Trust

Allow me to make a little detour and some sweeping generalizations. Cooperation pays off; this is true for different levels of complexity. Regarding the most basic unit of social interaction, there is the well-known example of the two farmers that help each other harvest their goods at different times of the year. On more aggregate levels, division of labor – that is the twin processes of specialization and cooperation – dramatically increases effectiveness.

Cooperation, in turn, requires trust – trust that the parties to the work-sharing agreement each do their part. Even more so if there is no third party that helps to enforce the – implicit or explicit – contract such as a tight-knit community or police forces. Moreover, as Axelrod has shown with his famous computer simulations (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cooperation), if you are generally trusting, that is, if you are ready to cooperate rather than defect when you first encounter a new potential cooperation partner, in the long run, you will maximize the benefits from these interactions – even though you will sometimes be taken advantage of by others. So far the social science bit of this blog entry.

Now, we all know examples of these small village stories where people do not lock the doors of their houses or where children are left to play in the streets unattended, because, you know, the last time there was a murder or rape or whatever in the community they still used horse-drawn carriages instead of cars. From telling these stories, most people go on quickly to condemn the anonymity of our modern city life, where you barely know your neighbors, you always have to take care to lock your car lest it will be stolen, where you feel uncomfortable to walk home alone through dark parks and so on, because you simply can't trust others. 

Now to my point: Having lived in Berlin and Bucharest for some time and having now gained some first impressions of life in Lusaka, I must say that regarding trust in strangers, there are huge differences between these capitals. Probably not smaller than those between the tiny villages in the feel-good stories and those anonymous mega cities we are used to compare them with.

Honestly, I find it shocking to what extent there seems to be generalized mistrust around me in Lusaka. I remember I had the same impression while I was living in Bucharest in Romania. (There are huge differences between these two cities, but I would say that they are in that matter both more different from Berlin than they differ from each other. And please note: I am not saying that I didn't or don't trust anybody there or that I have felt or feel I shouldn't.) How often have I been told in Bucharest to trust no one – the least if people appear friendly. And in Lusaka, in the few days that I have been staying here, I have already seen a couple of written advices to that effect (one sticker, for example, in a minibus reading “I know you look trustworthy, but I also know I can’t trust you”) and have been told countless times to be very careful with strangers. In short, nobody seems to trust anybody else, if they don't happen to have a shared history.

Now, I can’t say “this is why”, but it is astonishing how little seemingly easy cooperation is possible among people with similar interests in Lusaka. Taxi drivers, for example, seem incapable to jointly finance a person taking calls and then coordinating the drivers, although it would be tremendously more efficient to do that than always have to drive a triangle (from where the taxi driver is based to the place he is picking you up and on to the place you want to get to and then back again where the taxi driver is stationed) with only one third of it being paid by the customer - all because they each have only a couple of customers that call them. If you ask them why there is no call center, they seem puzzled as to how this should be organized – couldn’t it then be that the call center agent is giving all the customers to one single driver (and getting some extra money from that driver in return)? The same happens if you want to make a deal with a taxi driver - "give me a good price and I will keep calling you" - doesn't happen. Who knows whether you gonna call again? (Why this is all about taxi drivers? It's basically the only people here I have to cooperate with and I am not at the same time embedded in a common network with.)

I know this is no convincing evidence for my train of thought, but this is a blog and not a PhD thesis. Stay tuned :)