Trust (Fukuyama, 1995)

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995) made three arguments that the AI-era reader finds unexpectedly urgent. First, that the level of generalized trust in a society is the primary determinant of its capacity to build complex organizations. Second, that trust is not a cultural given but a produced social resource, generated through specific institutional practices and destroyed through specific institutional failures. Third, that the varying trust levels across societies explain much of the variation in economic outcomes that standard economic variables cannot capture. The book was widely read but not widely absorbed — its central claim, that social capital is a real economic asset, has been cited more often than it has been operationalized.