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A lot of this is covered in the excellent book "The Cheating Culture", which I recommend. "Bowling Alone", as the article mentions, covers the "stay home and do your own thing" part of it, but the economic system we've set up, I believe, is far a far stronger influence. We've set up a system that's dog-eat-dog, every man for himself, "everything that happens to you is your own fault", "lift yourself up by your bootstraps" and approaching hypercompetition. When it feels like you're one medical emergency, job loss, or bad debt away from homelessness, and have only pathetic (and painted as only for life's losers) safety nets there for you, you're out of necessity going to have to trust less. Add in the fact that many areas in this country have to deal with the daily threat of violence, and you get a toxic brew of distrust.

This is sad for more than sentimental reasons, as the article mentions. The "Economics of Trust" is important for easy dealmaking, credit, and other things. More here:

http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/software-programming-...

I recommend everyone read "The Cheating Culture", which explains in great detail why the author believes cheating is done the scale it is today:

"Callahan blames the dog-eat-dog economic climate of the past twenty years: An unfettered market and unprecedented economic inequality have corroded our values and threaten to corrupt the equal opportunity we cherish. Callahan's "Winning Class" has created a separate moral reality where it cheats without consequences-while the "Anxious Class" believes choosing not to cheat could cancel its only shot at success in a winner-take-all world."

The bottom line is if you create a system which makes it so that one terrible thing (like a job loss or medical emergency) can ruin your entire life, and are also told that you are easily replaceable - you get a culture like this. That unless you take lower wages, longer hours, and fewer benefits, that your job will be outsourced/offshored. That unless you get the right grades, and get into the right schools so you can get what's left of the jobs (in many fields, not everyone can be a dev, admin, business owner, etc.) that you'll wind up homeless, you will have this stuff happen. The more competitive and brutal things get (more unemployment, greater concentration of job opportunities), the worse this will get - and it's not likely to get better any time soon.

When you try to run societies - as many Social Darwinists think is good, healthy, and proper (where the weak die, and the strong prosper) people get an incentive to cheat on a massive scale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cheating_Culture