Among the many reasons Americans are lucky is that they tend to have people they can depend on.
That is one of the takeaways from a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which in part looked at social relationships and trust around the developed world. Here is a chart showing the share of a country’s population that say they have relatives or friends they can count on for help in times of need:
The United States is in the middle of the pack of the countries surveyed, with 92.3 percent of Americans saying they have a support network. Compare this to a country like India, where only 59.3 percent of people say they have a network they can depend on in times of need.
Dollars to doughnuts.
Unfortunately, the O.E.C.D. found that people with lower incomes and less education were least likely to have a personal social safety net:
Perhaps partly because they generally have good support networks, Americans are slightly more trusting than residents of other countries; 36.6 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,” compared with 33 percent across the developed world.
But distrust reigns when it comes to opinions of some of their most prominent institutions.
Just 30.1 percent of Americans have a “high level of trust” in the media, compared to an O.E.C.D. average of 40.4 percent. Even China, where news organizations are state-run, somehow managed to have higher trust in the media (54.6 percent). The same is true in Mexico (52 percent), where journalists reportedly self-censor to avoid angering the drug cartels.
Americans are also slightly less likely than other developed countries to say they have a high level of trust in their national government, yet somewhat more likely to trust in their own country’s judicial system.
No comments:
Post a Comment