This is, at the very least, questionable. Aside from pesticides, whose effects are frequently litigated, cheap but highly-unhealthy ingredients like corn syrup tend to propagate into all kinds of products that you wouldn't expect to contain them. [...] This position is common in the first world, where high trust society is generally expected[1], but it is far from universal. There are places where hosting a scam call center would be unthinkable, and there are places where it's expected. Everyone would prefer not to have garbage strewn all over the streets, but in much of the world, you can open Google Maps in any given place and see litter left lying around. It's Moloch's banner of conquest. It is dangerous to assume that Finland is the default state of things, and to look no further than that. Indeed, we've started to see lower-trust systems emerge even in America and Europe of late, for a variety of reasons. [...] A significant portion of the world has birth rates in the vicinity of half the replacement rate, despite reported preferences for more children, simply because dropping out of the workforce to have children damages individual competitiveness. This also eats many, many childhoods in, for example, Korea, where parents fear that leaving their child home from cram school will leave him with a lifelong disadvantage relative to his peers. Even efforts by the government to centrally regulate this have had mixed success, because parents desperately want their children to succeed, and are willing to skirt the law if they fear being left behind by not doing so. ---------------------------------------- I should note that the reason I feel so alarmed by all of this is that these trends emerged recently, and seem to be a result of increasingly-frictionless systems. A national testing apparatus that runs smoothly, with study guides rolled out to everyone, makes cram school much more appealing. A global recruiting system leads to entire businesses being created