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Trust in a Down Economy
By Jon Greenberg on Tuesday, November 17, 2009.
This week in our Working It Out series, we’re asking the question, Have we changed? Did the deepest recession in decades bring us to some new understanding or when it ends, will we be back where we started?
The Center for Public Leadership at Harvard gives us some insights through its National Leadership Index. The annual survey looks at popular trust in various institutions from Wall Street to religious organizations. This year, American’s overall confidence in their leaders went up a little bit. But as New Hampshire Public Radio’s Jon Greenberg reports, the picture is more complicated than that.
The sociologists and political scientists at Harvard ask people questions like” In general, would you say that the problems we face today Can be solved through effective leadership or Cannot be solved no matter who our leaders are”.
Americans tend to be optimistic. 87% say good leadership can solve our problems.
That’s not to say they are happy with the leaders they’ve got. About 7 out of 10 people say we have a crisis of leadership today and unless we get better leaders, the country will decline.
Despite that, there was an uptick in confidence from 2008 to 2009, led primarily by greater trust in the White House.
In contrast, public sentiment about Wall Street could not be worse. Rod Kramer is a visiting professor at the Center for Public Leadership.
Kramer: At the time the survey was conducted .. And other indicators.”
That’s Rod Kramer, a visiting professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. For the record, the three institutions at the top of the National Leadership Index are the military, the medical profession, and nonprofits and charities.
Way at the bottom, just one step above Wall Street, is the media. Kramer says as much as news organizations claim to be unbiased, the public isn’t buying it.
For NHPR News, I’m Jon Greenberg.
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