Confidence Lost

Take a look at this chart from Gallup on confidence in US institutions:



You can read the Gallup report on this poll here.

But let's think about what this poll is telling us. Interestingly, the military, most small business, the police and the Church are tightly controlled hierarchical organizations - in other words they are not democratic. The perception of trust and confidence tells us that people think these non-democratic organizations work pretty well.

Now let's look at the bottom: Congress at 12% is now considered the most ineffective institution in American society. And yet it's supposed to represent our democracy. Not such a good sign, do ya' think?

Look at the media - down there below our poor beleaguered president. Now that's a slap in the face. Organized labor and the justice system? Regulated HMOs? Ouch. This tells me our "liberal" institutions are hurting real bad in terms of public confidence. Perhaps we can blame this on the Bush presidency, but somehow that explanation doesn't appear to account for enough. It seems more likely we're having a problem with the self-regulation of our public institutions. The public--which these institutions are supposed to serve--see the politicians, CEOs, labor leaders, judges and bankers as part of the problem rather than the solution.

What's the solution? I'd guess something like citizen wikis. I recently read up on wikis and though their application to private goods and business seems very limited, their real value lies in the provision of public goods. Think about Wikipedia and how it may become the repository of all knowledge that dwarfs the great universities and libraries of the past. Wikipedia is still fairly unreliable, but the process by which it grows is self-correcting and thus the knowledge base is constantly becoming more accurate and valuable. Think of applying this to public institutions where information flows from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Perhaps this is the way we can make public institutions work for the people they're meant to serve.

I think Obama is hip to the power of the network and he may ride that network power to the presidency. But it doesn't really matter whether it's President McCain or Obama because citizen wikis could render the power hierarchies superfluous and purely symbolic, and that includes the presidency and the Congress. Think the royal family in Britain.