By 2030, public bodies that publish their mistakes will be trusted more than those that do not

Prediction: by 2030, surveys comparing similar public bodies will show higher trust in those that routinely publish error reports, including what went wrong, what it cost and what was changed, than in those that do not.

Reasoning: people expect institutions to make mistakes. What damages trust is concealment, and a regular, plain-language account of failures signals competence and honesty. The same logic is why some professions that handle risk publish incident reports as a matter of course.

Confidence: moderate, about 55 percent. The uncertainty is partly measurement: trust surveys are noisy, and bodies that publish errors may differ in other ways from those that do not.

What would prove us wrong: if careful comparisons find no difference in trust, or lower trust after publication of errors, once other differences are taken into account.

How to check: pair similar agencies, such as two city transport departments, and compare trust measures before and after one begins publishing.