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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

What -- oh, I guess someone should publish some papers on that. It is obvious, but that doesn't excuse the lack of publication. :-)

A simple example is the money market funds which contained mortgage-backed securities. As long as people trusted that their contents were genuine, they "recycled" money from investors to mortgage lending. As soon as people stopped trusting them, boom, 2008 crash.

The economy consists entirely of trust. There is actually nothing in the economy *except* trust. (Well, theft & fraud I guess.) Money is only valuable because people trust that others will take it. Contracts are only meaningful because of trust. Nobody will buy anything if they don't trust the seller to some extent.

I think this should be obvious, but it is probably necessary to put a bunch of empirical evidence into print.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

My questions are too big. Like "How do we cause a more, rather than less, democratic outcome after the next governmental collapse?" Or "Since economies are based on trust, how do we prevent the powerful sociopaths who rise through the economy by betraying that trust from destroying the economy?"

Questions are lovely and all but if you don't have a place to start getting a handle on the answer, they're not helpful.

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