Why Trust Matters is a succinct book about the importance of trust in modern society. It goes through the many examples and explains things in a way that a lay person without a background in behavioral economics could understand.

A very topical and essential book that goes beyond the accepted and received wisdom as propounded by conventional economics. A timely panacea for a world which is slowly albeit surely moving towards a phase of 'splinternet' - a balkanization of the net, as nations try to preserve their sovereign identities and economic interests. In a world devastated by a pandemic that is wreaking wanton havoc, it is not just the physical bodies that take a battering. Vaccine nationalism and inequity exacerbate already insidious economic inequalities in the form of income and wealth disparities.

Benjamin Ho's compelling book is a step in the right direction to sit back, assemble our thought processes and rethink about the subject of economics in a radically different and altruistic fashion.

WHY TRUST MATTERS

Because it does, of course!

In essence, that’s what Benjamin Ho drives at in his book, Why Trust Matters: An Economist’s Guide to the Ties that Bind Us. Beginning with the observation that trust emerged as an evolutionary imperative of the human species—we needed to develop trust in others in order to survive—Ho adopts an economic and game theoretic perspective to illustrate how trust keeps the fabric of modern society together.

There is no denying that trust is both the central feature of the institutions upon which we rely as well as the core problem of some of the world’s most intractable problems. That we use money at all is an act of trust; that we flirt with cryptocurrencies belies some lack of trust in the monetary system. republican democracy itself is rooted in the trust that an elected representative is capable of acting in our interest; increasing polarization along ideological lines is trust gone haywire. Meanwhile, issues like climate change or pandemic-scale health emergencies can only be overcome with increasing trust in science and public policy.

Ho draws on the microeconomic foundations of trust to highlight how it works and/or doesn’t in the modern setting. Yet, and somewhat ironically, Why Trust Matters also demonstrates the limits of economics as a framework for analysis. Notwithstanding the economic literature Ho cites to deconstruct and measure trust, an argument can be made that the very subject of trust in society is something best explored by psychology, sociology, or anthropology—and the book’s most valuable insights necessarily borrow from contributions in these fields anyway.

Benjamin Ho has a background in behavioral economics, and he uses that perspective to discuss how trust is at the center of not just economics, but all of modern civilization. The book discusses trust as it applies to many different fields, and how it has been key throughout history; but Ho also explains the effects of trust as it applies to the more narrow scope of economics.

In the first chapter, Ho describes some aspects of trust, and even how it can be difficult for scholars in many fields to even precisely define what trust means. He also introduces the concept of the“trust game” experiment, as one way that economists study behavior. Chapter Two describes how trust has been central to human civilization over the years. Ho discusses how our social structures have evolved over the years, and even gets into human biology and how the brain process social interactions. Chapter Three investigates trust as it applies specifically to economics, and how economists use models and experiments to try to translate trust into a mathematical framework. Chapter Four deals with trust in other institutions, and Chapter Five discusses interpersonal trust, in individual relationships and interactions with others. In Chapter 6 Ho ties it all together, gives a summary and offers some future predictions.

Overall, I thought that this book was very well written, and approached the topic of trust from a few different perspectives that I hadn't considered before. Ho was able to explain these technical behavioral economics concepts in a way that was fairly easy to understand. He was able to move fluidly from history to biology to math and back to economic theory, with enough knowledge of each subject to make clear points; without ever being too overwhelming. It took me a little longer to read than some other books of similar length; and that was partly because I was unfamiliar with most of the economics, and partly because I sat and thought about some of the ideas for long periods of time between chapters. I won't promise that you will find it as interesting as I did, but I have to give it 5/5.

I love books about economics that bring in new concepts of why things happen and what we rely on to function in a global economy. Trust is at the core of so many economic theories and concepts. This book was very helpful in my high school Economics class that I teach.