes on front lawns, and front doors are often unlocked.
Happy countries also differ from unhappy countries in many ways, but trust might be the most important determinant. Countries such as Finland and Norway, where folks just implicitly trust their neighbors and strangers, are the countries with the happiest people.
The value of trust is most visible when you land in pockets of extraordinarily high trust, such as a lake-house community for a summer vacation.
America is becoming less like Finland and July at the lake, the data suggest.
It seems Americans trust one another less than the denizens of other wealthy nations, and they’re becoming less trusting every year.
Gallup produces a World Happiness Report every year, and this year, Finland and Denmark were the happiest countries. The United States came in 24th place — its lowest ranking ever — between Poland and Germany.
Trust of strangers is a factor in this unhappiness. Americans, as you might expect, are likelier than their more democratic-socialist friends across the Atlantic to volunteer and donate, according to Gallup. But Americans are far worse when it comes to expecting benevolence from strangers. Gallup asked respondents if they thought a stranger would return their wallet if they lost it — the U.S. ranked 52nd, below Spain, Uzbekistan, and the Gambia.
This matters. Gallup found that the answer to this question predicts happiness better than just about anything else. A guy who says he just lost his job is likelier to be happy than a guy who says he doesn’t believe his wallet would be returned.
Pew, a rival pollster, also has evidence of American mistrust. In 1984, about half of all Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted.” The percentage of Americans who trust most people steadily fell to about 1 in 3 by the 1990s, and it’s been there ever since.
Whenever high distrust in anyone or anything, including the government, churches, neighbors, and institutions, is reported, a fair question is whether that distrust is deserved or undeserved.
In the U.S., it seems distrust of neighbors and strangers is mostly undeserved. The U.S.’s crime rates are falling again toward record lows. One informal study found that about two-thirds of lost wallets were returned by the police.
So, our distrust of one another comes not from our direct experiences but more likely from social media, the news media, or a politics that tells us to hate half the country.
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Eventually, distrust becomes self-fulfilling. We avert our eyes, lock up our bikes, know our neighbors less, let our children run the streets less, and cede the sidewalks to the ne’er-do-wells.
The U.S. is rich beyond the understanding of most people in human history. But if it becomes a low-trust society, it will become, for all practical purposes, impoverished.