The following are empirical measures of trust/social cohesion in a sampling of different countries.
Countries cluster into stable institutional-trust equilibria observable through compliance behavior, enforcement intensity, and institutional design assumptions. The U.S. now clusters with medium-low trust systems rather than high-trust Northern European or East Asian ones.
| Code | Indicator | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| TC | Tax compliance efficiency | Revenue collected vs. owed relative to enforcement effort |
| IE | Institutional impartiality | Predictability and neutrality of courts and bureaucracy |
| RC | Rule compliance under low monitoring | Compliance where cheating is easy |
| CE | Contract enforcement reliability | Whether formal contracts are trusted over networks |
| ID | Institutional design assumption | Whether systems presume honesty or evasion |
The data used for the TC metric are from IMF and OECD tax-gap studies.as well as Piketty, Saez, Zucman for administrative tax data.
The data used for the IE metric are derived from World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators and the EU Justice Scoreboard.
The data used for the RC metric are derived from Large-N lost-wallet experiments, fare-evasion and honor-system studies, Fare-evasion and honor-system studies and bureaucratic self-reporting accuracy studies.
The data used for the CE metric are derived from World Bank Doing Business, comparative commercial-law studies, and firm-level contracting behavior.
The JD metric is the least empirical. It is derived from documentation burden, audit frequency, means testing intensity, and fraud-prevention cost ratios. Short version: the Nordic and Japanese systems assume honesty; the U. S. and Italian systems assume evasion.
| Country | TC | IE | RC | CE | ID | Composite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Denmark | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.0 | 9.5 | 9.4 |
| Sweden | 9.2 | 9.3 | 9.2 | 8.8 | 9.2 | 9.1 |
| Germany | 9.0 | 9.2 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 8.8 | 9.0 |
| Japan | 8.8 | 8.7 | 9.3 | 8.5 | 9.0 | 8.9 |
| Netherlands | 8.7 | 8.8 | 8.7 | 8.6 | 8.8 | 8.7 |
| Canada | 8.2 | 8.3 | 8.0 | 8.2 | 8.0 | 8.1 |
| United Kingdom | 7.5 | 7.8 | 7.2 | 7.8 | 7.2 | 7.5 |
| France | 7.3 | 7.4 | 6.8 | 7.5 | 6.8 | 7.2 |
| Spain | 6.8 | 6.8 | 6.5 | 6.9 | 6.5 | 6.7 |
| Italy | 6.2 | 6.0 | 6.0 | 6.5 | 5.8 | 6.1 |
| United States | 6.0 | 6.2 | 5.5 | 7.0 | 5.2 | 6.0 |
| Greece | 4.5 | 4.8 | 4.2 | 5.0 | 4.0 | 4.5 |
| Mexico | 4.2 | 4.5 | 4.0 | 4.8 | 3.8 | 4.3 |
| Brazil | 4.0 | 4.3 | 3.8 | 4.5 | 3.5 | 4.0 |
| India | 3.5 | 3.8 | 3.2 | 4.0 | 3.0 | 3.5 |
When institutional trust is measured via revealed compliance behavior, enforcement efficiency, and system design assumptions rather than opinion surveys, the United States clusters with medium-low trust countries such as Italy, well below Germany, the Nordics, and Japan, and well above Greece or Brazil.
Denmark doesn’t just have generous welfare policies. It has a high-trust equilibrium that makes them administratively cheap and fraud-resistant.
We don’t need to speculate about whether Americans would abuse a large, fast-moving welfare state. We just ran that experiment during COVID. Fraud did not occur at the margins; it occurred at industrial scale.
