“Honesty is an expensive gift,” the most famous investor Warren Buffett once said. The start-up Twinner, which makes 360-degree scans of used vehicles, has now tried to measure this honesty in numbers. An optimistic plan. How is that supposed to work?
In this case, the focus was on a professional group that probably also enjoys an expandable reputation internationally: car dealers. To pinpoint the honesty of a city based on its car dealerships sounds amusing, but with the best will in the world, it isn't meaningful enough to support a study. That is why there has been a search for other ways of examining honesty in different areas of a society. And they found what they were looking for.
Trust “from top to bottom”
In the context of the study it was assumed that honesty “is often exemplified from top to bottom” and that the administration of a city acts as a “role model” for the people who live there. The aspect was divided into three sub-areas: administration, economy and society. Administrative transparency was measured using data on corruption, budget transparency and the integrity of the elections. In contrast, the economic transparency was based on the percentage of the existing shadow economy in one place, i.e. the economic activities that are hidden from the official authorities. Social transparency was measured by the extent to which the rule of law, the right to have a say, accountability and freedom of the press exist in a city. It also analyzed how strongly residents perceive theft, which also contributes to the overall picture of how people rate the honesty of their fellow citizens.
The wallet experiment
In order to measure individual honesty in a city, existing data was used: In the so-called “wallet experiment”, 17,000 wallets were laid out in cities around the world to see how many of them would be returned.
All these parameters were compared in 350 metropolises in which the study creators had access to comparable data. Cities in India and China, for example, are not part of the study due to a lack of data. Then the selection was limited to the 75 most honest cities. Study author Twinner emphasizes, however, that this index should not serve to denounce the most dishonest cities and places. Rather, one would like to highlight the cities that did well. That would be:
Zurich therefore ranks first in the city honesty index. And suddenly Warren Buffett's statement makes more sense than ever: “Honesty is an expensive gift.”
The exact results of the city honesty index can be found here.
