Francis Fukuyama Books

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014)

Fukuyama is currently a professor at Stanford with stops along the way at Johns Hopkins, George Mason University, and the RAND Corporation. His undergraduate degree is from Cornell, and his Ph.D. is from Harvard.

Trust seeks to show that “one of the most important lessons we can learn from an examination of economic life is that a nation’s well-being, as well as its ability to compete, is conditioned by a single pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society.”

Political Order and Political Decay is wide-ranging in its examples of what Fukuyama describes as decay in the modern world, notably: “The political left throughout the world lost its focus on economic and class issues and became fragmented as the result of the spread of identity politics.”

He posits “Smokey the Bear” as an example of a well-meaning government campaign that overlooked the fact that “forest fires are a natural occurrence and play an important function in maintaining the health of western forests.”

—Dick Fischer, May 2021