Economic stasis makes prosperity positional, breeding distrust and lethal conflict

Evidence

Reduced prospects for cooperative mobilization impair efforts that would produce general economic advance in an ordinary market economy in which every person’s prosperity depends more on the efforts of others in other productive activities than on his or her own efforts. The general economic backwardness produces little opportunity for personal advancement. Indeed, the only way to advance significantly may be to prevail over others in one’s own society (see further Hardin 1995, especially chapter 6). Hence advancement and even prosperity are positional goods and not the generalized social goods of a functioning market (Gambetta 1988, 162–63). In such contexts, absence of conditions for trust may breed distrust through paranoid cognition (Kramer 1994). Economic backwardness in these polities exacerbated conflict because it gave little opportunity for advancement through productive endeavor. Economic stasis is sufficient to produce such positional conflicts, which can become lethal, as has occurred in Rwanda and elsewhere in recent times. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 495

Categorization

• XREF: Gambetta’s Italy analysis anchors the positional-goods argument here and recurs across Hardin’s institutional-trust framework; also echoes Hardin 1995 ch.6 on advancement.