Heck, it's how the tax system works as well. Government has no way of knowing how much is actually on your bank account, well at least not officially (gov was probably quite happy about the US breaking our banking secrecy). So everyone is supposed to be responsible enough to fill out their taxes and hand in all the information needed. At the end it all works out fine - turns out you can mostly trust people to be honest and the system keeps working for everyone, at least it did so for the last 170 or so years.
Worked in a busy bike shop as a kid and sometimes you would have someone come through the door after a nut or bolt. I would go to the workshop and spend quite a bit of time finding the bolt, then I would only be able to charge 50p for it. By the time I had came back I could have used that time to serve a customer after some real purchases, e.g. a whole bicycle. There wouldn't even be any 'word of mouth' benefits, the bolt could be for a lawnmower or something and the customer could be far too wedded to their tin box vehicle for there to be the chance to upgrade them to a bicycle.
Anyway, it was not cost effective to do personal service bolt sales, at 50p a time, had I been smarter I would have had a big box of random bolts under the counter and made things 'self service'.
Like passing anti-minaret laws?
Societies and culture are more complex than you make it sound.
That's one hypothesis. Another is that trustworthiness is a genetic trait.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Do you imagine the children taken into care at a young age turn into bad people just like their parents anyway?
Surely everyone thinks that trustworthiness is about poverty, inequality and values?
One plausible explanation for some of that, which wasn't analyzed there, but has some basis in other research is that things like risk-taking behavior or being prone to addiction are quite genetic.
But in any case, for many(most? all?) "moral" characteristics saying that they're only about "poverty, inequality and values" is wishful thinking. Yes, they are in part about that, but they are also in part about genetics; the answer to "nature or nurture" pretty much always is both.
"The best fitting model for 41 key studies (58 independent samples from 14 month old infants to adults; N=27,147) included equal proportions of variance due to genetic (0.50) and non-shared environmental (0.50) influences, with genetic effects being both additive (0.38) and non-additive (0.12). Shared environmental effects were unimportant in explaining individual differences in impulsivity."
So impulsivity (which is obviously closely related to your propensity to betray the trust of your fellow-man for a short-term gain) appears to be a combination of genetics and random luck (non-shared environment).
How is that different from self checkout in most of the big food stores in USA?
generally no. They do sell stuff like that as well, but most is out in the open and you bag yourself. And then punch in the item codes or look them up at the self checkout. There's no real check, although sometimes they catch people cheating by reviewing video.
There's no extra tags involved, you just have to select what the produce is if it doesn't have a barcode.
There is indeed an opportunity to "cheat" by weighing something expensive but telling the machine it's something cheap like onions or potatoes.
But the machines can be monitored remotely from a security station, so there is a small chance you'd get caught. That keeps most people pretty honest.
I'm sure a few cheats do slip though, but the losses from this sort of thing are presumably much less than the savings from employing less checkout staff!
I've seen one location go from requiring an assistant to allowing full self-serve.
Not sure about the U.S. but I have the impression that there must be places which are similar in the U.S.
The US has its faults to be sure, but it's not that different here for buying produce these days. A lot of things had little stickers on them which can be scanned directly, and for other things the automated cashier lets you type in or look up a code number and then set the item(s) on the scanner/scale to be weighed. If you really wanted to cheat, it would be trivial to buy a bag full of some expensive item and type in the code number for some cheap item.
all super/hypermarkets in france are same, shopping there every weekend.
Doors and cars are also typically unlocked, sometimes the keys are left in the car too. I have always mused that if you wanted to steal a bunch of cars you would just take a trailer to a country town and load them right up.
It all worked out fine because it was a small community and people would know who did what. Steal a car? Where are you gonna drive it? Everyone will know it's not yours.
The other thing I imagine helps is that there are fewer mentally unstable people just thanks to there being fewer people. So someone "a bit off" would be known to the community. That can be good and bad.
>It all worked out fine because it was a small community and people would know who did what. Steal a car? Where are you gonna drive it? Everyone will know it's not yours.
>The other thing I imagine helps is that there are fewer mentally unstable people just thanks to there being fewer people. So someone "a bit off" would be known to the community. That can be good and bad.
Congratulations on describing a small town pretty much anywhere in the western world.
Except, do you think they'd chase Wallabies on their bikes, catch Blue-Tongues, Magpies and Gang-Gangs?
FWIW this fairly common in rural Ontario and probably other parts of Canada too. I imagine it happens in parts of the US too.
Edit: But not in Ann Arbor, the purportedly safest city in the state... Go figure.
Sometimes you will run into one of them at the produce stand in front of their house, but usually when I've been there it's unattended. The baskets of fruit have prices on them and there's a slot in the counter to put your money in.
Seriously, it seems like 90% of the HN crowd has was born in SV. You don't even have to go very far inland, from either coast.
For that matter, I regularly see schoolchildren riding the New York City subway accompanied only by their friends...
It's safer as a pedestrian in the suburbs than in urban environments, which is one of the reasons people move to suburbs to raise kids. In fact, one of the reasons public transit doesn't work in suburbs and you need a car to get anywhere out of your residential neighborhood is that suburbs are usually designed to limit both traffic volume and traffic speed in residential neighborhoods (which typically include small parks and other facilities specifically for for kids) to provide pedestrian safety (which has a side effect of requiring longer, both in road distance and time, trips to anywhere else than straight-libe distance would suggest, and making efficient public transit routes impractical where this is done through branching designs without connecting loops, and making distances impractical for walking out of the neighborhood to other areas -- though this is sometimes, in better suburbs, mitigated by walking/bike paths which make non-carbonated distances closer to straight-line than the motor vehicle routes.)