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The interesting question is: how do you change the people, or at least stop them from changing for the worse?
I spend a lot of time in Switzerland, and on paper it should be pretty similar to many US states. Population size and density, GDP per capita, Gini index, cost of living, ect. are all pretty comparable to one of the "nice" US states. Even healthcare is kind of similar (certainly closer to the US than to the EU). Also, they have insane immigration, and have had for decades: 40% of permanent residents over 15 have an immigration background, 35% don't hold citizenship. Walk through a major city, and you'll hear a dozen different languages spoken within minutes. Walk onto a construction site, and none of them will be one of the national languages (OK, you'll probably hear Italian).
And yet, Swiss society is insanely high trust. Bikes unlocked, phones left on empty cafe tables, unaccompanied children move all over town on bikes or public transit. Farm stands have cash sitting in an open box, stores don't have locks on any product, self checkout is 100% unsupervised (and isn't using a digital scale to check what you bought).
The question is: why? How do they run a 1%-2% immigration rate, and instill the honor principle/high trust into everybody that arrives? How do they keep their citizens from defecting, practically ever? Of course, rate of incarceration is extremely low, too.
Or maybe we have to turn the question around: why are Americans choosing to defect so frequently now? Is the gini index not covering real differences in inequality?
You don't change the people. Switzerland has very few immigrants from Africa or the Middle East so they don't have too many problems yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Switzerland
Of course, immigrants from those countries commit crimes at a rate of several times the native population.
Switzerland isn't doing anything "right" except for restricting immigration from unsavory countries. Neverthless, numbers are increasing, so unless they start deporting people soon, they can say goodbye to that high trust society within a few decades. None of this should be surprising to anyone.
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Where are the immigrants from? A Bavarian/Piedmontese family moving to Switzerland counts as an immigration background but is not likely to lower trust significantly (they're crossing a border but originate in a different part of the same mountain range) while a family coming from another continent that speaks a different language is going to be far more challenging to assimilate quickly.
That's relatively diverse, at least from language, income and a "native trust level" perspective. The largest groups are, in descending order: Italy, Germany, Portugal, France, former Yugoslavia, Albania and Turkey. None of those groups is more than 10%, an together they're below 60% of immigration origin.
Maybe that diversity helps with not forming ghettos. Maybe all these origin countries have higher-trust societies than the most common countries the US gets immigrants from. But my intuition says this isn't the case.
Number one origin for immigrants in the US by far is Mexico, number two is India, followed by the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Philippines, El Salvador, Brazil, Cuba, and South Korea.
I believe your intuition is bad. Mexico, India, the DR, El Salvador, and Brazil are notoriously low trust.
I see your point. Even the low trust countries from Switzerland's list are probably ahead of every single one of those...
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At least on this metric, all of the countries listed are rather lower trust than Switzerland itself, which has been gaining in trust over the past 30 years despite immigration from lower trust societies.
Italy, France, and the DR are similar trust societies. Same for Portugal and India, and El Salvador and Turkey. Albania is lower trust than any other country mentioned.
Italy and Germany (#1 and #2 for Switzerland) are significantly higher than Mexico and India (#1 and #2 for the US) by that metric. Though that metric may be suspect; it has China higher than Switzerland, and there's at least plenty of anecdote pointing towards China being low-trust. Perhaps they don't trust the surveyors.
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They're mostly Germans and Italians with some Iberians thrown in.
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