Trust is the basic building block of any effective warning system. Right now, it’s too scarce in both directions: officials don’t trust the public, and the public doesn’t trust officials either. That’s partly an unintended consequence of the way we live. “Our social and democratic institutions, admirable as they are in many respects, breed distrust,” Slovic wrote in his 2000 book, The Perception of Risk. A capitalist society with a free press has many things to recommend it. But it is not a place where citizens have overwhelming confidence in authority figures. Distrust makes it harder for the
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