If anything, you can argue the exact opposite. If resources are abundant, that means the potential gain is increasingly higher. First mover advantage and opportunity cost then play into creating a paradoxically opposing outcome, with high-velocity strategies outcompeting low-velocity strategies. What you call “trust” in abundance environments, is better described as indifference, and that cuts both ways. Agent that pick high-velocity strategies with long-term costs might be indifferent to them, knowing that any potential downside downside is non-threatening. And inequalities from the larger range of potential wealth would mean that if anything, the environment becomes more coercive, more stratified, and as a result more restrictive to new-entry or low-velocity agents.
Meanwhile scarce resources might actually promote trust, exactly due to the risk aversion you pointed out. Coercive punishment as a post-facto action that in a risky and poor environment is already too late and might actually add to the resource cost. To borrow your example of criminals, criminal groups themselves are often composed of families or people with childhood-connections, because the cost of defection is so high that the goal is to avoid any defection altogether, not punish it. Scarcity also translates to lower wealth inequality, exactly because resources are too finite to allow for gross excesses without being a direct detriment to a community.
Finally, resource abundance also means punishments can become increasingly baroque, because the “punishment cost” becomes increasingly inconsequential. Killing, imprisoning, or maiming someone is far more acceptable when you don’t have to rely on that person being a productive member of your community. In fact you could argue abundance is detrimental to both forgiveness and rehabilitation, because there is no incentive to maximise the resource-gaining potential of an individual. You also mention social scarcity, and I genuinely don’t understand how you can’t see how a lack of social scarcity means it’s actually easier to exile individuals from groups, easier to deny people from entering groups, same as it is easier for “serial defectors” to optimise for group-switching.
In many ways, modern society has become more coercive, with contemporary “trust” actually being faith in the coercive power of systemic mechanisms of social control to keep everyone else in line, same as it keeps us in line, and who’s metric of value is in its ability to control the behaviour of strangers. Where we see wrongdoing without punishment, our faith in the entire social order collapses because coercion is the foundation of our social order. Unlike past culture, we don’t engage in “trust rituals” with strangers such as gift giving, meal sharing, or hospitality, as a formalised necessity, because there is no incentive in spending resource to create Xenia-style trust-networks.
We might need to consider that it is entirely possible, that the best in people doesn’t bloom outside the harshest conditions.
I endorse the shape of your argument but not exactly what you said.
Perhaps a better way to think about this is incentives. Zero sum moves are optimal in conditions of scarcity, while positive-sum moves are optimal in conditions of abundance.
If anything, you can argue the exact opposite. If resources are abundant, that means the potential gain is increasingly higher. First mover advantage and opportunity cost then play into creating a paradoxically opposing outcome, with high-velocity strategies outcompeting low-velocity strategies. What you call “trust” in abundance environments, is better described as indifference, and that cuts both ways. Agent that pick high-velocity strategies with long-term costs might be indifferent to them, knowing that any potential downside downside is non-threatening. And inequalities from the larger range of potential wealth would mean that if anything, the environment becomes more coercive, more stratified, and as a result more restrictive to new-entry or low-velocity agents.
Meanwhile scarce resources might actually promote trust, exactly due to the risk aversion you pointed out. Coercive punishment as a post-facto action that in a risky and poor environment is already too late and might actually add to the resource cost. To borrow your example of criminals, criminal groups themselves are often composed of families or people with childhood-connections, because the cost of defection is so high that the goal is to avoid any defection altogether, not punish it. Scarcity also translates to lower wealth inequality, exactly because resources are too finite to allow for gross excesses without being a direct detriment to a community.
Finally, resource abundance also means punishments can become increasingly baroque, because the “punishment cost” becomes increasingly inconsequential. Killing, imprisoning, or maiming someone is far more acceptable when you don’t have to rely on that person being a productive member of your community. In fact you could argue abundance is detrimental to both forgiveness and rehabilitation, because there is no incentive to maximise the resource-gaining potential of an individual. You also mention social scarcity, and I genuinely don’t understand how you can’t see how a lack of social scarcity means it’s actually easier to exile individuals from groups, easier to deny people from entering groups, same as it is easier for “serial defectors” to optimise for group-switching.
In many ways, modern society has become more coercive, with contemporary “trust” actually being faith in the coercive power of systemic mechanisms of social control to keep everyone else in line, same as it keeps us in line, and who’s metric of value is in its ability to control the behaviour of strangers. Where we see wrongdoing without punishment, our faith in the entire social order collapses because coercion is the foundation of our social order. Unlike past culture, we don’t engage in “trust rituals” with strangers such as gift giving, meal sharing, or hospitality, as a formalised necessity, because there is no incentive in spending resource to create Xenia-style trust-networks.
We might need to consider that it is entirely possible, that the best in people doesn’t bloom outside the harshest conditions.
I endorse the shape of your argument but not exactly what you said.
Perhaps a better way to think about this is incentives. Zero sum moves are optimal in conditions of scarcity, while positive-sum moves are optimal in conditions of abundance.