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Your own little Davos: Why trust is failing and what to do about it
With the world’s Most Powerful People™ busily pondering the fate of the rest of us at Davos this week, I thought to myself I’ll be damned if I’m not gonna go skiing too. So last weekend, I went with the family to Belleayre, a small mountain in upstate New York.
It’s not quite the same as Davos. The Eastern Catskills are not the Swiss Alps. I have it on good authority that the cost of a single schnitzel at Davos comfortably buys lunch for a family of four – maybe even six – at Belleayre.
But when it comes to places for thinking deep thoughts about the world, one mountain is as good as another. And since the Davoisie have dedicated their high-altitude gathering to the theme of “Rebuilding Trust,” I figured I also could think about trust while hitting the slopes.
Trust, as we keep hearing, is broken. Only 16% of Americans trust “government” – that’s down more than 60 points from “peak trust” in the mid-1960s. Fewer than a third of Americans trust each other, down from nearly 47% in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, half of Americans say “the media” deliberately misleads them, and fewer than one-quarter say journalists have society’s interests at heart.
But these data sometimes feel abstract. Like something that’s happening out there rather than right here. Well, a ski mountain is a good place to observe trust in action – a microcosm of the thousand little leaps of faith in people and things that get us through our days.
Consider the following: When you read the ski report and believe it, you are trusting the media. When you allow yourself to be whisked up the side of a mountain by a giant metal hanger with seats on it, you are trusting the institutions and experts who design and run ski lifts. (A sudden gust of wind will quickly heighten this trust.) And when you hit the lodge for lunch or the aprés, leaving your skis or snowboard on a rack unattended, you are showing social trust.
You can do this experiment anywhere, by the way. On your commute, where the subway conductor will not crash the train. On the highway, where the person driving toward you will not cross the double-yellow line. At the café, where the employees have washed their hands before returning to work. At the gym, where your spotter can, in fact, spot.
Why does trust seem to work at the mountain, the subway, the café, or the gym – but not in our national politics? Come closer. Trust works best when the stakes are immediate and observable. Where you can verify, you can trust. The farther things get from what you can see with your own eyes, the harder it is to believe in anything. Our online experiences only heighten this, of course: They are algorithmically engineered to feel close, personalized, and personal.
The data bear this out: Even amid the broader black diamond descent of trust, local institutions still shine. Polling by the Knight Foundation shows Americans are 17 points more likely to trust local news sources than national ones – (which makes the well-documented decline of local news 17 points more alarming.)
The same is true of government. Gallup found that while only a third of Americans trust the federal government, nearly 70% trust local government, where practical results are usually more important than partisan smackdowns.
With all this, it’s no wonder – as we head into a crucial global election year – that populism and nationalism are so appealing again. They’re each, in their ways, responses to falling trust in distant institutions. Populism seizes on our perfectly understandable lack of trust in distant institutions: Those people up there on the mountain are lying to you, let’s fight back. Nationalism and nativism propose a solution of their own, artificially shrinking the boundaries of society to tighten its bonds: It’s us vs. them. Let’s trust us.
What’s the solution? Lots have been written about this. But one place to start is by focusing on the places where things do work: invigorating good local government, reversing the decline of local media, and emphasizing the experiences of actual people rather than online avatars.
There’s no one solution, but, to flip a phrase from someone who knew a thing or two about trust: Keep your friends close, and your institutions closer.
See you on the slopes!
G-20 summit to focus on COVID-19 as Eastern Europe faces a new surge
Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden, shares his perspective from Europe:
What is happening with COVID in Europe?
Well, primarily the east of Europe is a worrying situation. Russia has substantially more than a thousand deaths every day. And Bulgaria, Romania, difficulty for the Baltic states at the moment are surging infection rates. Vaccination rates must improve. It's primarily a problem, of course, in Russia, where people don't have trust in the vaccine and trust in the records.
What's up at the G-20 Summit in Rome this weekend?
A number of officials, although neither Xi Jinping or Putin is going to be there. But one critical issue is whether there's going to be the willingness to really pay the money that is necessary to pay for vaccines and treatments in the low and the medium income countries. And if you don't get to grips with that, the risk of new variants coming and creating havoc also in our countries is substantial. So, that remains to be seen.
Protest rally against COVID-19 vaccinations on 30 August 2021 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The world’s worst COVID outbreak (for now)
Right now, only one region of the world is reporting an increase in new daily COVID cases. Here's a hint: it's one of the places where vaccines are, for the most part, easiest to get.
It's Europe. According to the World Health Organization, the region last week notched a 7 percent uptick in new daily infections, the third week in a row that infections rose there.
Much of that comes from Central and Eastern Europe, which is currently mired in its worst COVID outbreak to date. Home to just four percent of the world's population, the former Eastern Bloc is now racking up 20 percent of all new cases each day.
Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria have in the past three days all reported their highest daily numbers of infections and deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Romania, where funeral parlors are now running out of coffins, leads the world with 22 daily COVID deaths per million people, followed closely by neighboring Bulgaria and eleven other Eastern European countries in a row.
Governments in the region, once hailed for their early action to "flatten the curve," are yet again imposing fresh restrictions on businesses, schools, and entertainment venues. Latvia recently went back to an almost full lockdown. Russia has ordered most businesses and schools to close for a full week beginning October 30, with some regions of the country starting already.
Part of the story is that vaccination rates throughout the region are still low. While three-quarters of all EU adults are fully vaccinated, those numbers fall off a cliff as you move eastward. In Romania it's barely 36 percent, while Bulgaria's mark is still below 25 percent. In Russia, which developed one of the earliest COVID vaccines, Sputnik V, just 32 percent of the population has been fully immunized. In Ukraine, it's 16 percent.
And it's not because there aren't enough jabs in stock. Despite early hiccups with securing vaccines, the EU now has more than it needs. Russia now makes its own supply in large quantities. Ukraine is a partial exception here, as the country's fractious politics have hampered its ability to buy and distribute shots.
But the region's problem isn't supply, it's demand — or, more specifically, it's vaccine hesitancy.
EU surveys find that rates of vaccine hesitancy are much higher in Eastern Europe. A recent EU poll found that just 31 percent of Bulgarians were keen to get the shot, and fewer than half of Slovaks, Croatians, and Latvians were with them. Other countries like Romania are in the 50s, but that's far off the overall EU mark of 59 percent, or the Western European countries which are almost all above 70. Surveyed separately, Russia had one of the highest rates of vaccine skepticism in the world, as does Ukraine.
Why is this happening? Not coincidentally, public trust in government is also markedly lower in Eastern Europe, where democracies are in general younger and less well established, than in Western Europe.
It's hard to draw a direct link between trust in government and willingness to take a vaccine — but in countries where people generally don't believe what their governments tell them, it's harder for those governments to convince people that vaccines are safe and important.
Moreover, political turmoil in some of the worst-hit places isn't helping: Romania's government collapsed after a no-confidence vote earlier this month, and Bulgaria is heading next month into its third election of the year, in a vote where new coronavirus restrictions are shaping up to be a salient issue.
Upshot: Unlike in earlier waves of the pandemic, most of Eastern Europe has the tools to grapple more successfully with COVID-19. But political bickering, weak trust in government, and high skepticism about the jabs are proving to be an endemic condition of their own.
The Graphic Truth: No trust, no jab in EU
After a very rocky start, the EU stepped up its COVID vaccination game in the spring, and by the end of summer had vaccinated more people per capita than the US. Close to 80 percent of EU residents are now fully vaccinated, yet inoculation levels have either plateaued or remain low where people don't trust the government, the vaccine — or both. This is leading to a third wave of the pandemic mainly in Eastern Europe, and as a result Europe is the only continent where COVID cases are now rising. We compare how much people in the EU trust their government with their willingness to get vaccinated.