The Trust Deficit

Via Boing Boing

Leonard Wantchekon talks about the lack of interpersonal trust within a community as a major challenge to economic development.Communities in Benin where he has seen this phenomenon manifest most, he says, are the same communities where the highest amount of slave exportation took place from the 1600s to the 1900s -- villages and towns in the southern part of the country, where the huge slave ports once stood, and where massive numbers of (basically) war captives were sold into bondage. Wantchekon documents all of this in a research paper he co-authored with Nathan Nunn...[continue reading]