Trust.

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan

Francis Fukuyama Free Press, $25

By Jonathan Rowe

I was talking recently with a friend who had just left his job at a West Coast bank for a higher-paying job at another. It was the fifth time he had done this, and I asked him if the constant job-hopping was something he regretted. He did at first, he said. But the banks soon disabused him of such notions. "You put in your effort, you try to show loyalty," he said. "Then they sell the bank or they merge, and everything you've done, all your effort, it doesn't count for anything. They can dump you tomorrow. What I learned is, you've got to look out for yourself"

This atmosphere poisons much of the American economy today, from Silicon Valley to pro sports. In the corporate world, mergers and leveraged buy-outs have everyone looking over their shoulders. It is likely that the employees of Chemical and Chase banks in New York have their minds on more than banking these days, as the triage begins after the big merger. It was with such thoughts in mind that I started Francis Fukuyama's new book, Trust. The theme is both fertile and timely. An economy is much more than an arrangement of monetary incentives and rewards, Fukuyama reminds us. It is part of a larger culture, from which it ultimately draws its character and strength. For all the Republicans' obsessive harping upon their policy prescriptions--tax incentives and deregulation--Fukuyama shows implicitly that there's much more to prosperity than rebuilding the temple of Money and Gain. You can get the tax incentives right," let the profit-seekers turn every forest into a shopping mall and every river into a sewer. But if the social structure is falling apart in the process, the economy eventually will flounder anyway.

Regrettably, however, Fukuyama continually pulls back from the broad implications of his premise. Early on, he invokes Max Weber's refutation of Marx: Culture can determine economics, as well as vice versa. The influence clearly goes both ways, especially in America, where the economy has virtually become the culture. Not coming to terms with this, Fukuyama has written half of what could have been a truly important book. He has explored incisively how America's crumbling social structure could bring about economic decline. But he does not pursue with any vigor the role of the economy in hastening that social disintegration--and hence in the destruction of itself.

The social trait Fukuyama focuses on is what he calls...