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The breaking of social covenant and the rise of selfish societies
Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.
In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone. The cost of thefts cause a cyclical cycle, it forces stores to raise prices to cover the loss of the theft, which in turn prices people out of purchasing goods, which again raises theft. So far, the plans the governor has been trying to put into place seems to have done little to curtail any theft.
A 2024 jobs report shows a massive shortage of manufacturing labor, with 770,000 manufacturing jobs open. Labor participation has not recovered from the COVID crisis, with participation at 63.3% just before corvid and around 62.5% from the most recent report. Labor participation was highest before the 2008 housing crisis during the Bush admin around 67%. 7.5 million men have dropped out of America's workforce, meaning that they are not job seeking and therefore wouldn't be tracked as part of unemployment in FRED data.
There's a lot of words spilled on the internet on 'high trust societies'. Places like Japan where a lost item will be much more likely returned to its owner than, say, Detroit. Or rural America, where people will pay money at an unattended farm stand for fresh fruits and/or vegetables. However, trust doesn't fully cover what's going on in the west. /u/johnfabian's post is not about trust, but rather the breaking down of the covenant between constituents and their governments that keep a society basically functions. These social functions are much more simple than trust. It's about not running a red light, not driving the wrong way down a highway, or waiting in line for a train rather than trying to crowd on regardless of capacity.
Western society flourishing was largely predicated on this tacit understood social covenant: on an individual level, each person does their best to contribute through labor - be it stocking shelves to software development to entrepreneurship. In turn, the government upholds the status quo and optimizes legislation for stability and prosperity for the working class.
However in recent times this has changed. I'm not sure if the western governments decided they can have it's cake and eat it, too, or that the only way to perpetuate power is finding a new voter base, but the recent focus on marginalized groups has significantly eroded the trust away from indigenous constituents. It doesn't take a genius to tell that demographic groups are being treated, litigated, and policed based off of completely different rule books, and this type of treatment always creates division and resentment. The covenant between government and the constituencies broke, which changed the payoff matrix. As governments pick and choose which demographics to control, people become more selfish, as the ability to create value from freer markets diminish.
This is why 'selfish societies' is a better term than 'low trust' societies. As much as people love to yell at corporations for perusing short term gains, individuals pursue selfish gains at the cost of others even more as shown from my examples alone. Trust does not fully explain how people behave in the aforementioned examples, but selfishness does. Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold. Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint. Even the declining birthrate is a result of selfishness; people would prefer to have the increased income and enjoyment of consequence-free fornication instead of laying an effective and positive groundwork for future generations.
The question, then, is it possible for a government to regain the respect of its constituents, and can the people understand that there needs to be some amount of selflessness to create an environment to nurture the next generation?
This isn’t true.
I can buy a large pizza and a 12 pack and settle into videogaming while pigging out. I can make an organic healthy meal for after returning from the gym. These imply the exact same level of concern for my fellow man- it’s simply a differentiation between long term consequences(for myself) vs short term pleasure(also for myself). Like sure, one indicates better character than the other. But it’s not about selfishness. It’s about- I think mostly time preference and discipline.
Selfishness doesn't always come at significant cost to someone else, but I'd argue the choice to pick former over the ladder does imply some amount of selfishness in the term of short term gain over long term benefit.
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