Soviet centralization produced distrust by replacing market signals with personal blame

Evidence

Alternatively, one might suppose that centralization was a problem in addition to low levels of trust or even that centralization tended to produce distrust or to reduce trust. It probably did lead to distrust through the need to monitor production. For example, the government set quantitative quotas, and the natural way to meet these was often to stint on quality. In a market, this would merely mean that the poorer producer would have poorer sales. In a centralized economy, the qualitatively poor producer could only be rebuked or fined, and this would be done by a recognizable personal agent of the government, not by the invisible hand and the noninvidious forces of the market. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 842

Categorization

• XREF: Causal claim that market mechanisms and centralized monitoring generate opposite trust outcomes — connects to the blindness->monitoring theme and Hardin’s observability conditions. — connects to: China’s pervasive social distrust stems from totalitarian destruction of traditional affiliations — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1240; American capitalism secretly adopted Soviet centralized planning principles in the 1960s. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 158