CONCEPT
Trust (Fukuyama)
The expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms — and the variable Fukuyama identified as the primary determinant of economic and institutional performance across societies.
Fukuyama's 1995 definition of trust identifies a social resource most economists overlooked because it resisted precise measurement. Trust is the expectation that community members will behave cooperatively on the basis of shared norms — an expectation that reduces transaction costs, enables fluid cooperation without elaborate contracts, and makes possible forms of collaboration that formal enforcement cannot sustain. Societies that generate high trust produce complex organizations capable of innovation, adaptation, and sustained cooperation among strangers. Societies that fail to generate trust are confined to smaller, family-based organizations whose scale is bounded by kinship. The AI transition tests this framework with unprecedented severity: technology that performs cognitive work previously requiring teams restructures the conditions under which trust forms, maintains itself, or dissolves.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The economic function of trust begins with transaction costs but extends far beyond them. Trust does not merely reduce the cost of cooperation — it enables forms of cooperation that are