New and Old #255
Trust as a precondition for free enterprise, tennis NIMBYs, middle-class immiseration, and how to pray for prisoners
The Strip-Mining of Trust, The Choice Engine, Adam Butler, February 1, 2026
I like this; it reads like an old Nation or Mother Jones piece. I’ve always had a soft spot for old-school left-wing economic populism, and in some ways I think of it as being conservative in the truest sense of the term.
He begins, writing of the old floor trading in stock markets:
What made the system work was what made it invisible to the logic that would eventually replace it. The handshake was bound—not by contract but by community, not by surveillance but by memory. The traders saw each other every day. They would see each other tomorrow. Reputation accumulated over years; betrayal echoed for careers. The binding was social, and therefore cheap. No lawyers drafted the agreement. No compliance officers monitored the execution. No auditors verified the settlement. Trust was the lubricant that made the gears turn without friction, and because it was lubricant, it generated no profit for anyone selling friction….
The algorithms inherited a reservoir of institutional trust built over a century, the sediment of ten thousand handshakes honored. They cannot replenish a drop of it. The new systems extract from the commons they did not build, drawing down the principal while calling the withdrawals “innovation.” And in the space where trust once operated for free, a new industry has emerged—Loss: lawyers to draft the contracts the handshake didn’t need, compliance officers to monitor the behavior that reputation once constrained, auditors to verify the settlements that memory once guaranteed. The destruction of trust is not merely a cost. It is a profit center for everyone selling the machinery of distrust.
Perhaps starting with the stock market sounds a bit right-wing, but he quickly points our other erosions of trust and institutional stability:
Here is the paradox: the water system that poisoned Flint’s children could only do so because it had inherited a reservoir of institutional trust built over generations. Trust that the water was safe, that the officials were competent, that the systems worked. When residents turned on their taps, they did not perform chemical analyses. When parents filled their children’s glasses, they did not demand assurances. They simply drank, as their parents had drunk, as their grandparents had drunk, because decades of reliable service had taught them that the water could be trusted. This trust was not naivety; it was the rational response to a system that had earned it. And it was precisely this earned trust that made the extraction possible.
This describes what I’m trying to get at when I write about how things feel like they’re getting worse: for example, this pair of pieces, here and here, about consumer advocacy issues. There’s a feeling I get that the people in charge are not really in charge. That nobody feels a duty to steward what they have inherited, a duty to maintain a continuity with their institution’s past.
I’m quoting a lot, but this is just so well articulated:
Had Flint’s residents been vigilant, suspicious, equipped with home testing kits and skeptical of official assurances, the corrosion might have been caught in weeks rather than eighteen months. But such vigilance would have been its own kind of tax, its own erosion of the social fabric. A community that must verify every interaction with its own government is a community already impoverished, already paying the costs of lost trust in currencies of time and anxiety and social friction. The emergency managers drew on reserves of confidence to avoid exactly this kind of scrutiny—and in doing so, they dissolved the very confidence they required….
The successful destruction of trust registers as economic growth.
I have two further thoughts: one is that perhaps this is just how societies expand and grow up. I often think of something an environmentalist speaker said at a conference I went to years ago: we didn’t have regulations 200 years ago because we were smaller. There was less to regulate. Things changed and you can’t go back. I think there is some truth in that. The other is that this brand of analysis is not anti-free-enterprise, really. It asks free-market folks to be more honest with regard to what markets can and cannot do, which is a distinction with a difference.
Sorry, one more thought. This also makes me think of a point Ronald Reagan supposedly made once1, about how environmentalists had forgotten how brutal nature was, and why man had always sought to tame it.
There’s a lot more, and it’s a long piece. Read the whole thing.
What the Pickleball Boom Tells Us About Housing, Southern Urbanism, Aaron Lubeck, January 7, 2026
Like housing in the South, pickleball is booming. The number of players has doubled in seven years, fast outpacing its lumbering uncle. The sport’s growth has triggered an associated land grab, which makes it an apt analogy to explain the region’s housing shortages.
In North Carolina’s Triangle, those who manage tennis courts have been tasked with building pickleball facilities to meet demand. They have acted quickly, but their response has been somewhat bizarre. At Hollow Rock, all three tennis hard courts were converted into temporary pickleball courts. At Duke Faculty Club, two courts were converted into four pickles. In Chapel Hill, public courts are consistently being taken over by the paddle people.
I wrote once about the analogy between pickleball and housing. There’s an uncanny similarity in the discourse: the NIMBY/tennis snob narrative that making room for apartments/pickleball is entitlement or wanting a handout on the part of the people the large, not-always-used tennis courts/large, spread-out single-family houses are artificially pricing out. It’s really interesting.
A sort of sidenote here is that I think a lot of people have no idea how uncertain journalism careers are. I remember years ago, when I was in college, I came across a tweet from a journalist about how she was struggling to pay her bills, and I remember thinking, How could you be poor? You’re famous! I’ve heard of you!
Like professors, journalists are often imagined as this elite class, and I think the appearance of influence makes people assume there must be a lot of money behind it. All of which is to say that Scherer’s story is not at all improbable.
He writes about part of his old journalism career:
In 2014 I sailed on the San Giorgio, a 133-metre Italian Navy vessel. The San Giorgio was part of an Italian mission, called Mare Nostrum or “Our Sea” in Latin, which began after a shipwreck near the Italian island of Lampedusa killed more than 360 men, women and children. The mission saved 150,000 people, but it was suspended after a year under pressure from countries like France, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands — where most of the migrants settled after being rescued. Right-leaning, anti-immigrant parties were gaining ground.
Non-governmental organizations took over sea rescues after that. In 2017, I boarded the Aquarius, which was run by two NGOs. It was a peak time for sea crossings. In one morning, within sight of the Libyan coast, the Aquarius picked up 560 people in six massive rubber boats reinforced with a plywood floor. They hailed from at least a dozen countries, including Nigeria, Sudan, Morocco, and Bangladesh.
Now he drives for Uber:
On my first morning driving for Uber, everyone I picked up was Latino or South Asian and they were all going to work. My first three customers were schoolteachers. Then I dropped one young woman at a hospital, and her mother at a grocery store that had yet to open. I brought a young man to a large auto mechanic’s garage, another to a Panera Bread chain restaurant, and a woman to the open back door of a strip-mall diner.
I made $100 in a little less than five hours. Since I’m 55 with the bladder of a three-year-old, I had to find a place to pee three times. Welcome to Donald Trump’s America, I whispered to myself when I whipped into a city park to take a leak behind a tree.
I didn’t know the immigration status of any of my clients. But I wondered, how is the misguided and aggressive targeting of the very people who serve us breakfast, teach our children, fix our cars, clean our hotel rooms, and comfort of our sick making America great?
I think a lot of people who think of politics as ideas and abstractions only are operating from a position of privilege, or even cluelessness. They have no real idea how anything actually gets done. It’s ironic how profoundly un-conservative that is.
A better prayer for prisons, The Christian Century, Phil Christman, January 29, 2026
A denomination’s primary prayer book [he is talking about the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer] shouldn’t be updated at the drop of a hat; I’d aim for once or twice a century, tops. When it comes to the emotional furniture people have sat on their entire lives, you want to wait to tamper with it until the legs start giving out. And I take it that churches have a responsibility—it’s not our main responsibility, but it’s one of them—to counterprogram the dominant media environments around them. Giving people old, carefully chosen words to speak and read is one way to do this. So, as a non-Episcopalian who will probably darken those doors again at some point, I hope the current Book of Common Prayer is still in effect when I do. It’s a full year younger than I am—it dates to 1979—and I am still more or less functional.
But whenever the Episcopalians do get around to revising, I want to make some suggestions regarding Prayer #37, “For Prisons and Correctional Institutions.”
First of all, just call it “For Prisons”—avoid the euphemism. Prisons are places where people are held captive, sometimes because they arguably need to be but often not. Prisons are good at that job. They are not great at any other job.
More on his point (Christman, of course, is a more-than-perfect name for a Christian writer):
The problem really sets in with the next sentence. It’s not that there aren’t many guilty people in prison; it’s that we’re taking it for granted that guiltiness is the first phenomenon that prison should make us think about. Prisons are good at sequestering people, but courts aren’t always great at separating the guilty from the innocent. Where private prisons exist—as I write this, a rapidly growing number of immigration detainees sit in a private facility just three hours from me—their whole raison d’être is to make money. All prisons serve, meanwhile, as a form of security theater, as a thing to threaten people with in order to coerce information, and as an alternative social safety net for demographic groups our society has decided to abandon.
Prison also does the necessary job of preventing the occasional Charles Manson from moving about freely. But the point of a system is what it does, as Stafford Beer said, and our system does a lot of other things too.
This is a kind of Christian Left sentiment that I don’t entirely share, but understand and respect. Finally, this:
I think the US prison system exists in part to satisfy a deep national hunger to sacrifice somebody. This hunger expresses itself in many obvious, ugly, public ways throughout our society: the way we talk about the poor, the humiliation rituals of reality TV and tabloid journalism, the ill-concealed hunger for war that many of our defense and security intellectuals harbor, the folk belief that bullying improves children’s character, the contempt often shown toward victims of abuse, our unexamined attachment to economic austerity as a way to fix economic problems. I think there’s something in human nature that doesn’t feel safe if we aren’t passing the occasional child through the fire to Moloch.
To see this as simply American bleeding-heart liberalism with a Christian veneer is to miss the point, I think. Christianity should make us rethink our base instincts. Christ’s teachings challenge, if not our human nature, our fallen nature. If that makes us uncomfortable, that is probably a good thing.
Related Reading:
Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,500 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!
I swear I read this paraphrased in a book once, but I can’t find anything online to this effect. It’s possible it was a member of Reagan’s cabinet who said the thing that was paraphrased in the book I read.