We seem to have a society where if you get screwed by misplaced trust, it's generally your fault. You should have known better. Sometimes people laugh at you: a fool and his money are soon parted.
The one obvious exception is if you have a ironclad legal document. Are there others?
We distrust our politicians, our news sources, our police, businesses, and strangers. Some say we have very few actual friends, friends whom you would trust with a deep, dark secret.
Is this new? Perhaps it is a result of larger, less tightly knit communities. In small communities, treacherous behavior could be effectively punished by extra legal means.
This kind of global distrust probably has a cost. How do you measure it? How high is the cost?
If we wanted to reduce costs, how would we do it? I suspect this is a problem that cannot be solved by legislative means: more laws, more ironclad legal contracts.
Another hypothesis is: misplaced trust causes you to lose something of material value. It's the structuring of society around objects material value, with money, with keeping and gaining money, that is the cause of this. Income redistribution might help: you can't lose it all; there will always be a safety net no matter how much you misplace trust.
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