Aug 4, 2009

Social Capital and Trust: New Evidence from China

For all of you loving survey data on trust:
"The five most trustworthy groups, according to a survey by the Research Center of the Xiaokang Magazine, are farmers, religious workers, sex workers, soldiers and students."
What an amazing combination of groups! You will be interested to know that "people like scientists and teachers were ranked way below [together with] government functionaries." So considering that a big chunk of students (who are ranked under the trustworthy ones), will later on be teachers, scientists and functionaries and therefore fall behind, the only truly trustworthy ones are farmers, religious workers, sex workers and soldiers.

I presume the acclaimed representativeness of the survey is not warranted. The alternative is that China is really different to most of the rest of the world or I should seriously reconsider my career?

The entire article is here.

2 comments:

Pierre-Louis said...

trustworthy sex workers makes a lot a sense though since they operate outside formal institutions, a high level of trust (or social capital) is required in their business...though I guess their informal institutions (pimps with machine guns) are quite effcient at enforcing contracts...

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