Trust is one of the most stable values, but it also has fallen sharply from its high in the boom years of the 1960s. In this chapter I look at both stability and change, though mostly the latter. Trust has fallen from 58 percent in 1960, the first time the question appeared on a national survey, to about 36 percent in 1996 (before rising to about 40 percent in 1998 and 1999). Something important is going on and we can learn some important lessons about the prospects for cooperation by looking at the dynamics of trust.

At one level stability and change may be quite consistent. Putnam (1995a, 1995b, 2000) argues that America has become less trusting because each succeeding generation has less faith in others. Our collective loss of trust stems from population replacement. There is much support for Putnam's argument, but a generational argument doesn't explain why younger people are less trusting. And it also cannot do justice to one remarkable countertrend: The generation that supposedly started the unraveling of trust, the Early Baby Boomers, shifted direction in the late 1980s. Soon they were to become the most trusting generation.

Even in the face of aggregate stability, there was some systematic shuffling of individual-level trust in the 1970s. And people responded in precisely the ways that my account of trust suggests that they should.