Optimal wariness always incurs the cost of missing rare trustworthy partners.

Evidence

Raymond Chandler’s cynical, distrusting Hollywood agent ruefully says to private detective, Philip Marlowe, “I’m going to find myself doing business with a man I can trust and I’m going to be just too goddamn smart to trust him” (Chandler 1955, 118; quoted in Coleman 1990, 100). In his milieu, unfortunately, he was probably as smart as he ought to be, and part of the cost of being so smart was the occasional error on the side of failing to cooperate. The dumber person who would cooperate with the rare trustworthy man in Hollywood would, alas, also cooperate with some others who were not trustworthy. Perhaps the agent took risks at the optimal level. Epistemologically one can do no better. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 528

Categorization

• XREF: An illustration of the false-alarm vs. missed-betrayal tradeoff Hardin frames elsewhere, and a counterpoint to why the wife’s sightedness lets her uniquely calibrate rather than merely generalize.
• CANDY: The Chandler quote is a memorable, tweetable encapsulation of the economist’s point that optimal distrust still loses some good partners.