Trust gains in value as it gets rarer
You can't put a price on trust, writes George Pitcher, but that doesn't mean you can't trade in it.
“It’s a living animal,” the first EU ambassador to London, Joao Vale de Almeida, told The Times this week. “It requires permanent attention and permanent investment. It requires trust, trust and trust… but there’s not trust right now.”
He was talking about Brexit, on the fifth anniversary of the referendum. And he was talking about our trade prospects. The temptation is, as always, to be drawn into the polarised politics of Brexit, to ask where in the political sphere trust has been betrayed and to construct accusations that suit our own particular prejudices in that debate.
But all that is wilfully to turn a blind eye to the core of what the ambassador is saying – that trust is an investment on which trade depends and, as such, we might assume that it is transactional. I’ll examine some political and perhaps commercial implications of that in a moment and, indeed, return to the theme of blind eyes. But, first, some data from two trust surveys published early this year.
The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual research project conducted by the global PR firm, found that an epidemic of misinformation (the “infodemic”) has caused “widespread mistrust of societal institutions and leaders around the world”, leaving business, government, NGOs and media “in an environment of information bankruptcy”.
Within that enervating prospect, trust in all news sources has plunged to record lows. Social media are the least trusted, with a trust score of 35 per cent. But “traditional” media saw the greatest drop in trust, at eight points globally, to 53 per cent.
Meanwhile, another research exercise by the Reuters Institute found quite the opposite. According to its Digital News Report, 36 per cent of respondents in the UK "trust most news most of the time", a finding that contradicts Edelman’s statistic with a year-on-year rise of an exactly commensurate eight percentage points.
Both organisations have respectable research samples and both surveys were conducted within a couple of months of each other. So what’s going on? It may be that the UK bucks the global trend. But the more cynical might observe that Reuters has a dog in this fight. It’s not exactly miraculous that it is a bastion of “traditional” media.
Nobody is suggesting here that its research is anything but scrupulously honest. But you find what you look for. And trust, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder.
Blurred vision
The knock-on effect of this blurred vision - the blind eye - is that it can lead to statements of the, well, blindingly obvious. In the sight of some sage corporate advisers it’s that “a reputation can take years to build and only seconds to lose”. Well, you could have knocked me down with a platitude. For those who work on building corporate trust, it’s that “trust is earned not granted”. Who knew?
The danger of such superficiality is that it can miss a major point. It’s a piety that trust is not something you can buy. But that is not to say that trust isn’t tradable. It may not be biddable, in the sense that it’ll do what it’s told (the cry “trust me!” invariably goes unanswered), but trust is tradable in the sense that it really is transactional.
Trust is invested in someone or something, such as an institution. The trustee (hence its usage in the charitable context) is invested in by the trustor, who expects a return on their investment. And both parties are stakeholders in the transaction – I earn your trust; you invest it.
A common mistake is in assuming that this transaction mirrors the machinery of investment in the financial markets. True, the return on invested trust can be monetary – but, if it is, that is a secondary reputational benefit, welcome as it may be. And, like anything, it’s worth noting that the value of trust rises as it gets rarer.
But trust is altogether less observant of prosaic market behaviours – I may very well trust the primary-school teacher, the nurse I have only just met for my vaccination or the homeless Big Issue seller, over a banker, favoured restaurateur or politician with grandiose promises.
Religious roots
Trust’s inversion of conventional market behaviours, with their foundations in worldly valuations, has ancient religious roots. While the Hebrew Bible contains legion examples of a transactional God, who can be enraged or appeased by human behaviour, the Psalmist nevertheless provides the source for the contemporary motto of the United States, adopted since the mid-Fifties: “In God we trust”.
The Koran quotes that expression twice. And the Christian tradition emphasises its non-transactional faith in an eternally immutable deity who acts through grace rather than human petition.
For those with a rather more worldly desire to be trusted, this multi-millennial and Abramic heritage reduces to the simple truth that trust can’t be sold or bought, even though – paradoxically – it’s both tradable and transactional. It’s a sacred exchange. A more world-weary reading is this: “In God we trust - everyone else pays cash.”
The key to that last paragraph is the first appearance in this piece of a single word – truth. The relationship between trust and truth is an indivisibly intimate one, to which I will return next week.
For the time being, it’s simply worth observing that the EU’s ambassador in London would have a lot less trouble with drawing a line under Brexit - and looking forward to a healthy trading environment - if he believed, indeed trusted, that the organisation he represents had been told the truth.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.