Generalized trust media like money and power buy systems decision time

Evidence

The dimension of time becomes especially relevant in all these generalized mechanisms, and this explains at the same time why trust is a prerequisite for them. If a system has liquid assets, if it has power, it can postpone its decisions and nevertheless secure them within a given context of possible choices. The system can form long chains connecting selective events without being able to know or specify in advance the situations which are thereby co-ordinated. It thus gains time for complex information-processing decisions, which make it possible to adapt to the environment at a higher level of complexity. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 227

Categorization

• XREF: Explains how institutional deference frees agents from constant re-evaluation — the temporal slack that lets Stevens focus on micro-duties while the macro-order runs on trust.