Early 20th-century progressives were trust-busters. They wanted to break up the cartels and large firms—the “trusts”—that were thought to dominate economic life, especially in the United States. Early 21st-century progressives are trust-boosters. They want to nurture trust in society, both because pervasive trust seems to make economies work better and because it adds to people’s well-being directly. Societies where people trust each other are more pleasant to live in.

UBC’s John Helliwell is one of the world’s, ahem, most trusted researchers in this area of economics. In a new working paper for the World Bank Group (No. 7707: “Social Capital, Trust, and Well-being in the Evaluation of Wealth”), he, Kirk Hamilton of the London School of Economics, and Michael Woolcock of the World Bank make a case for seeing trust as an important part of well-being and for trying to devise policies that increase trust.

The way they develop estimates of how much trust is worth—a hard thing to do on the face of it—is to look at the correlation between people’s self-reported well-being and their self-reported degree of trust. Various organizations, including Gallup, periodically ask people in different countries one or another versions of the “social trust question,” which is “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” They also ask people how well-off they feel they are, not just financially but in terms of their overall well-being.

Put surveys of this type together and you can tease out—at least roughly—the relationships between trust and well-being, both the direct ones because trust is valued in itself, and also the indirect ones because higher levels of trust seem to help economies produce more goods and services per capita. You can even try to monetize the value of trust, which Halliwell and his colleagues do, finding that its capitalized value represents on average more than a quarter of the wealth of OECD countries though substantially less than that in less-developed countries.

I suspect most people will be skeptical of this attempt to estimate a dollar value for trust. There are too many interrelationships among the variables you’re trying to estimate and the data you’re doing it with are never exactly the data you want. On the other hand, I doubt anyone will disagree with the idea that widespread trust in a society is a good thing—even if a trusting society will be ripe for exploitation by the unscrupulous—think of used car salesmen operating in a community of Quakers.

The policy question is: How does a government encourage people to both trust more and be more trustworthy?

We’re into very deep waters here. Helliwell, Hamilton and Woolcock don’t provide much discussion on this question but do mention policies to help, or encourage self-help, in groups that traditionally declare low levels of trust. They argue this will require “building the capability of implementing systems that can deliver what are often deeply complex administrative tasks (e.g., accommodating the specific concerns of groups ranging from refugees and disabled military veterans, minority groups, juvenile offenders and the chronically unemployed).”

This is not promising. The governments I’m familiar with aren’t very good at “deeply complex administrative tasks.” They often have trouble doing relatively routine things, such as keeping overpasses from falling down or getting people hip replacements in good time.

One way governments clearly can encourage trust is by being more trustworthy themselves. Avoid over-promising during elections. Implement the platform they were voted in on. Hit their budget targets. Honour property rights. Don’t break faith with future taxpayers by building up large debts. And so on and so on.

When our governments have taken care of all that, maybe we’ll trust them to move on to the deeply complex.