That poor kids are increasingly living in untrustworthy social environments is confirmed by trends in social trust among high school seniors over the past four decades, as measured by a question that asked kids to choose between two options: “Most people can be trusted” or “You can’t be too careful in dealing with people.” (This often used question taps feelings not merely about one’s neighbors, but about one’s experiences with other people in general.) Answers to this simple question have been shown to predict health, happiness, and other indicators of human thriving, perhaps because constant fear of one’s social environment puts continuing stress on the human body. Around the world, social trust is almost always higher among haves than have-nots, and that pattern has long held true for American youth.36

Trust has fallen among youth of all social backgrounds during the past half century.³⁷ However, as Figure 5.5 shows, during the past several decades the long-standing class gap in social trust among American adolescents has significantly widened, producing yet another scissors chart. From the late 1970s to the early 2010s the fraction of 12th graders from more educated homes (the top third) who say that most people can be trusted fell by roughly a third, whereas the fraction of trusters from the least educated third of homes fell by roughly one half. Nearly six out of seven poor kids nowadays choose the distrustful option.