The authors make a distinction between “high-trust” and “low-trust” countries. In the former, most people have positive feelings about business and government and the general level of regulation is relatively low. In “low-trust countries,” the opposite is true and citizens “support government regulation, fully recognizing that such regulation leads to corruption.” As an example, they point to differing attitudes toward government-mandated wages in former socialist countries that transitioned to market economies. “Approximately 92 percent of Russians and 82 percent of East Germans favor wage control,” they write, naming two low-trust populations. In Scandinavia, Great Britain, and North American countries, where there are higher levels of trust in the public and private sectors, less than half the population does. As a final kicker, Aghion et al. suggest that increased regulation sows yet more distrust, which in turn engenders more regulation.

It’s this dynamic that has me worried. In the Pew data, which goes back to 1958, the lines for trust and distrust converged in 2002, as the essentially unmitigated disaster that were the Bush years got underway. Trust in government reached a post-9/11 high of 60 percent before starting its long slide toward 26 percent. Distrust over the same period has climbed over 20 points from around 50 percent back in 2001. In every way under Bush, the federal government grew massively. Spending increased by about 50 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, “economically significant” regulations ballooned by 70 percent, new entitlements (Medicare Part D) and new bureaucracies (the Transportation Security Administration) were hatched. We entered a state of permanent wars (on “terror” and in Iraq and Afghanistan) and the government began secret surveillance…

It turns out that government may be growing not in spite of our confidence in it, but because of our lack of confidence in it…