Low Trust, Low Growth: Somalia's Trouble

There's a saying that has been kicked around a lot in recent years, that states, "If you import the Third World, you become the Third World." The reason that saying has been kicked around a lot lately is that we're seeing it happen, in Europe, in Canada, and right here in the United States. I might point out Minneapolis' Somali community, for example, and the possible billions in fraud emanating from that community.

The Third World remains the Third World in no small part because the societies that make up those impoverished places are low-trust societies, and a low-trust society is incompatible with prosperity. On Monday at RealClearPolitics, author Mitzi Perdue has some personal experiences to share to that point.

More than 40 years ago, when I was a rice farmer in California, American rice growers learned of famine conditions in Somalia. Competitors set aside their rivalry and donated an entire shipload of rice for humanitarian relief. I later traveled to Somalia, expecting to see that food had reached people on the brink of starvation.
It had not.
A powerful clan had taken control of the shipment. Once its own members’ needs were met, the remaining rice did not go to feed other Somalis. Instead, it was used to feed animals, while those outside the clan continued to go hungry.

That's classic low-trust society functioning; there is no trust beyond family and clan. That may be for a variety of reasons: Corrupt government officials, heavily armed clans, any number of reasons, but the end result is always the same: There is no trust but in blood.

Ms. Perdue points out:

Over time, I found language for what I had observed: the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a concept from game theory that explains how cooperation and trust either compound or collapse. When two parties cooperate, both benefit and trust grows. When one cheats while the other cooperates, the cheater prospers and the cooperator becomes the loser. When both are defective, everyone loses.
High-trust societies solve this dilemma by extending cooperation beyond family and tribe. Laws, institutions, and norms reinforce the idea that cheating ultimately harms everyone, including oneself. Low-trust societies work differently. Trust is reserved for kin. Outsiders are assumed to cheat. In that environment, cheating is not necessarily immoral. It is often rational, expected, and even applauded.

The United States has been, for much of its history, a high-trust society. But if we keep importing people from low-trust societal frameworks, that may change.

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We should note that not all of the non-Western world is low-trust. I've spent a fair amount of time in Japan, as regular readers will know, and Japan is a very high-trust society. An old friend of mine, who grew up in Tokyo in the late '60s and '70s, told me once that in the Japanese postal service when he was a boy, there were special envelopes for mailing cash that were bright red. These envelopes were only used for mailing cash, and were often left in communal, open letterboxes. He had never heard of one being taken. And stories abound of such from the Land of the Rising Sun, of wallets left on the counter of a ramen joint and still there, cash and credit cards intact, when the owner returned an hour later to look for them.

Now, today, in the United States, we are slipping. We are slipping from a high-trust society to a low-trust society. It is unchecked Third World immigration that is the cause of the change, and if you want a sterling example, just look at Minneapolis.

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