The importance of trust in the world of commerce is uncontroversial inside and outside of economics. So many actions have to be taken in concert with the faith that other parties will be working just as hard to deliver their end of the bargain. Trust, as much as knowledge, is what puts pencils in your local Staples. Most people take this for granted. Two years ago, Garett Jones suggested that it is trustworthiness, and not trust, that is actually valuable. This demands a shift in perspective that has some ethical implications worth exploring.

It’s trivially obvious that who you know can have a huge impact on your career trajectory. But it is not just the knowing that makes the difference. Networking in the old sense refers to people who help each other out or will put each other in touch with someone who will. We can speak cynically of people seeking to network; we all have the sense of the person who gives you their business card because they may want your help at some point. They want your trust, they want you to rely on them because there’s something in it for them. In short, they see you and the potential relationship with you as purely instrumental. The network exists purely for their enrichment, and nothing else.

Let’s contrast this with the person who seeks to be reliable, to be worthy of trust. Who is this person? Certainly not your typical Economic Man, or at least the caricature version of him that gets trotted out in public discourse on a regular basis. Economic Man needs the incentives to be aligned just right to keep him from cheating regularly; when there’s an opportunity to do so and a very low probability of getting caught, there are few models of him that would result in anything other than going for it.

But someone for whom a good life is in large part constituted by the kind of person that they are, and who asks questions such as “would my grandmother approve of this?” Is much more likely to strive to be worthy of other people’s trust. The kind of person who loses sleep over the question of whether or not they’re reliable to the people they care about is much more likely to do the hard work to actually become trustworthy.

What does a network of such people look like? They still might offer you their business card, but they offer it on the possibility that they might be able to help you. They strive to be reliable for the people they build relationships with and work to build durable relationships which become part of what constitutes their own reliability. In the context of commerce, such people are worth more than their weight in gold. They form the backbone of any community of which they are a part.

This is what it means to build a good network as a component of a good life as a whole.