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Inside Out | World’s trust barometer is reading red amid growing global challenges
- Global crisis in trust in governments, the media and even NGOs means mounting difficulties in garnering public support for economically important innovation and often-controversial social change
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“Unfortunately, the new year has begun with fresh turmoil and long-standing suffering. Geopolitical tensions have reached dangerous levels,” said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, addressing the UN Security Council. He added that “conflicts that no one is winning grind on and on”.
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Noting that turbulence had been rising and trust falling within and between nations, he complained of a deepening “trust deficit” that was challenging the work of the United Nations and creating a grave test for multilateralism.
Most troublingly, these comments were not made recently, but on January 9, 2020 – before the World Health Organization had declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s war on Gaza and 2023 became the hottest year on record. If there was a global trust deficit then, where are we today? The short answer is: in a very bad place.
US survey data suggests Americans trust each other less than 40 years ago. Trust in the government in the US has fallen to historically low levels from over 70 per cent in 1958 to around 20 per cent in 2022, according to Pew research.
Even in the health sector, where doctors normally attract high levels of trust, the editor of Britain’s Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine reported that “the global crisis of trust, accelerated by the pandemic and the cost of living crisis, is so entrenched that it has begun to weaken the bond of trust between patients and doctors”.
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“Trust is a barometer of the state of our world and the barometer is reading red,” the editor concluded.
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