This summer, I worked with Professor Ben Ho in the economics department to revise his book, Trustonomics, which explains how trust has developed and contributed to economic growth over time. The book is an important contribution to the field because it calls on economists to consider the importance of centering relationships between individuals in economic analysis as opposed to focusing on the traditional rational actor.

We constructed a narrative grounded in the concept of Dunbar’s number, a metric discovered by anthropologist Robin Dunbar that measures the average size of a human network, which he estimates to be about 150 people. We then explain how a person’s “trust number,” or the size of their personal network, has grown over time as a result of the development of bodies like religion, governments, and financial institutions which help us determine who we can and can not trust and allow increasingly large numbers of people to work together. Toward the end of the book, we grapple with recent data that indicates an erosion of institutional trust over the past several decades. With the advent of the internet, we  gained access to a significant volume of information. Social media has encouraged the proliferation of fake news and false information and has changed the way we interact with each other, affecting who we form relationships with and who we decide to trust. Ultimately, we believe that current declining levels of trust are symptomatic of an adjustment to new technologies and methods of communication and that institutional structures that developed and evolved over thousands of years will support and help maintain important relationships as we adjust to new ways of communicating and interacting with each other.