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³ The number of articles published in scientific journals with “trust” as a keyword or in its abstract increased from 129 to 1,956 from 1990 to 2005. Adding the word “growth” to “trust” shows an increase from 1 to 42 articles, which indicates a stark increase in the use of this concept by political economists; ISI Web of Knowledge, http://www.isinet.com/.

⁴ World Value Surveys, http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/.

⁵ Jan Delhey and Kenneth Newton, “Social Trust: Global Patterns or Nordic Exceptionalism,” Working Paper (Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung, 2004).

⁶ Uslaner (fn. 1), chap. 7.

⁷ There is a huge discussion in political philosophy of how to define “equality of opportunity.” It is certainly hard to imagine a society that would, in reality, create equal opportunity for all its citizens. We employ here a narrow definition that focuses on the establishment of public policies that are intended to create equal conditions for citizens regardless of their income, ethnic/religious background, sex, and race in areas such as health care, education, and social security and legal protection (“equality before the law”). Thus, central to our conceptualization of “equality of opportunity” is not whether there is “equality of opportunity” in general but whether the state does (or does not) promote equality of opportunity.

⁸ In theory, one could imagine a society with huge economic inequality but with perfect equality of opportunity. In practice, it seems as if these two types go together. For example, in contrast to the United States, the Nordic states provide all citizens who qualify for college with tuition-free education and provide benefits like universal health care and elderly care. One measure of the equality of opportunity is the level of educational inequality in a country. Using a measure of the standard deviation of educational attainment provided by Daniel Lederman of the World Bank, we found a modest correlation (r =.367, N = 62) with the Gini index of economic inequality. The correlation is attenuated by greater economic inequality than predicted for African and Latin American countries and lower economic equality than expected for countries in the Indian subcontinent. We found almost identical results using a Gini index of educational inequality (r =.364, N = 55) estimated by Vinod Thomas, Yan Wang, and Xibo Fan, “Measuring Economic Inequality: Gini Coefficients of Education” (Washington, D.C.: World Bank Institute, Office of the Vice President, and Economic Policy and Poverty Reduction Division, January 2001).

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¹² Uslaner (fn.l).

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¹⁹ For the logic explaining why we eliminate countries with a legacy of communism, see Uslaner (fn. 1), 228–30.

²⁰ This is not an issue of case selection, since we get an R² of.560 of the regression of the Galbraith measure on trust for the thirty cases with nonmissing values on both Gini coefficents.

²¹ The R² for the 1963 measure with levels of trust in the 1990s is.653 (N = 33) compared to.560 for the 1996 index of inequality. The regression coefficients (.022 and.020, respectively) are almost identical.

²² Eric M. Uslaner, “The Bulging Pocket and the Rule of Law: Corruption, Inequality, and Trust” (Paper presented at the conference “The Quality of Government: What It Is, How to Get It, Why It Matters,” The Quality of Government Institute, Department of Political Science, Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden, November 17—19, 2005), at http://www.qog.pol.gu.se/conferences/novem-ber2005/papers/Uslaner.pdf

²³ Uslaner (fn. 1), 233–36.

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⁴⁷ Daniel Eek and Bo Rothstein, “Exploring a Causal Relationship between Vertical and Horizontal Trust” (Paper presented at the conference “Trust and Democracy: A Multidisciplinary Perspective,” Department of Economics, Department of Political Science, and Department of Psychology, Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden, May 19–20, 2005). The report itself has data only about Swedish students. The data from our scenario experiments with the Romanian students have just been analyzed and confirm the result from the experiments conducted in Sweden.

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⁵⁴ Larry Rother, “Where Taxes Aren't So Certain,” New York Times, March 21, 1999, 3.

⁵⁵ Janos Kornai, “Hidden in an Envelope: Gratitude Payments to Medical Doctors in Hungary” (2000), at http://www.colbud.hu/honesty-trust/kornai/pub01.PDF.

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⁸⁹ The data can be obtained at http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/web/.

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⁹⁷ If we had a choice, governments in high inequality/low social trust societies should opt for highquality universal education programs. There are several reasons for this. One is that universal public education both creates a sense of equal opportunity and generates more economic equality. Second, it should give parents a sense of optimism for the future or their children, and since optimism is strongly connected to social trust, this would have positive effects. Third, such programs would bring children and young people from different ethnic, religious, and social groups together. Results from social psychology show that this is one important generator of social trust; Yamagishi, Toshio, “Trust as a Form of Social Intelligence,” in Cook, K. S., ed., Trust in Society (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001)Google Scholar.

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