Attendees at the 1952 Republican National Convention, Chicago, Illinois. 1952 by Thomas J. O'Halloran, U.S. News & World Report Magazine. Donated into the public domain. Via Library of Congress.

Culture of Trust Is Necessary for Economic Growth

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Prabhu Guptara points today to a series of video speeches from Vishal Mangalwadi. He says that although

I disagree with a lot of what Dr Mangalwadi says. But what matters is neither my agreements, nor my disagreements. What matters is that, in his very winsome way, he makes you think!

The most useful thing he provides in these videos is easily-understood and very valuable correctives to many popular illusions about democracy in the USA.

The talks are a pretty good description of the basic trust that is necessary for Western economies to work. Since Elliott Jaques and Wilfred Brown were interested in promoting trust through their structural changes in organizations, these are relevant to our thinking here.

Francis Fukuyama, the controversial and always interesting academic of Social Capital, wrote an entire book on the issue (Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity, and even later works deal greatly with the issue). In his opinion, certain societies have greater trust built into their relations. He even cites the concept of “adoption”, which is rare in many societies, as an example of how the West develops trust across biological familiarity. Some societies build trust while others do not.

The issue of trust is important to the development of democracy. It seems that trust must be present in society. Even in the Magna Carta, the nobles had to trust each other in their joint pressure against the King. It is the betrayal of Scottish trust by the Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate (in refusing to honor the agreements regarding their religious belief that may have ingrained the Scottish belief in the need of not only contracts, but methods for their enforcement against the powerful.

Anyway, I offer Mangalwadi’s material, along with a recent Fukuyama showing where he says, “Democracy is the only source of legitimacy,”


Related Videos

Vishal Mangalwadi on the Culture of Trust at YouTube

Francis Fukuyama on Dictators and Democracy at FORA.tv

Image Credit: Attendees at the 1952 Republican National Convention, Chicago, Illinois. 1952 by Thomas J. O’Halloran, U.S. News & World Report Magazine. Donated into the public domain. Via Library of Congress.

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  1. Pingback: Does Requisite Organization Build the Trust for Social Capital? - The Manasclerk Company

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