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 The Columbia Journalism Review recently published a long article by Jeff Gerth on media coverage of Donald Trump.  In the introductory section, Gerth says: "Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. ...Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism."  Confidence in the media has been in general decline for decades, according to the data I've seen, so the first sentence surprised me.   I checked the Edelman Trust Barometer and noticed that they have continued to survey trust, so you can look at how trust has changed since 2016.  The following figure shows trust in the media in 2016 and 2023 for nations in which both are available:Trust in the media fell from 47% to 43% in the United States over the period.  Among all 25 nations in the sample, average trust fell from 49.3% to 46.9%.  So the US was a little below average at both times.  As far as change, the United States had a decline of 4%, which was not unusual--the mean change was a decline of 2.4%.  As far as the "positive trend" in 2016, the report says that trust in the media was higher than it had been in 2015.  The Edelman Trust Barometer apparently goes back to 2001, but there doesn't seem to be a convenient place to look up the data, so I didn't pursue that.  The main point is that it doesn't suggest that the American media suffered a particularly large decline in trust after 2016.  Now for the Reuters study (the Digital News Report):  the United States did rank lowest, at 26%.  The Reuters data go back to 2016, so they can also be used to measure change.   A figure showing trust in 2016 (or the earliest year available) and 2022:The United States has fallen in both absolute and relative terms, but the change wasn't that large--a decline of 6, when the average change was a decline of 2.5.    The samples are different, but about 20 nations appear in both.  Neither the scores nor the changes in the scores are highly correlated (the correlations are a little less than 0.2).  Perhaps that's because of a difference in the questions:  Edelman asks whether you trust the institution to "do what is right," while Reuters asks if they think you can "trust most news most of the time."  But both give the same conclusion about whether there's been a decline in trust in the American media:  some, but not an unusually large amount.  The comparison in the Gerth article is misleading--it treats the difference between two different questions as a change over time.  Although the article was mostly an examination of media coverage rather than an analysis of public opinion, the passage I quoted was featured prominently and clearly pointed to a conclusion--that flaws in the coverage of Trump had produced a decline in public trust.  But regardless of what you think about the quality of coverage, it apparently didn't have much overall effect.  That may be because of political polarization--anything that made supporters of Trump feel more negative about the media made opponents feel more positive, and vice-versa. 

The Social Security Trust fund is set to run out in a few years. Who cares? Is the total US Federal debt $31,456,554,630,496.28, including Treasury debt held by the Social Security trust fund and other agencies?  or is it "only" $24,629,050,125,670.81 held by the public? (Source.)I've been mulling these questions over, prodded by conversations with some colleagues. The "trust fund" exists because for a while, Social Security taxes were larger than Social Security payments. Social Security used the extras to buy Treasury debt. Now there are fewer workers, more retirees and more generous benefits, so Social Security taxes are smaller than payments. Social Security sells off its "trust fund." And it seems we're in trouble when the "trust fund" runs out.  But that's not how it works at all. Treasury debt is not an asset like a stock or bond, or Uncle Scrooge's pool of gold coins. Treasury debt is a claim against future income taxes. Cashing in Treasury debt just  means paying for benefits with income taxes. The ups and downs of the trust fund just reflect a change in how we finance spending. While payroll taxes > social security spending, which was the case until 2007, then payroll taxes are financing other spending. When payroll taxes < social security spending, then income taxes or increases in debt are financing social security spending, which (graph below) was the case after 2008.* The trust fund just adds up this change over time. But exhausting the trust fund is, in this view, really irrelevant. source: CBOThat doesn't mean we can all go to sleep, for two reasons. First, when payroll taxes < Social Security outlays, and the trust fund is winding down, then income taxes or additional public debt must finance the shortfall. The government has to spend less on other things, raise income tax receipts, or borrow which means raising future taxes. And, per the graph, the numbers are not small. 1% of GDP is $230 billion. The extra strain on income taxes, other spending, or debt, happens right now, when the trust fund is positive but decreasing. Zero matters only because by law,  when the trust fund goes to zero, Social Security payments must be automatically cut to match Social Security taxes. That's the sudden drop in the graph. The program was set up as if  the trust fund were buying stocks and bonds, real assets, and would not lay claim on income tax revenues. But it was not; social security taxes were used to cover other spending, and now income taxes must start to pay social security benefits. What happens when the trust fund runs out, then?  Congress has a choice: automatically cut benefits, as shown, or change the law so that the government can pay Social Security benefits from income taxes, or, more realistically, by issuing ever more debt, until the bond vigilantes come. (Or raise payroll taxes, or reform the whole mess.) I bet on change the law. So what's the right measure of debt? It's conventional to look only at debt in public hands. But there is a case to look at the total debt, i.e. including the trust funds. Those are the total claims against the income  tax. Looking at it this way, however, one could also go on and count unfunded future social security benefits as a debt -- the present value of the difference between the two lines above, which leads to immense numbers, per Larry Kotlikoff. I have usually not considered the present value of unfunded promises as "debt," because Congress can change the payments at any time. Changing debt repayment to the public is a default, with financial and legal consequences; changing social security benefits is legislation. You can't sell your future social security benefits as you can sell your treasury debt. The trust fund is half way on this scale. What would be the consequence of a haircut or rescheduling of trust fund debt? Would that trigger something like cross-default clauses in corporate debt? I don't know. The event is unlikely anyway. The left pocket defaulting on the right pocket doesn't help pay the bills. The trust fund is certainly unlikely to run, and its debt is not used as collateral in financial transactions. As a somewhat meaningless accounting identity, it's a lot less "debt" than the debt in public hands. I think this all goes to remind us that paying off the existing debt is not the US central fiscal problem. The central problem is vast unfunded future promises. Defaulting or inflating away current debt does nothing to fund those promises. I look forward to comments on this one, especialy if there are standard views on these apparently simple questions that I'm not aware of. *In the end,  payroll taxes + income & other taxes + increase in public debt = Social Security spending + other spending. The trust fund nets out. 

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about claims that people had lost faith in the media because of the coverage of the Russian collusion story--the basic idea is that the media kept saying that the Mueller report would be a bombshell, so when it turned out  to be inconclusive, people felt like they had been sold a bill of goods.  I looked at two measures of trust in 2016 and the present, and found only small declines in both.  Of course, a lot has happened since the collusion story was big (the Mueller report was issued in the spring of 2019),  so it would be better to consider some intermediate points as well.  I'll do that in this post, using three different measures.   First, from a survey conducted by the Edelman Trust Institute "how much do you trust [the traditional media] for news and information?"I have to show it as a screenshot (from an article in Axios--I got the reference from Andrew Gelman's blog) because I don't have access to the original data.*  The figures on the x-axis are misleading, because they refer to the year of the annual reports, which involve a survey taken late in the previous year.  That is, the last survey in the figure was taken in late 2020.  As of late 2019 ("20" on the x-axis, trust was about the same level as in 2016--that is, it hadn't suffered during the time that the investigation was a big story.  It did fall a lot between late 2019 and late 2020--there are a lot of candidates for what might have caused that change.  Second, the Reuters Digital News Report, which has annual surveys conducted early in the year.  I show results for two questions:  whether you can trust "most news most of the time" and whether you can trust "news sources that you use."Trust in the news sources that you use has declined steadily--general trust in news rose from 2015 to 2017 and then declined steadily.  The 2019-20 decline was just about the same as the declines in 2017-8 and 2018-9.    Finally, a question on trust in the media to report the news "fully, accurately, and fairly," measured on a four point scale.  Gallup has done this question annually (in September) in recent years, and a few other news organizations have asked it from time to time.By this measure, confidence increased in the first years of the Trump administration, but then declined from 2018 to 2019.  You could say that was a reaction to the way the collusion story ended, but the declines have continued.  There are some differences between the paths of the three measures, and since lots of things are happening at any time, it's difficult to identify the impact of any specific event.  But there's nothing here to support the idea that the inconclusive end of the collusion story caused confidence to collapse.  That implies that trust should have been substantially lower in the second half of 2019 than it was in 2016, which wasn't the case.  *They had another question about whether you can trust the media to "do what is right,"  which I looked in my previous post.   The results for the question on "trust for news and information" are not regularly included on their annual report--that Axios story says the data were "shared exclusively with Axios."  (Edelman seems to be a management consulting firm which charges for access to their data--the reports just give a taste).  [Some data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

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This week we are looking at social trust. What is it? Why does it matter? And how can it be increased?

By KIM BELLARD I know the A.I. community is eagerly waiting for me to weigh in on the Sam Altman/OpenAI dramedy (🙄), but I'm not convinced this isn't all a ploy byContinue reading...

Dennis Patterson (Rutgers University School of Law, Camden; University of Surrey - School of Law) & Jacob Hale Russell (Rutgers Law School) have posted Post-Truth and the Rhetoric of "Following the Science" (Critical Review, August 2023) on SSRN. Here is...

Which political party will win the next election? How is inflation straining the economy? Who do we trust when it comes to COVID? IPPSR Podcasters search for answers.

Hanoch Dagan (Tel Aviv University - Buchmann Faculty of Law) & Irit Samet (King's College London; King's College London - The Dickson Poon School of Law) have posted What's Wrong with Massively Discretionary Trusts (138 Law Quarterly Review 629 (2022))...

In the runup to the 2020 election, the academic journal Nature made the unprecedented decision to endorse Joe Biden for President. During an era when trust in science has never seemed more crucial, this decision led many to wonder if explicitly political statements increase or decrease public trust in science.

Luckily, one PhD graduate from the Stanford School of Business designed a well-crafted experiment to find an answer. Using the Nature endorsement as a test case, Floyd Zhang wrote a paper that helps us explore the effects of public trust when scientific journals make endorsements.

Discussing recent research into how the REF distorts research and academic publishing patterns in the UK Moqi Groen-Xu and Peter Coveney argue for a researcher, rather than a rules centred REF. All governance systems – states, parents, or research evaluations – fall on a spectrum between authoritarian and democratic. Authoritarian systems can be better in … Continued

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Requiring political disclosure would increase trust in the university system at relatively low cost. Rather than massive cutbacks in funding, it is better to let the light of day restore faith in US higher education.
The post Increasing Transparency Can Restore Trust in Higher Education appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.