How A Single Lie In A Crisis Can Destroy Trust In Government

We’re living through a crucial moment for public trust in government. Conflicting and contradictory political and scientific messaging during the coronavirus pandemic seems to have eroded public trust on both sides of the aisle. But what do we know about how governments could avoid further decreases in trust, and how persistence these effects can be? David Yang is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard and has a paper, “Historical Traumas and the Roots of Political Distrust: Political Inference from the Great Chinese Famine”, that speaks to both of these questions. On this episode, we talk about how important government messaging in a crisis can be for destroying public trust even fifty years in to the future.