Trust, capabilities, confidence and basic income

Had John Lennon and Paul McCartney been sociologists, the title of their most famous and most referenced article might have been ‘All You Need Is Trust’. Indeed, trust is something we need in everyday life. We could not interact with others in any positive or productive manner if we did not trust them; similarly, without trust, we could not properly interact with public institutions and authorities. Mutual trust is a prerequisite for any sustainable social organization. Societies with low levels of generalised trust in fellow citizens and institutions inevitably struggle with political instability and corruption; hence, when reforming social institutions and experimenting with new social policy models, the emphasis should be placed on how to increase and maintain trust and, in a Putnamian sense, get people ‘to bowl together’ (Putnam, 2000). The academic literature has typically separated trust into two distinct forms: trust in one’s fellow citizens, also called generalised trust, and trust in institutions. Whether people trust institutions, or other people for that matter, has an effect on the functioning of society (Fukuyama, 1995, 2011; Stiglitz et al., 2018); thus, the importance of trust should not be ignored when assessing the functioning of existing national institutions or the pursuit of new policies. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, ‘trust’ is the belief that the other person is good and honest and will not cause harm, or that something is safe and reliable, while ‘confidence’ refers to the quality of being certain of one’s own abilities and plans for the future. For the purposes of our analysis, we define confidence as one’s reliance on oneself and one’s perceived ability to cope, meet future challenges, and be an influential actor in one’s own life. Even in the scientific literature, the concepts of trust and confidence are frequently used interchangeably. However, from a sociological perspective, it is useful to distinguish between the two. While they are interwoven and