Losing Faith in American Institutions As Tyler Cowen (and then I) wrote about earlier this week, trust in government is declining. The decline in American trust is not unique to government, though, and it's also not terribly recent. Gallup has just released its latest figures on Americans" confidence in various institutions. The numbers are all pretty grim, with new lows recorded for Americans" confidence levels in public schools, churches, banks and television news. These latest record-lows were within the margin of sampling error for last year's measurements, I should note, but the longer-term trend is still down, down, down. Here's an interactive chart I put together showing the share of Americans who have expressed "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in a selection of major institutions since 1973: Click on almost any category charted in the graph above, and you'll see that confidence has generally been falling. Mousing over individual data points will show you the specific share of American adults expressing confidence in any given year, too. Institutions that have enjoyed a relatively steady increase in public confidence - like the military - are the exception. It's not clear why trust in so many major institutions is falling. Clearly the trend predates the financial crisis. Maybe more combative political rhetoric is to blame. Maybe it's a more sensationalistic, 24-hour news media cycle. Maybe it's the rising "myth of the meritocracy," as Christopher Hayes argues in his new book. Or maybe the relative transparency afforded by the Internet age has given Americans more evidence that the organizations they used to trust can make mistakes. In any case, if these trends continue, they could further diminish the potency of various policy tools, as Mr. Cowen explained. (Results for the latest Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted June 7-10 with a random sample of 1,004 adults, 18 or older, living in the 50 states or the District of Columbia. The maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus four percentage points.)