Japan is obviously a "high trust" society, so I feel like this experiment will work.
I wish we had a way to make this sort of system work in a low trust society.
Japan is obviously a "high trust" society, so I feel like this experiment will work.
I wish we had a way to make this sort of system work in a low trust society.
We do have a way - "high trust" enclaves inside the low trust society.
The modern examples in the USA are things like colleges, community centers, etc.
You gatekeeper the area and then everything inside is high-trust and you can get away with things like this.
You can also find it in rural areas and some very expensive islands, too.
While driving through upstate New York on a camping trip I found a maple syrup shop run on the honor system. Leave the money in an unlocked box. It was shocking. I bought a gallon.
I had the same experience in upstate NY. So many little boutique country stores with craft and art tables outside that just had venmo signs next to the crafts. My wife bought a few items and we were pleasantly surprised to see how many public purchases were made to that venmo account. And it wasn't super cheap junk/stuff either.
There are shops like that in Sweden and Germany, probably many other countries.
We have quite a few road side stalls like this around where I live in NZ, Honey, eggs, swedes are a common one. You hear of the odd theft from them every now and then but for the most part it seems to work well.
I wonder if this is actual high trust or that there are security cameras everywhere.
If you've been to the rural USA you'd know it's just high-trust (and the middle of nowhere). They're pretty common for low-value things like corn and farm produce; but I've seen syrup and honey, too.
There might be a camera but since there's usually no power, it'd have to be some sort of trail/game/deer cam. What would you do with the result besides some vigilante frontier justice? No cop anywhere but daytime children's TV is going to investigate the Case of the Stolen Syrup.
We once went to Florida and saw some open orange farms. We wanted to buy some, but there was nobody in sight - we got very confused until we saw a box which said "$X a bag"; there was a sack of bags nearby. My mind was blown.
That's a matter of scale. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_H...
> No cop anywhere but daytime children's TV is going to investigate the Case of the Stolen Syrup.
Or Japan apparently, according to some of the comments in this thread.
In what way are USA colleges high trust. USA colleges have very high petty theft.
> I wish we had a way to make this sort of system work in a low trust society.
I’d rather we had a way to change low trust societies into high trust.
After traveling for years, I often wonder how various cultures end up high or low trust. Wealth or financial inequality doesn't seem to be the main driving factor, despite seeming an obvious cause. Racial and ethnic homogeneity doesn't always explain it either.
Destruction of traditional culture by things like colonialism seems to be an important factor.
Colonialism is turning the UK into a low trust society?
I didn't suggest it was the only factor. I guess if you want a single explanation, any significant immigration or influence from a vastly different culture will likely lead to a lower trust society.
Agreed.
> Destruction of traditional culture by things like colonialism seems to be an important factor.
Were native peoples of North America high trust between tribes before colonialism?
I'm not that familiar with them, but my guess would be yes, at least for hunter-gatherers. I would think that bad behavior would get you kicked out of the community and lead to likely death.
The larger ancient cities that farmed would be more interesting, especially because today Latin America is one of the lowest trust regions of the world.
Agreed, points well made. I think an ordered society with long-term stability has much to do with it.
If there are consequences to bad behavior which results in real, felt, shame, then society will self-police to whatever values it holds. However, there can be downsides; for instance a lack of out-of-the-box thinking and individuality.
>for instance a lack of out-of-the-box thinking and individuality.
Overrated. There's close to 0% of it going on in "low trust societies" anyway. It's not like the average social media zombie in the west is anywhere near an "out of the box" thinker...
I used to buy firewood at National Forest camping sites in the US; there was a box where you dropped the money and then you grabbed a wood bundle.
Granted, this was almost 40 years ago, but this type of thing can work, even in less civilized places like the US.
They leave out more wood than a camper would even think to take because they only need one bundle every day or two. The sort of person who would need to steal a whole season's worth of wood is less likely to have the means to transport it all, and if they're so desperate that they'd go to the trouble then the Christian thing to do would be to let them have it.
Gillette razors on the other hand, are expensive to stock for their size, and easy to steal because of their size.
I’d wager that outdoorsy people who are out camping in the woods are like a “mini-Japan”. The community has their own set of rules and behaviours that would make an honour system possible. Especially 40 years ago when it would have been more of a monoculture.
The real challenge is figuring out how to build even a fraction of that in lower-trust environments
You can turn it into a high trust society. The mechanisms and procedures to achieve that are fairly well known.
High trust environments tend to crumble in society when you allow too much immigration. Japan’s xenophobia has worked well in this regard.
Switzerland is a diverse society with lots of immigration and it is also a high-trust society
That probably has more to do with who immigrates to Switzerland. I don't now the numbers, but people who immigrate to Switzerland is probably fairly well educated and generally pretty well of.
Denmark is still a fairly high-trust society, not to the level of Switzerland or Japan. We're seeing certain items in supermarkets being locked away or chipped to prevent theft. Now that's not just because of immigrants, Danes steal from the supermarket as well, because prices on many items are increasing rapidly.
The huge majority is from Germany, Italy, France, etc. A lot of it is highly vetted, professional migration.
If it adds enough of illegal immigrattion or low-grade legal one, it wont be a high trust society anymore.
Switzerland is so small, basically a city.
That's irrelevant to how the world works.
There are countries that are equal or much smaller than Switzerland with 10x worse crime and low trust. Just look at Jamaica.
And there are countries 12x bigger than Switzerland (like Japan) with high trust and low crime.
Switzerland's population would make it one of the biggest cities in the world, more than double the population of Los Angeles, and more than New York City. Neither of which could be counted as high trust.
The population of Switzerland is ~9 million. The population of LA metro is around 15 million, and NYC metro aroound 20 million
LA "the city" might be less but you can't tell where LA ends and it's other parts begin. It's one giant metropolis. Same with NYC.
The city of LA is just there for administrative purposes. People who live in "Burbank" or "Pasadena" are seen as living in "Los Angeles" by most people outside the region.
You can tell where the city ends very easily. There are well-defined boundaries. Government statistics take that into account. Here's the census page for the city of Los Angeles, which lists a population just under 4 million: https://data.census.gov/profile/Los_Angeles_city,_California...
Also depends on type though. I’ve seen honesty boxes work out fine where the immigration consists mostly of professionals.
And a 99.8% conviction rate.
Only 33 prisoners per 100k population (cf 541 in the US). Whatever they're doing, it's working.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...
In 2024, the average US prison sentence was for a duration of 52 months, with over half the total months being for drug trafficking (average 82 months) https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu... (page 11).
Also in 2024, Japanese prison sentences were mostly between 1 and 3 years, and about two thirds were fully suspended. https://www.moj.go.jp/content/001436547.pdf (page 20). Assuming an average of two years for the third not-fully-suspended, that works out to 8 months of time spent in prison per person handed a prison sentence.
That results in about a factor of 7 difference in prison population simply due to the difference in average sentence length. Maybe the US should sentence more people to prison but keep each of them there shorter.
The US court system already relies heavily on plea deals to not jam up the courts. Increasing the throughput of the justice system to facilitate your idea would require an order of magnitude investment into more courts, judges, public defenders, prosecutors, etc. I'm all for it, but the incredible cost does have to be considered
It's a different system, they don't go to court without iron-clad case. Japan does not have a large prison population.
And they heavily influence (using pressure such as off-the-record interviews, and long detention times during the investigations) the suspect's statements so that it says what they need to make it a crime, even when it isn't.
Whatever the suspect may say afterwards, they just have to point out to the signed statement and say "but here you confessed".
Source: I have been directly living such occurrence lol.
That's what has been coined the "hostage justice" of Japan (referring in particular to the "long detention times during investigations" part above).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostage_justice
given the stats above, 33 of 100k incarcerated, vs 541 of 100k in the USA. I'm inclined to think that the USA has far more of those types of cases than Japan.
Hmm, the thing is that the hostage justice system does have a deterrent effect.
Its net effect is that you absolutely do not want to have anything to do with the police to help solve your problems in the society (true problems, not merely e.g. asking for directions). And then you really want to avoid problems at all.
So, you cannot think of them as "friendly useful workers to help solve problems", because they are heavily incentivized and biased to find or invent crimes if you give them the opportunity.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but police interviews are recorded in the US?
And also, you always have the right to an attorney? (that's not the case in Japan except if you want to stay 20 days incarcerated while waiting for an attorney, all for a tiny minor dismeanor).
> you absolutely do not want to have anything to do with the police to help solve your problems in the society
this is commonly said in the USA as well