Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity [Paperback]

Francis Fukuyama (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 18, 1996

In his bestselling The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War would also mean the beginning of a struggle for position in the rapidly emerging order of 21st-century capitalism. In Trust, a penetrating assessment of the emerging global economic order "after History," he explains the social principles of economic life and tells us what we need to know to win the coming struggle for world dominance.

Challenging orthodoxies of both the left and right, Fukuyama examines a wide range of national cultures in order to divine the underlying principles that foster social and economic prosperity. Insisting that we cannot divorce economic life from cultural life, he contends that in an era when social capital may be as important as physical capital, only those societies with a high degree of social trust will be able to create the flexible, large-scale business organizations that are needed to compete in the new global economy.

A brilliant study of the interconnectedness of economic life with cultural life, Trust is also an essential antidote to the increasing drift of American culture into extreme forms of individualism, which, if unchecked, will have dire consequences for the nation's economic health.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fukuyama argues that a nation's economic strength is tied to its social unity, and that America is in danger of losing both.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man, LJ 1/92) examines the impact of culture on economic life, society, and success in the new global economy. He argues that the most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation's prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms. In comparison with low-trust societies (China, France, Italy, Korea), which need to negotiate and often litigate rules and regulations, high-trust societies like those in Germany and Japan are able to develop innovative organizations and hold down the cost of doing business. Fukuyama argues that the United States, like Japan and Germany, has been a high-trust society historically but that this status has eroded in recent years. This well-researched book provides a fresh, new perspective on how economic prosperity is grounded in social life. Highly recommended for academic libraries.
Jane M. Kathman, Coll. of St. Benedict Lib., St. Joseph, Minn.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1st Free Press Pbk. Ed edition (June 18, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684825252
• ISBN-13: 978-0684825250
• Product Dimensions: 4.4 x 1.3 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #175,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), resident in FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent books are America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, and Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap between Latin America and the United States. His latest book, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution will be published in April 2011.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, the first time as a regular member specializing in Middle East affairs, and then as Deputy Director for European political-military affairs. In 1981-82 he was also a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Dr. Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest, which he helped to found in 2005. He holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), and Kansai University (Japan). He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, and member of the advisory boards for the Journal of Democracy, the Inter-American Dialogue, and The New America Foundation. He is a member of the American Political Science Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Pacific Council for International Affairs. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

March 2011

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars underrated despite being an oversimplification November 11, 2004

By maximusone

Format:Paperback

I live in Europe close to the fault line between (in Fukuyama-speak) low-trust-land and high-trust-land and I have rarely read such an interesting book. In some ways the book is the successor to Max Weber's magnum opus, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (published in 1905) about the impact of protestant religion and culture on economical success in Germany.

Rather than compare Protestantism with Catholicism and their economical impact on German citizens, Fukuyama divides the world into high and low trust societies. Within Europe low trust societies largely coincide with Catholic countries and high trust societies coincide largely with Protestant countries, hence some of Fukuyama's work will sound familiar at times to a reader of Max Weber. Still, Fukuyama's categorisation is not based per se on religious affiliation. Fukuyama is at pains to attribute the low trust of Italians or French to historical events or situations. At times it seems he goes out of his way to avoid attributing any causal role to religion. But the advantage of his approach is that his methodology in theory works in any culture outside the European Christian context. Fukuyama also applies his trust criterion on societies such as the US, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. The Middle East and Africa are conspicuous in their absence, possibly because there are few if any examples of so-called high-trust cultures in these parts of the world.

There are a few shortcomings to the book :

Fukuyama only draws economical consequences from the presence or absence of trust, for instance, he claims high trust cultures such as Japan and Germany find it easier to form very large companies, whilst low trust cultures such as Taiwan or Italy feel more at home in family companies. It is a pity he does not extend the field of study of consequences into areas such as corruption (low trust countries generally score higher on corruption), the law (for instance perjury is not regarded as a big deal in low trust countries), demographics (intermarriage, such as consanguineous marriages, is much more common in low trust cultures such as in the Middle East), etc...

The division of the world by Fukuyama into low and high trust cultures is very binary. Some studies by others into trust have first segmented the environment of individuals in concentric layers, starting with the immediate family, then friends, then the extended family, then the local community, then the country and then his or her civilisation. In such a scenario trust typically decreases with each layer which is further removed from the individual (although there are exceptions, such as in failed Islamic states where more trust is put by individuals in the Umma - all Muslims - than in the nation.), but the slope of the curve differs between low and high trust cultures. Still, as a simplification, the division into two extremes of trust is an interesting start.

Like all human phenomena, economic organisation can never be explained by one variable. But even if trust turns out to be only one of the variables which have a high correlation with economic structure, it remains a valid subject for a book like this.

Finally, some reviewers have accused Fukuyama of explicitly arguing that economic development is hampered by low trust, whilst I think he actually argues economic structures are merely different in both categories. Nobody will argue Belgium, a typical low-trust culture, is poorer in GDP per capita terms than - say - the neighboring Netherlands, a typical high trust culture that even shares its language with the majority of Belgians. But it is true that Belgian multinational companies are even rarer than famous Belgians.

Despite the simplifications this is still a very interesting book for those interested in the compatibilities or incompatibilities of cultures in the workplace. One of Fukuyama's underrated books.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Argues that trust (or its absence) shapes economies. January 17, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

The author divides societies into two classes: high trust and low trust. High-trust societies form volunteer and meritocratic organizations that expand in scope and efficiency to reach optimum economies of scale. These commercial and non-profit organizations (which are not dependent on family ties) create a network of efficiencies that benefit commerce, media communication and social change.

Low-trust societies, in contrast, rely on the extended family to build commercial, social and political networks. The trouble with the extended-family approach to economic development is that all families will soon run out of blood-line managerial, scientific, literary or artistic talent. The Latin Catholic and Chinese cultures are described as low-trust societies.

One conclusion to this analysis is that it is the lack of trust in society that forces developing countries to have large government organizations. In countries such as Mexico, the lack of trust in the players and in the notion of market efficiency itself leads to the creation and perpetuation of state monopolies.

The author wonders if trust in the American society is declining, to judge, at least, by the rising number of guarded residential compounds. The Clinton impeachment trial, from one lens, is about the threat to trust in public life. According to the model, if trust declines, so too will economic prosperity.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly original analysis of comparative economic performance February 18, 1997

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

As a result of his previous major work Francis Fukuyama achieved fame as the man who predicted 'the end of history'. With this new work he has turned his attention from the political arena to consider comparative international economic performance. He describes the broad theme of Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity as follows; "that social capital has a significant impact on the vitality and scale of economic organizations".

Many commentators have tried to evaluate the importance of culture in determining national economic success. Fukuyama claims to have identified the key, performance-determining, aspect of national culture, namely, the level of trust present in a society. He maintains that culture is of critical importance to everyday economic life and that only high trust societies can create the kind of large scale business enterprises that are needed to compete in today's global economy.

The culturalist view of history attributes the success of Japan and later of other East Asian countries such as China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan to their common Confucian traditions and their concomitant cultural characteristics. However, the traditional drawing of distinctions between Eastern and Western cultures is seen as too simplistic by Fukuyama, who points out the many differences inherent in East Asian societies. He points out not only the differences between Japan and China, but also those between China and Chinese societies abroad such as Taiwan and Hong Kong. This attention to detail and depth of analysis is one of the strengths of Fukuyama's study.

To date, the debate on this topic has centred around culturalist explanations of the economic success of the Asia-Pacific Region, but Fukuyama has gone further by attempting to apply his thesis to all developed economies; Chinese, European, North American, Japanese and former communist. Fukuyama, following Weber, sees the earlier economic success of Western Europe as culturally determined, namely as a logical result of the Protestant work ethic.

Fukuyama sees three types of trust; the first is based on the family, the second on voluntary associations outside the family, and the third is the state. Each of these has a corresponding form of economic organisation; the family business, the professionally managed corporation and the state-owned enterprise, respectively. Societies in which family ties are strong (and thus ties outside the family relatively weak) have great difficulty creating large professionally managed corporations and look to the state to perform this critical economic function. Societies with high levels of trust, and many voluntary associations can create large economic organisations without state support. Fukuyama cites China, Italy, France and South Korea as societies with a strong role for the family and weak voluntary associations, while Japan, the United States, and Germany are said to have strong and plentiful associations beyond the family. The detail with which Fukuyama supports each of these examples is truly impressive and betrays the depth of research that undoubtedly went into writing this book.

Overall Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity has to be considered a highly original work which has and will continue to raise significant interest. While many will dispute Fukuyama's main contention that significant comparative advantages arise from differences in levels of trust between countries, he offers a great deal of evidence to support an argument which is certainly correct at an intuitive level.