Trust vs. Reliance

                          Trust vs. Reliance

Declines in trust of government correlate strongly with calls for more government regulation in more parts of our lives. "Individuals in low-trust countries want more government intervention even though they know the government is corrupt," explain the authors of a 2010 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper. That's certainly the case in the United States, where the size, scope, and spending of government has vastly increased over exactly the same period in which trust and confidence in the government has cratered. In 2018, one of the paper's authors, Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist who grew up in the Soviet Union before coming to America, was asked, why do citizens ask a government they don't believe in to bring order? "They want regulation," he said. "They want a dictator who will bring back order."

While this might be a simplistic--or Russian--explanation, the correlation is curious.

Counterintuitively, the relative size and spending of government in the United States actually flattened or dipped during periods when trust and confidence in government picked up:

From 1994 to 2001, Pew data show upticks in the number of people who trust the government to mostly do the right thing…. Using inflation-adjusted dollars, the feds spent about $250 billion more in [Bill] Clinton's last year than in his first, a small increase compared to the spending surges seen under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Viewed as a percentage of GDP, federal spending fell significantly during that period. In 1991, it equaled 21 percent. By 2001, it equaled just 17.5 percent.

It could also be that lack of confidence in government is taught, that it rises when government action is more prominent. On the other hand, in a crisis people may just turn to the seemingly strongest solution.