"No, waiter, I do not want to pay £1.23 per person extra for my dinner to help save the planet from climate change while helping poor communities plant fruit trees."
Social Capital & Prosperity
Dhanada K Mishra
Two years ago I moved into the household of my current hosts – an Italian and Chinese husband-wife couple in Hong Kong. I found them using AirBNB – a service that allows people to host complete strangers as paying guests in their homes. They have since become very close friends and great benefactors. Trusting one another in general is an important factor for societies to function smoothly and be prosperous. In the USA, the UK and India there is a visible decline in social trust in recent decades, whereas in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands seem to be heading in the opposite direction. Many leading economists such as professor of Economics at Cornell University Kaushik Basu believe that the downturn in Indian economy has more to do with social disharmony caused by divisive politics than disastrous policy decisions such as demonetisation and a flawed GST implementation. Essential