The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You

Also high schools. demographics of Thomas Jefferson High School (one of the best in the country) vs. Fairfax county.

I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians. Now, cheating is pervasive. Game theory in action

The more people lose trust in your work history and other credentials, the more metaphorical leetcode becomes relevant.

Interesting. When I was at university there were a few foreign contingents known for cheating academically. It was unexpected and strange ...yet, despite that, some of the students were smart yet cheated in areas they were weak in. But also didn't seem to mind sharing assignments in any area among themselves. I guess they assumed they'd learn much of what they needed in the real-world on the job.

It's sad to learn this attitude has begun to permeate our own students. People want to take short-cuts and skip the work necessary to get to the goal and miss out on the learning aspect. Maybe they expect "A.I" to do the thinking for them --but then what will they have to offer a prospective emplyer?

Our society does not reward honesty enough. So in some sense, this outcome may have been partly inevitable.

I do not think cheating in higher education can be explained simply as “students are bad now.” I dropped out of a master’s program myself. It was not an elite universit, just a regional university in Korea, but even there I often felt strange pressures.

From the outside, academia seems to contain many signals that are not always obviously necessary. I do not mean that peer review itself is unnecessary. The problem is that the actual quality of a paper often seems less important than the journal in which it was published. Some journals are treated as legitimate, others as suspicious, and some publication records are recognized while others are treated almost as if they do not exist.

Then a natural question arises.

Do those journals really have verification mechanisms strong enough to justify the trust placed in them?

If a journal functions as a quality assurance institution, then its authority can be justified to some extent. But in many cases, the system seems to rely heavily on individual morality, reviewer goodwill, the conscience of advisors, and the self-restraint of researchers. The system says, “You can trust this because it was published in this journal,” but it often does not seem to pay enough of the verification cost required to support that trust.

This creates a problem. People who gained reputation through those journal signals often react to criticism of the signal system as if it were an attack on scholarship itself. For them, the authority of the journal is not merely a verification mechanism. It is also the basis of their own career and status. So even when the signal becomes polluted, there is a force that defends the existing signal instead of repairing it.

In that structure, cheating naturally gains power.

If the system rewards compressed signals such as publication counts, journal ranking, citation counts, school names, and recommendation letters more strongly than real understanding, honest failure, and slow learning, then people will look for the shortest path to those signals. That is a predictable result.

What happens next is not a fairer meritocracy. Instead, we get more verification, more references, more networks, and more demands for prior proof. When a shared credential collapses, the market does not become more open. It becomes more closed. People who already have reputations, elite schools, or strong networks survive, while new entrants are asked to prove more and more.

So I do not want to see cheating in higher education only as a matter of individual student morality. Of course individuals have responsibility. But if the system rewards signal acquisition more than honest learning, and if the institutions issuing those signals do not take enough responsibility for verification, cheating will continue to grow.

To me, as a programmer, expecting honesty in a structure that does not reward honesty looks like failed design.

In that sense, I also think we should strongly criticize recent behavior where people attach words like “open” to their projects and sell the trust of open source in order to promote their startups. But if I think about it from another angle, it also feels like a desperate final move to win inside the game of our society.

In our society, morality is assigned far too little value.

Yeah the unpunished petty crime is the reason, not the entire economy and every politician existing solely to scam everyone.

I have not lived in “the city,” meaning New York, so I cannot speak from direct experience.

I agree that trust is not maintained by moral sentiment alone. But the United States is already a society with relatively harsh punishment, and yet it still has a high crime rate.

So I do not think law enforcement is the whole explanation.

There are many faults with the Japanese justice system --but letting petty crime go doesn't tend to be one of them. I'm glad there are places on earth where they still believe in a structured society where actions have predictable consequences.