Thanks to everyone who left questions in the comments of Tuesday’s post. There were a lot of great questions and below I answer four of them.

Fare-jumping and high-trust societies

Harry Morse writes: “I'd be interested in a longer write-up about fare jumping and high-trust societies.”

Harry is referring to a tweet thread I did on Wednesday that went a bit viral. Helen Andrews, an editor at the American Conservative who lives here in Washington DC, observed that she’s been seeing a lot of people jumping over the fare gates on the DC subway. I’ve noticed the same thing—it’s way more common than it was before the pandemic. I tweeted that “I think a lot of liberals underestimate how much this kind of behavior erodes the norms of social trust and solidarity that make societies work well.”

Let me try to unpack my thinking about this.

The smooth working of a modern society depends on people mostly following the rules even in the absence of strict enforcement:

• Most people don’t shoplift even if they think they could get away with it.

• Most Americans fill out their tax returns honestly even though the IRS would be unlikely to catch them if they cheated.

• Most people keep the promises they make in contracts even though the courts don’t provide a cost-effective remedy for small-dollar breaches.

When norms of trust and cooperation weaken, it adds friction to a lot of everyday interactions. A relatively low-stakes example is that if shoplifting becomes more common, stores start putting more merchandise behind glass, inconveniencing shoppers. If shoplifting gets really bad, companies start shutting down stores altogether.

I learned about a more profound example from Matt Yglesias, who last year wrote that “Italy and Greece are dominated by small, closely held businesses with family-centric management that are reaping huge economic gains by cheating on their taxes. Even the best-run of those companies tend not to expand or professionalize because to do so successfully, they’d have to actually pay what they owe.”

In a 2019 study, economists Bruno Pellegrino and Luigi Zingales blamed Italy’s slow economic growth on its culture of small, family-owned firms. While this culture seems superficially counterproductive, they argue that it may be an “optimal response to the Italian institutional environment” because “among developed countries, Italy stands out for its patronage-based banking sector, its inefficient legal system, and the diffusion of tax evasion and ...