The age of mass distrust

Richard Edelman, the brains behind the world’s leading survey on trust in institutions, joins this week with a severe warning: trust is becoming heavily local, and democracies are experiencing a collapse of trust in government and media. Not only that — there’s a sharp class divide: members of elite groups trust institutions more than ever, while distrust grows among the masses. CEOs are asked to step into this breach. There are also strategic consequences to these trust divides: we explore what happens when China trusts its domestic institutions, while Americans distrust their own institutions.