6/4/21: Edelman Trust Barometer: the Age of Cognitive Dissonance?

Some shocking, genuinely shocking data from the Edelman Global Trust Barometer for 2021. Let's take a look. 

Start with this: 

Welcome to the world where sociopaths like Jeff Bezos are both trusted to be competent and perceived to be ethical. 

Meanwhile, at least w are catching up with what is happening in the tech sector:

And with the Social Media...

But we can't be human without some serious cognitive dissonance... Healthcare is now the second most trusted sector of business in America. Yep, the same private healthcare that had to rely on public / State / Federal money and logistics to distribute vaccines. The same private healthcare that could not organize vaccinations. The same private healthcare that, effectively, bankrupted and overcharged millions of Americans for emergency treatments during the pandemic. 

Back to Social Media:

I am not quite sure what people 'trust' in terms of information delivered via 'search engines', exactly. A search engine provides access to information, but it does not provide  or produce information. So drop this daft category from the analysis and what you have? Traditional Media is barely above the water, when it comes to trust. Owned Media and Social Media are below the waterline. If you control for the partisanship divide in the U.S. political landscape, most likely the vast majority of those trusting Traditional Media are... well, Democrats. The vast majority of those who distrust Social Media are... well, Democrats. Converse holds for the Republicans. One way or the other, massive shares of American population do not have trust in anything relating to quality control or verifiability of information sources.

This year's barometer is a scary reading. In most basic terms, NGOs and Business are the only two sets of institutions that are perceived ethical. Business' perception in this area is dangerously close to being marginal. Perceived incompetency of the Government is vastly greater than perceived competency of Business.  Media is virtually the exact mirror reflection of business. We trust no one in terms of information we receive. And we love those who are making money by not caring for us - American Healthcare. We lap up anything our employers communicate, but we believe they are telling us bullshit when it comes to their social and environmental sustainability efforts or to the risks of us being displaced by them with AI and technology. 

Is there much 'social fabric' left that hasn't been torn up, yet?.. 

28/1/17: Trust in Core Social Institutions Has Collapsed

The latest Edelman Trust Barometer for 2017 shows comprehensive collapse in trust around the world in 4 key institutions of any society: the Government (aka, the State), the NGOs (including international organizations), the Media (predominantly, the so-called mainstream media, or established print, TV and radio networks) and the Businesses (heavily dominated by the multinational and larger private and public corporates).

Here are 8 key slides containing Edelman's own insights and my analysis of these.

Let's start with the trend:

In simple terms, world-wide, both trust in Governments and trust in Media are co-trending and are now below the 50 percent public approval levels. For the media, the wide-spread scepticism over the media institutions capacity to deliver on its core trust-related objectives is now below 50 percent for the second year in a row. even at its peak, media managed to command sub-60 percent trust support from the general public, globally. This coincided with the peak for the Governments' trust ratings back in 2013. Four years in a row now, Governments enjoy trust ratings sub-50 percent and in 2017, mistrust in Governments rose, despite the evidence in favour of the on-going global economic recovery.

In 2017, compared to 2015-2016, Media experienced a wholesale collapse in trust ratings. In only three countries of all surveyed by Edelman did trust in media improve: Sweden, Turkey and the U.S. Ironically, the data covering full 2016, does not yet fully reflect the impact of the U.S. Presidential election, during which trust in media (especially the mainstream media) has suffered a series of heavy blows.

 In 2016, 12 out of 29 countries surveyed had trust in Media at 50 percent or higher. In 2017, the number fell to 5.

Similar dynamics are impacting trust in NGOs:

 Of 29 countries surveyed by Edelman, 21 had trust in NGOs in excess of 50 percent in 2017, down from 23 in 2016. Although overall levels of trust in NGOs remains much higher than that for the Media institutions, the trend is for declining trust in NGOs since 2014 and this trend remans on track in 2017 data.

As per trust in Government, changes in 2017 compared to 2015-2016 show only 7 countries with improving Government ratings our of 29 surveyed. This might sound like an improvement, unless you consider the already low levels of trust in Governments.

In 2017, as in 2016 survey, only 7 countries posted trust in Government in excess of 50 percent. This is the lowest proportion of majority trust in Government for any survey on record.

Based on Edelman analysis, the gap between 'experts' (or informed public) view of institutions and that of the wider population is growing.

 And as the above slide from Edelman presentation shows, the gap between informed and general public is substantively the same in culturally (and institutionally) different countries, e.g. the U.S., UK and France. All three countries lead the sample by the size of the differences between their informed public trust in institutions and the general public trust. All of these countries have well-established, historically stable institutions and robust checks and balances underpinning their democracies. Yet, the elites (including intellectual elites) detachment from general public is not only massive, but growing.

These trends are also present in other countries:

As Edelman researchers conclude: the public in general is now driven to reject the status quo.

All of the above suggests that political opportunism, ideological populism and rising nationalism are neither new phenomena, nor un-reflected in historical data, nor fleeting. Instead, we are witnessing organic decline in trust of the institutions that continue to sustain the status quo.

10/1/17: Losing Trust and Social Capital: U.S. and Europe

The U.S. National Intelligence Council January 9, 2017 report on future global trends titled “Paradox of Progress” cites income inequality as one of the reasons for emergence of anti-free-trade sentiments in the West (see page 12 here: https://www.dni.gov/files/images/globalTrends/documents/GT-Full-Report.pdf) and links income inequality to declining public trust in U.S. institutions (page 32, above).

These risk assessments are supported by recent research from the IMF.

A recent IMF research paper by Gould, Eric D. and Hijzen, Alexander, titled “Growing Apart, Losing Trust? The Impact of Inequality on Social Capital” (from August 2016, IMF Working Paper No. 16/176: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2882614) observes that “There has been a sharp decline in the extent to which individuals trust one another, and other social capital indicators, over the past forty years in the United States”

So, observe the first fact: trust and social capital have declined in the U.S. over time.

Next, the IMF paper notes that “income inequality has tended to increase” in the U.S. over the same period of time. The paper then goes on to examine “whether the downward trend in social capital is responding to the increasing gaps in income.” The authors use U.S. data to test this possible relationship and contrasts the dynamics against the data from the EU. Beyond this, the analysis also “exploits variation across [U.S.] states and over time (1980-2010), while our analysis of the [european data] utilizes variation across European countries and over time (2002-2012).”

Per authors, “The results provide robust evidence that overall inequality lowers an individual's sense of trust in others in the United States as well as in other advanced economies. These effects mainly stem from residual inequality, which may be more closely associated with the notion of fairness, as well as inequality in the bottom of the [income] distribution.”

Some more on the findings:

1. “The results suggest that inequality at the bottom of the distribution lowers an individual’s sense of trust in others – in the United States and in Europe,” and per IMF, the relationship is causal: greater inequality at the bottom of income distribution causes loss of trust.
2. “For the United States, it appears that inequality at the bottom of the distribution is the main component of inequality that reduces trust, and this phenomenon is mainly confined to those that are negatively impacted by that component of inequality – individuals who are less educated and those at the lower third of the income distribution.” Were these ‘negatively impacted’ not at least a subset of the voters that Hillary Clinton described as ‘deplorables’?
3. “The trust levels of Europeans are also negatively affected by increasing inequality levels. However, in contrast to the United States, the impact of inequality on trust in Europe is more general. Inequality at the top and bottom of the distribution seem to have a negative impact, and the negative effect is shared across education groups.” Again, any wonder that Europe nowadays has emerging Left and Right wing populist political movements, that are more sustained over time than either Bernie Sanders’ and Donald Trump’s campaigns in the U.S.?
4. 4) Interestingly, in the context of ‘1%-er’ arguments: “For both the United States and Europe, the results do not provide any support for the idea that increases in inequality at the very top of the distribution, such as the top 1 percent or top 5 percent shares, have led to a decline in overall trust levels. The significant negative effect of inequality on trust is apparently not driven by inequalities at these extreme ends of the distribution.”

So, perhaps it is the structure of the U.S. and European institutions and the ways in which these institutions function on the ground that are causing the deterioration of trust and social capital? And, perhaps, looking at broader income and jobs outcomes, rather than focusing on '1%' arguments, can be a more productive approach to starting reshaping U.S. and European systems to address the ongoing loss of public trust and social capital?