[HN Gopher] Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies t...
___________________________________________________________________
Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in
autocracies
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 615 points
Date : 2026-03-16 11:25 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.frontiersin.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.frontiersin.org)
| retep_kram wrote:
| It looks like a tautology to me. Like: "Corruption erodes social
| trust in places where social trust exist and is key for the
| political system."
| lm28469 wrote:
| I think culture and education play much bigger roles than
| anything else, all the sources I find show Germany and France
| having similar level of corruption (on top of being
| geographically and economically close) but completely different
| level of "social trust".
|
| China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is
| quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I
| can tell
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/corruption
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/trust
| rob74 wrote:
| > _China 's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust
| is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far
| as I can tell_
|
| There are a few reasons for that that I can imagine:
|
| - China is one of very few autocracies that has managed to
| significantly improve the standard of living of most of its
| population.
|
| - The public trials and (sometimes) executions of allegedly
| corrupt individuals might help improve the perception of
| corruption.
|
| - The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence
| people to declare a higher level of social trust than they
| actually have, even if the poll is supposedly "confidential"
| and "only for scientific purposes".
| ses1984 wrote:
| >The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence
| people to declare a higher level of social trust than they
| actually have.
|
| This 100%.
|
| Political imprisonment and reeducation camps are
| antithetical to any definition of a high trust society that
| I would subscribe to.
| boringg wrote:
| Social trust is high because there are pretty heavy handed
| control measures over the population with havy costs. Thats
| more of a fear based society than trust. Government can
| giveth and government can taketh.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| 1. Fear of a capricious state can cause survival-
| motivated compliance which can appear as "trust" in
| coarse measurements. Meaning, you simply do fewer of
| those things that would provide opportunities for
| distrust in contexts where that could happen.
|
| 2. In a relatively severe, but consistent regime, the
| high penalties for violating trust in everyday cases
| (crime) act as a deterrent.
|
| 3. Fear may cause people to be selective and mindful
| about their social associations based on stronger proofs
| of trustworthiness. You might tell a Hitler joke to
| someone you have used more energy/caution to "vet", but
| avoid being too casual in environments of undetermined
| trustworthiness.
| bluGill wrote:
| China was getting better for a long time. XI is changing
| that. Change is slow though and he is not rushing
| corruption though it seems to be increasing. He has purged
| some corrupt people as well making things slightly better
| in the short term - but he values loyalty over competence
| and so his short term changes are for less corruption but
| long term increase it.
|
| That is China is a complex country and books (which are not
| written and many cannot be for decades yet) are needed to
| understand this, not a short comment box. [This applies to
| every other country anyone here mentions]
| ses1984 wrote:
| We are probably meant to assume ceteris paribus and only vary
| the dimension of corruption.
|
| I think you're right that culture plays a key role. For
| example if small bribes are customary, that doesn't erode
| trust, that's just the way things are.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The corruption numbers break down into: (1) They didn't ask
| the question in China, (2) They asked somebody if they paid a
| bribe or if taking a bribe is every justifiable, and (3)
| "Expert estimates of the extent to which the executive,
| legislative, judiciary, and bureaucracy engage in bribery and
| theft, and the making and implementation of laws are
| susceptible to corruption"
|
| For (2) China doesn't look too different from the U.S., for
| (3) experts think it has gotten much worse since the time of
| Mao but I'd say China is on the honest side of the "global
| South".
|
| Note that lay perceptions of corruption are widespread in the
| US
|
| https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51398-most-americans-
| see-c...
|
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/185759/widespread-government-
| co...
|
| https://www.occrp.org/en/news/survey-reveals-corruption-
| as-t...
|
| though unlike India I think very few Americans have paid a
| bribe to a cop. See also
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr.
| ..
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| How do you see Xi's anticorruption campaign? Is it just a
| club to beat political opponents with, or is there a real
| problem and he's trying to fix it?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Both
| jimbokun wrote:
| Knowing nothing my guess would be he wants all the
| benefits of corruption accruing only to himself.
| bnjms wrote:
| > though unlike India I think very few Americans have paid
| a bribe to a cop.
|
| No one, left or right, thinks there is street level
| corruption. Not the kind accessible to someone in a traffic
| stop. I have experienced it in Mexico and think that kind
| of corruption would still be worse because I cannot imagine
| how to recover from it. I have hope that a few high profile
| arrests of c level fall his may turn the tide. If not then
| there are extrajudicial methods open to American culture.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is this difference.
|
| I know from my own personal experience that I haven't
| paid a bribe to a cop or to an alderman to get a zoning
| variance. There are some places where this kind of thing
| is routine. (e.g. I know there is a crooked cop somewhere
| but I also believe that if I tried to pay a bribe to a
| cop it wouldn't go well)
|
| Thus I trust people's reports of street level corruption.
|
| If it comes to perceptions of "corruption in high places"
| that is mediated by the media. It may well be that it is
| very corrupt and you never hear about it, or that it
| squeaky clean but you hear allegations 10 times a day. Or
| a Democrat might think everything is corrupt when
| Republicans are in power and then when Democrats are in
| power, Republicans take up the slack.
|
| So I don't trust people's reports of corruption in high
| places.
|
| Now I know a lot of people who are involved in road
| construction and maintenance in upstate NY who range from
| "drives a truck" to "manages $10M+ projects" and the
| belief that there is corruption in highway projects is
| widespread based on second- and third- hand accounts.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Do you really think "extrajudicial" methods will improve
| social trust in the US?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Wow Americans really dislike Americans! (Pew link)
| bdauvergne wrote:
| It's the institutional part which is lacking in France. Look
| at the budget of the ministry of justice in France per capita
| and in Germany. Germany spend twice as much and has twice as
| much judges per capita than France (and everything which goes
| with it like clerks).
|
| My company took the biggest telecom company in France to
| court for a violation of our license on a soft, license was
| GPLv2, we won, but it took 12 years.
|
| Justice is a very poor and slow institution in France. For
| the same countries the budget of police forces per capita are
| nearly the same for example.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| Also Germany spends more than France on defence while
| having a lot less to show for, with France having nuclear
| weapons, nuclear subs, aircraft carriers and a much more
| capable military overall with less money. Germany is the
| poster child of government waste. If I were a taxpayer
| there I'd want my money back and/or bureaucrats going to
| jail.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Kinda; authoritarism runs on bribes and nepotism, of course
| corruption would have lesser effect here, it's expected
| scythmic_waves wrote:
| It's not a tautology because it's not guaranteed. There are
| plenty of plausible sounding claims that fail to be true.
| That's why science is needed: to provide _empirical_ evidence
| for/against a claim.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Well obviously.
| gmerc wrote:
| What you're saying is that with the shift to autocracy, all these
| trust problems will become manageable?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| once you know the way to solve problems is to pay off the
| people with power you start to trust people again, because
| things are working the way you were told they would.
| mrktf wrote:
| or in other words: people in power are corrupt, but they
| usually are corrupt equally for everybody.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| for everybody who can pay.*
| brookst wrote:
| So following this through, does it mean that autocracy is the
| preferred government for a country that sleepwalked past the
| tipping point where corruption is entrenched because the
| institutions that could uproot it are themselves deeply corrupt?
| watwut wrote:
| No, it just means that in autocracy everyone assumes
| institutions are corrupt, so no trust is broken. If you don't
| have trust, it cant be broken.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Perhaps ironically, there are still institutions that to some
| extent rely on social trust in autocracies. For example,
| black market is an institution. As is "bribe economy" - the
| general understanding that getting X done generally costs you
| around Y, where Y is not arbitrary. Then there's the whole
| thing about criminal organizations that typically rely on
| social cohesion and upholding all kinds of rules.
| someguyiguess wrote:
| No. It does not say that. You added that meaning.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| This does sort of feel like the kind of thing I might think and
| wonder about and then do a lot of work doing a study and some
| research and writing up an article and in the end everyone says
| "yeah, no duh!"
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| I can't speak to this area of research, but studies for obvious
| things are still quite important. Maximal surprise is not a
| goal of science, nor is it an effective way to advance
| knowledge in a field.
| PepperdineG wrote:
| I think of the recent study with raccoons how they like to
| solve puzzles. That was something well-known but not actually
| scientifically demonstrated and measured until now.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| The expectation that science must necessarily "surprise" us
| is a terrible habit. It creates an unhealthy lust for
| novelty, a trivialization of what it means to "know" or to
| "understand" by conflating it with familiarity, and it can
| impede understanding, because the person in question will
| deny the straightforward and hunt for the "surprise" which
| becomes a criterion for truth. It can also feed into an
| incoherent categorical skepticism of human rational powers
| and tantalize superstitious, gnostic appetites.
|
| Science (broadly understood) looks for explanation and for
| verification. The point is to understand. Many interesting
| things may be found by analysis of what is known.
| dotcoma wrote:
| Corruption erodes social trust where social trust exists.
| fer wrote:
| Exactly, sounds tautological.
| yubblegum wrote:
| The point isn't to make a logical assertion. It's a fucking
| heads up.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Of course. Because in a dictatorship your social trust is based
| only on other things than the govt while in a democracy your
| social trust is in the govt as well.
| mothballed wrote:
| Corruption makes things more democratic in an autocracy by
| providing a mechanism of soft power by people not directly in the
| autocratic office.
|
| Corruption makes things less democratic in a pure democracy by
| granting more soft power to some individuals' 1/N office ( N=
| population size).
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Corruption makes things more democratic in an autocracy...
|
| _Technically_ , maybe yes? But autocrats tend to use "de facto
| authorized" corruption as a carrot for their loyal supporters,
| and "arrested for corruption" as the corresponding stick. Which
| leads to outcomes little different from an absolute
| dictatorship.
|
| Except the autocrat now has a convenient scapegoat for problems
| affecting the populace - corrupt officials - and a nice
| narrative for explaining the sudden removals of officials whose
| loyalties or performance were not to the autocrat's liking.
| dzink wrote:
| You have to understand how gears shift from there. Trust is
| essential for business transactions and specifically for long
| term investments. You can't make massive leaps in technology or
| medicine or many other areas without trust (a lot of money on a
| leap means if you don't trust the other side or the government to
| keep conditions stable, you won't see a return).
|
| Now if you are in a high trust society, you may have a lot of
| leveraged businesses or governments who have gotten loans or
| permission to do something based on past trust history. If the
| trust degrades systematically Investors may want returns faster,
| or interest rates go up, or partnerships don't happen. That's why
| low trust places don't grow as fast - trust is the oil for growth
| engines and lack of it is sand for the same.
|
| Corruption also does a lot of small-profit-for-the-corrupt that
| leads to massive damage to the overall society via second and
| third order effects. (example: someone stealing copper cables
| that stop electricity to entire cities for a while).
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Are we living in the same reality?
|
| Look at how business works in the rich west works. Everything
| is formalized with contracts, risk is portioned out and
| offloaded to every party under the sun. You bring in people
| with licenses and accreditation, 3rd party consultants, etc,
| etc. All of this work and expense is incurred so that if things
| go wrong then the parties all have precisely defined ways in
| which they can (expensively) drag the matter through a
| courtroom and whatever comes of that will be enforced with
| state violence.
|
| Contrast with (certain parts of) the far east and eastern
| europe. The west is the low trust environment.
| tw04 wrote:
| Your response just proves his point. All of that paperwork,
| all of those contracts- that assumes you can trust the
| government to fairly enforce the law.
|
| In a society where corruption rules, you have no reason to
| spend time and money on any of that because you know you're
| one bribe away from it all being kindling for your next
| bonfire.
|
| So yes, in areas with high corruption they don't bother. They
| either just set aside some cash to pay off whatever official
| they need to if things go sideways, or they hire the local
| judge's son to an empty position of power so that they can
| win anything that goes to "court". That's not a sign of high
| trust, that's an acknowledgment there's no point in
| bothering.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Lawyers in the west are a high status career, because we
| trust the rule of law. In China, its considered a joke
| career. What is the point of being a lawyer, when relative
| position, influence and power within the CCP is the lone
| factor in winning a case? Big companies all end up with
| shadow positions that are there just to pay money out to
| CCP honchos and their kids. Board positions and executive
| positions go to the CCP.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| That's nonsense. No matter how corrupt the CCP is, it
| cannot have a stake in all court cases in China. Maybe
| politically sensitive trials are a farce (arguably that's
| the case in much of the West too, but that's a different
| story) but that doesn't make the profession as a whole a
| joke.
| jordanb wrote:
| The central government in Bejing doesn't care even a
| little bit about some property dispute in Henan but
| there's a local apparatchik who cares or who could be
| made to care with the right consideration.
| ecshafer wrote:
| This is from my Chinese wife, basically by "joke" I mean
| its not the top students who are going into it. You don't
| become rich becoming a lawyer. The top students in
| Schools join government, become Engineers, do Business,
| etc.
| ModernMech wrote:
| And that's exactly what's happening here too, starting
| with the high-powered law firms who settled with Trump
| when he sued them instead of fighting. Overnight they
| ruined their reputation, because who is going to trust
| them when they folded so easily to government pressure?
| Moreover, as Trump's will becomes law, literally
| everything they went to school for becomes moot. All
| their experience about intellectual property or contract
| law or whatever is worthless when the law is actually
| whatever the guy in charge wants on any given day.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > In China, its considered a joke career.
|
| Is there a source for this or is more of a vibes thing?
| ecshafer wrote:
| source is my wife who spent the first 25 years of her
| life in China. So I guess vibes? But she was/is pretty
| academically rigorous, so I believe her.
|
| So I would caveat it as if you are a really good strong
| student in China, it would seem that you are much more
| likely to go into Engineering, Business, or Join the CCP.
| Its not an A student type of career, more of a B or C
| student.
| jjcc wrote:
| It's widely believed in Western society due to the
| language barrier to access Chinese social media.
|
| But it's not true , or only half true 30 years ago. I
| personally know 3 or 4 of my alumina abandoned their
| expertise of Optical Engineering to pursue Lawyer career
| 20 years ago and made big money.
|
| Another example is one of celebrity law professor (not
| lawyer though) who recently got involved in a controversy
| because of Epstein file. He shut down his "weibo" (a
| Chinese Twitter ) account. He also made tons of money.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luo_Xiang
|
| China moves very fast compare to the western society.
| Something true today might not be true 3 years later. Let
| alone half-truth 30 years ago.
| graemep wrote:
| In societies where the government is corrupt, or even where
| the courts are slow and expensive, people then trust in the
| individuals becomes more important.
|
| Being able to rely on being able to enforce contracts means
| you need less trust in people you do business with.
| eru wrote:
| Western Europe is a low trust environment compared to the
| beacons in (cultural) East Asia, like Singapore. I can leave
| my kid with an iPad in her hand here without fear of it being
| nicked, like in London.
|
| But business wise, western Europe is still relatively high
| trust. I suggest you read more about this.
| miroljub wrote:
| > Western Europe is a low trust environment compared to the
| beacons in (cultural) East Asia, like Singapore. I can
| leave my kid with an iPad in her hand here without fear of
| it being nicked, like in London.
|
| Funny that you take London as an example of Western
| Europe's low-trust environment, entirely ignoring the fact
| that the population of London can hardly be called Western
| European anymore. According to [1] in 2021 only 36,8% of
| the London population was White British, trend decreasing.
|
| > But business wise, western Europe is still relatively
| high trust.
|
| Maybe because the population actually working and doing
| business is still Western European? But that won't last
| long if current trends and policies continue.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_London
| eru wrote:
| > [...] the population of London can hardly be called
| Western European anymore. According to [1] in 2021 only
| 36,8% of the London population was White British, trend
| decreasing.
|
| If you want to make that argument, you'd at least need to
| look at the proportion of the population that's Western
| European, not just British.
| miroljub wrote:
| > If you want to make that argument, you'd at least need
| to look at the proportion of the population that's
| Western European, not just British.
|
| The page I linked shows 53,8% white in 2021. Even if you
| count the majority of whites as West Europeans (and not
| East Europeans), they were under 50% in 2021, probably
| even less today.
|
| If you have more accurate and up to date data, please
| share.
|
| But that misses the point. I don't say London is not
| high-trust because of the non-Western population. I say
| London is not a western city anymore because of its
| population.
| eru wrote:
| London is a western city, because of its location and
| culture.
|
| London has been a city of traders and other foreigners
| since at least the days of the Romans.
| miroljub wrote:
| > London is a western city, because of its location and
| culture.
|
| The dominant culture of the local population is not
| "Western" anymore.
|
| > London has been a city of traders and other foreigners
| since at least the days of the Romans.
|
| Is it?
|
| Let's look at the official data:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_London
|
| Percentage of white population in London over the years:
|
| - 1961 - 97,7%
|
| - 1966 - 95,5%
|
| - 1971 - 92,6%
|
| - 1981 - 86,6%
|
| - 1991 - 79,8%
|
| - 2001 - 71,15%
|
| - 2011 - 59,79%
|
| - 2021 - 53,8%
|
| It's clear that, up until very recently, London was a
| city of traders and other foreigners living there among
| the highly homogenous local population.
| angiolillo wrote:
| The framing of "low trust" vs "high trust" is useful but
| another important distinction when conducting business in
| different jurisdictions is whether *institutions* or
| *counterparties* are more trustworthy.
|
| If institutions such as courts are trustworthy (in that they
| will impartially adjudicate contracts and help you enforce
| their terms) then you are able to work with a wider spectrum
| of counterparties who you do not yet trust. You just have to
| document and hedge against the risk via contracts and
| insurance, as you point out.
|
| If institutions such as courts are absent, corrupt, or
| otherwise captured then you must ensure that you only
| interact with counterparties that you can trust or have
| direct leverage over. Perhaps ones with which you share
| personal or reputational connections.
| hedora wrote:
| As the US transitions into a high corruption / low trust
| environment, business investment disappears.
|
| Trump tried to solicit bribes from anthropic, retaliated by
| violating the DoW contracts when they didn't pay, and then
| somehow forced Dario to publicly apologize for bringing the
| matter to light. Do you really think this is how the US will
| win at AI?
|
| Look at the car industry, where the corruption and coercion
| started earlier. For some reason, Trump used ICE to illegally
| detain a bunch of Kia engineers. They announced they're not
| going to add more trimlines to their EV lines in the US.
|
| Honda announced they're canceling planes to build three new
| model lines in Ohio.
|
| The macro statistics are dire. Pre-Biden, US factory
| investment was $80B per year. Trump wiped $30B off that
| number in 2025. Biden got it up to $240B, so Trump "only"
| wiped out 10-15%, but, because he was starting from a high
| number, the damage is equivalent to 35% of all factory
| investment that existed when he last left office!
|
| The rate at which industrial production is fleeing the US is
| increasing. This year, the loss will probably be greater than
| the entire 2018 US factory investment base.
|
| There are similar trends happening in tech and academia.
| There's not much left once that happens. (Insurance, banking
| and marketing, mostly.)
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Look at how business works in the rich west works.
| Everything is formalized with contracts, risk is portioned
| out and offloaded to every party under the sun._
|
| Sounds like formalized corruption to me.
| GZGavinZhao wrote:
| Did you meant to write "You *can't* make massive leaps in
| technology or medicine" instead of *can*?
| andai wrote:
| I have an unusual perspective here.
|
| In my country the politicians are openly very corrupt. (Well,
| possibly yours too ;)
|
| Recently there has been a lot of improvement to the
| infrastructure. I realized that what has happened is, a lot of
| EU funds have been made available for development, and people
| are lining up to skim a little bit off the top.
|
| How you say, the incentives are aligned, yeah?
|
| I find myself in the odd situation where for each dollar that
| gets embezzled, a little bit of actual construction happens.
| That seems like a force you'd want to work with, rather than
| against.
|
| I mean yeah ideally we'd get rid of corruption, but haha good
| luck with that. At least now they're fixing the roads.
| consp wrote:
| Depends on how it happens and what your goal is, it starts
| with a little bit off the top, and ends with it being the
| prime goal. Somewhere on that gliding scale people get hurt
| because a bridge collapses because the money went into
| someone's pockets instead of construction.
| akdev1l wrote:
| I am not sure the incentives are aligned.
|
| those people fixing the roads are incentivized to do the work
| cheaply so they can skim more "off the top"
|
| And you still need to fight corruption to some level or it
| will come to a point where there's more skimming than work
| being done
| mentalgear wrote:
| Exactly, sounds inherently unsafe and the work is only done
| superficially to keep more EU funds coming (like in
| Hungary).
| order-matters wrote:
| >those people fixing the roads are incentivized to do the
| work cheaply
|
| this incentive exists with or without corruption
| akdev1l wrote:
| cheaply as in not meeting standards
|
| without corruption you could do a shitty job once and
| then you won't get another contract because you did a
| shit job
|
| with corruption the quality of the work won't matter so
| in the extreme case you can deliver nothing at all and
| you'll still keep getting contracts - In my country we
| call this being "plugged in"
| speeder wrote:
| I am from Brazil, and there is a famous politician there that
| has the non-official slogan of "Steals but Does". He is Paulo
| Maluf. "Everyone" knows he is corrupt. But people vote for
| him anyway, because he get things done, and he doesn't engage
| in certain kinds of corruption.
|
| That is the problem, how you get corruption to go the way you
| want?
|
| Lots of politicians see Paulo Maluf, and think they can
| imitate him, that they will be beloved by the public and
| steal money somehow and line their own pockets, except those
| are too self-serving or too incompetent to pull that off
| properly, so they steal in ways that go against the public.
|
| So for example in one city where I lived, one mayor stole the
| money from the kids lunch, resulting in hungry kids. Another
| mayor stole ludicrous amounts of money from garbage
| collection services, the result is that the city ended with
| debts in the billions while being a tiny city (it has 100k
| people, yet has debts bigger than cities with millions of
| people).
|
| Paulo Maluf meanwhile built lots of useful infrastructure
| that is still in use. (also hilariously he used to brag a lot
| using the phrase "Maluf that did it!", one time some comedic
| journalists went to a bridge opening, and asked him who did
| the bridge, he replied: "Maluf didn't do this bridge. But he
| did the two roads the bridge are connecting, so there is no
| bridge without Maluf!")
| mothballed wrote:
| I would vote for an infrastructure kleptocrat any day over
| someone that will actually enforce the insane zoning and
| code law we have here. A big problem in USA is you can only
| get many building or infrastructure things done maybe if
| you have millions to "influence" politicians. The
| opportunity to have a politician rob me of 10,20% of the
| construction costs and meanwhile actually be able to build
| a condo or something on my own property would be amazing.
| johngossman wrote:
| You might reconsider when your richer neighbor paid the
| politician to block you or build an asphalt plant next to
| your new condo. It's a slippery slope. Or how about when
| the fire department starts asking for a little something
| to keep your condo "safe"
| mothballed wrote:
| Costing money to block me rather than $0 is an
| improvement.
|
| I have no fire department where I live, nor really any
| effective police. We don't have public infrastructure nor
| public roads or anything like that. People here do not
| use public services and our taxes aren't high enough to
| pay for them, they are almost $0. We do have zoning and
| codes, but that's sustainable only because it's funded by
| enforcement fines, otherwise you're on your own.
| whstl wrote:
| The copy part sounds a lot like Cargo Culting.
|
| Copying the visible behavior but not doing the actual part
| that matters.
|
| Also incredibly common in corporate.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| In a sense, he is not unlike a high ranked executive or
| business owners. These people usually demand high pay for
| their work because of how important their decisions are for
| the well-being of the company.
|
| Same idea here except that it happens under the table.
| Elected officials usually get a fixed pay, and often, it is
| not that high compared to the importance of their work.
| What Paulo Maluf is proposing is essentially "I am going to
| pay myself well (through corruption), but I will do what's
| best for the city".
| terminalshort wrote:
| At some point the process to prevent corruption costs more
| than the actual corruption. The process to award the contract
| for the Obamacare website wasn't corrupt, but it cost $700
| million and the app didn't even work. In a corrupt system
| that contract would have gone to a company owned by some
| official's cousin, and he would have bid $100 million knowing
| he could pocket 50, but it would have got done because he
| knows the last thing he needs is an investigation. That's
| kind of how it works in China.
| nyeah wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. One example of a low-trust society was the US in
| the decade after 1929.
| trollbridge wrote:
| One of the "innovations" in the bank runs of 1929 was that a
| farmer or business owner would lose all their savings in the
| bank, because of the bank run.
|
| However, the loans they owed to that bank were still good,
| and would get bought by an "investor" for pennies on the
| dollar. They no longer had their bank account to make their
| normal loan payments from, yet the full repayments were still
| due, despite the original bank that made the loan going under
| and closing its doors.
|
| So many farmers ended up having to sell or foreclose on their
| farms and then attempt to rent them back from the new owners.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| > You have to understand how gears shift from there. Trust is
| essential for business transactions and specifically for long
| term investments. You can't make massive leaps in technology or
| medicine or many other areas without trust (a lot of money on a
| leap means if you don't trust the other side or the government
| to keep conditions stable, you won't see a return).
|
| I am not quite sure, how exactly you mean "trust". For example
| there are countries, that I would consider quite corrupt, but
| that are able to leap ahead. I would say there can be a lot of
| trust, even in a corrupt system, if the ones making the leap,
| are part of the corrupt system, and trust that system to
| continue to "work". But you could say: "Well, then there is
| trust!"
|
| Ultimately, I think where there is more trust, there is more to
| destroy, so any betrayal of this trust, causes more damage,
| than in a low trust environment, where there was not much trust
| to begin with.
| lokar wrote:
| For business it's almost a simple as adding another factor to
| your model: the odds of expropriation by the leader and his
| cronies.
|
| It does not take a very high number to make most capital
| investments look really bad.
|
| And you compare that (investing in something new), to instead
| using the capital to bribe your way into the "system".
| terminalshort wrote:
| Your example isn't corruption. That's just crime. But it does
| do massive damage.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > You can't make massive leaps in technology or medicine or
| many other areas without trust
|
| The Soviet Union _did_ manage to get massive leaps in some
| areas (in particular related to armament, but not only) such as
|
| - armament/weapons
|
| - space technology
|
| - mathematics
|
| - physics
|
| > (a lot of money on a leap means if you don't trust the other
| side or the government to keep conditions stable, you won't see
| a return).
|
| I guess you can immediately see how the Soviet Union "solved"
| this problem by the fact that you simply couldn't gain a lot of
| money from your innovation.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| The Soviet Union was able to innovate in the areas they chose
| to sink resources into but innovation was clearly not as
| widespread as evidenced by their decades of stagnation from
| the 60s onwards.
|
| They were still innovating in military technology in the 80s
| but analysis since their collapse analysis that they were at
| least 20% of GDP on defence, if not as high as 40%.
|
| The West managed to match and surpass Soviet military and
| scientific advances without sacrificing consumer goods or the
| economic wellbeing of their people.
| pastage wrote:
| I am very sure the west sacrificed a lot of wellbeing
| because of the vast amount of money spent on war. Peace
| time was great.
| deepsun wrote:
| Not true. We spent more taxpayers' money on 2008 banks
| bailout than on every and any war (+ space race)
| combined.
|
| Also, investing into military tech prevents war on your
| territory, which is, well, highly disruptive.
| titzer wrote:
| According to this
| [https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-
| weapo...], the US has already spent more than five
| trillion dollars on nuclear weapons.
| bequanna wrote:
| I'm not trying to downplay their accomplishments, but how
| much of their scientific advances from the 40s-60s were due
| to capturing ex-Nazi tech (and scientists) or stealing from
| the US via their incredible intelligence efforts?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| and or lend lease?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Depends on the sector.
|
| They definitely supported a lot of their rocket science
| from found documentation in Peenemunde et. al. (The
| personnel OTOH did its best not to fall into Soviet
| hands, and most of them ended in America, even though
| some didn't make it and were captured by the Soviets.)
|
| They had genuine excellency in mathematics and
| theoretical physics. First, those specializations didn't
| require much expensive or advanced equipment back then.
| Second, by their very nature, they were freer from
| ideological bullshit than other specializations, and that
| alone attracted many of the best and brightest there.
|
| (I can confirm that even in late-stage Communist
| Czechoslovakia, very hard sciences were considered an
| intellectual haven for non-conformists. The ideologues
| didn't understand them and did not consider them
| subversive per se.)
|
| On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of
| Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get
| imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or
| starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never
| recovered to a respectable science again, not even after
| Lysenko lost his power.
|
| Until today, you will find ex-Soviet textbooks of maths
| and physics all over the net, and people actually
| download them and use them to study. That does not apply
| in most other domains.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of
| Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get
| imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or
| starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never
| recovered to a respectable science again, not even after
| Lysenko lost his power.
|
| This holds for "pure" biology. On the other hand, for
| medicine, in the East Block phage therapy was intensively
| developed (which in the West was barely done; instead in
| the Western countries there was an intense development of
| antibiotics).
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phage_therap
| y&old...
|
| "In the Soviet Union, extensive research and development
| soon began in this field. [...] Isolated from Western
| advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Soviet
| scientists continued to develop already successful phage
| therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field
| hospitals. During World War II, the Soviet Union used
| bacteriophages to treat soldiers infected with various
| bacterial diseases, such as dysentery and gangrene.
| Soviet researchers continued to develop and to refine
| their treatments and to publish their research and
| results. However, due to the scientific barriers of the
| Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not
| proliferate across the world."
| mamonster wrote:
| I don't know why you are getting downvoted. As a simple
| example of practical biology in USSR, the Eastern Bloc
| basically invented modern doping programs.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I'd rather call this research medical science, and with
| some exceptions (the Doctor's Plot during the last year
| of Stalin's paranoid rule), medical science tended to be
| less policed than biology, because even the top dogs of
| the Party knew that they could fall ill and require top
| treatment.
|
| Unlike with Lysenko, where shortages of food for the
| regular population never demonstrated themselves on the
| nomenklatura's own dinner tables, there was some feedback
| mechanism that could not be ignored.
|
| But I agree that the exact border between biology and
| medical science is murky.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| Innovation is a term inherently tied to products sold at
| markets in product cycles that change over time. I think
| you're looking for the term invention.
| divan wrote:
| An invention is a new device, method, or way of doing
| something that did not exist before. Innovation is
| anything that significantly improves real world processes
| or products. I believe the literature uses term
| "innovation systems" regardless of type of economies.
| derektank wrote:
| Your examples do kind of reinforce the point being made.
|
| Mathematics and (theoretical) physics are capital-light
| research sectors. Weapons platforms and space technology were
| state managed (I.e. didn't require private sector capital
| financing).
| jimbokun wrote:
| For a while before the US and other democracies left them in
| the dust.
|
| Mathematics and Physics maybe but not in a way that benefited
| the broader society overall.
| tlogan wrote:
| Excellent insight. Trust is key for capitalism. And for
| functioning democracy. When trust is lost, whether in the
| system or in your fellow citizens, everything begins to suffer.
|
| I think of society as an extended family. If you do not trust
| your spouse, many things in your home simply will not work.
| himata4113 wrote:
| People generally are saying the same thing, the more trust exists
| the more you got to lose.
|
| However, it's not that simple there's a different kind of trust
| that comes with these types of social structures and they usually
| trust that as long as they keep their head down nothing will
| change. You can obviously draw parallels with conservatives here,
| but in reality people more often than not just want to live their
| life.
|
| Democracies tend to be a lot more active politically and promote
| transparency so there is trust that your government is being
| transparent and that your vote matters. Of course if you find out
| that your political activism and votes don't accomplish anything
| due to corruption you check out and start disliking your
| government. Autocracies don't have political movements to begin
| with (exceptions apply) so it is way less impactful. There's way
| more comparisons to be made, but in general they roughly boil
| down to the same thing.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| BS data is BS. On what basis have they classified each country as
| a democracy or an autocracy?
|
| Edit: this article is an example of a circular research. Create a
| narrative branding target entities - in this case countries -
| with a positive or negative characteristic. For some reason the
| Scandinavians revel in this.
|
| Another example of compromised organisations are the various US
| govt funded "think tanks" which publish annual reports which are
| then used to classify whoever they want with whatever they want.
| Which then the US regime uses as a pretext for unprovoked
| attacks.
|
| The West is an example of systemic corruption at the highest
| levels, surpassed only their citizens collective ignorance and
| hypocrisy.
| iammjm wrote:
| Speaking of "the West" is dumb, ignorant, and worst of all, not
| really helpful or insightful. Just as speaking of "the East" or
| "Asia". It just doesn't make sense to make these broad
| generalized statements about various multiple self-governing
| countries spanning hundreds of millions of people and thousands
| of square kilometers.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| What a perfect example to demonstrate the "collective
| ignorance and hypocrisy of western people" they were
| mentioning. There is a dichotomy in "Corruption", it is
| weaponized as a tool of neocolonialism in the continued
| subjugation of the global south and systematically downplayed
| and re-framed in the west.
|
| The west is just a shorthand for countries within the global
| north that are part of the international liberal order. This
| is all well established terminology, including "western
| imperialism" and "western hegemony". Its not our fault you
| are hearing these words for the very first time.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I have been thinking about this more and more the past few
| points, to the point where I feel like I have to run for office
| as a social duty. (USA) There are so few politicians who give
| more than lip service to stopping corruption.
|
| Our districts are embarrassing. People tolerating the blatant
| corruption by the Trump administration is something I don't
| understand. They will get upset about Epstein, but don't care
| about the corruption. (See for example the recent Jared Kushner
| contracts for one of many examples) Congress campaigns funded by
| PACs.
|
| Phrases of interest: "Conflict of interest". "Shame". It is wild
| how people still vote for corrupted politicians, which is almost
| all of them. My parents are the prototype. If you take money from
| corporate-funded interests, you still have a conflict of
| interest, even if you aren't caught acting in the favor of those
| corporations.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Problem is a lot of people engage in textbook expressive
| responding when it comes to corruption. Everybody doesn't like
| it _allegedly_ , but a lot of people are willing to look the
| other way if they agree with the policy being carried out and,
| more importantly, politically aligned with the person engaging
| in the corruption.
|
| The bar they set is incredibly high unless it involves a
| politician they don't support, then a rumor is enough for them
| to go "yeah I knew it."
| throawayonthe wrote:
| > From V-Dem, we use two measures of democratic quality: the
| Regimes of the World (RoW) classification and the Liberal
| Democracy Index. The RoW (Luhrmann et al., 2018) is a categorical
| measure distinguishing closed autocracies (no multiparty
| elections), electoral autocracies (multiparty elections that are
| not free and fair), electoral democracies (free elections but
| limited liberal protections), and liberal democracies (free
| elections with strong liberal protections).
|
| by "democracy" they of course mean liberalism
| cess11 wrote:
| Yes. In this sense the cold war never ended.
|
| The country I live in consistently ranks as rather non-corrupt
| but I would disagree with this assessment since I know that our
| biggest party (where I was a member for some years) is
| slavishly loyal to one of our main 'stock market owner
| families', and would consider a lot of legal practices and
| regulations highly corrupt. Clearly this is also outside of the
| scope of this study.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| They classify Germany and the UK as democracies. That's
| precious. Germany has sanctioned its own journalists as has the
| UK. I don't remember the number of ordinary citizens arrested
| in Germany for social media posts but I know the UK number was
| 12000 per year.
|
| Now let's look at the US:
|
| Tucker Carlson is under the gun for allegedly being a Russian
| or is it Iranian agent. But the US is a democracy.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-foreign-agent-charge...
| jojomodding wrote:
| Do you have a source for the 12k arrested in the UK?
|
| I'm asking because all I could find was a list on Twitter
| that didn't cite any sources itself and also had very
| implausible numbers (including he 12k/year for the UK).
| Implausible based on the lived reality of friends of mine
| living in e.g. the UK or Germany.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| Coffee is a roasted bean with hot water taking its essence.
| varispeed wrote:
| Corruption is rife in the West. Wealth managers wine and dine
| with governments and essentially order policies that nobody voted
| for that continue to be developed regardless of which party won
| the elections. Same faces meet with new cohorts of politicians
| and continue to get their way whilst security services supposed
| to protect democracy hide their heads in the sand.
|
| See things like Digital ID, censorship, surveillance - nobody
| voted for this, but certain wealth managers want this to happen
| and so it takes priority over issues that actually people would
| want to be resolved (housing, healthcare to name a few).
| lnsru wrote:
| I am in Germany. Apparently very democratic place. However
| nothing happens what people voted for. There is always few
| groups advertising affordable living in Munich. Never happened.
| Every year the rent climbs to new never seen high. The system
| very obviously does not work as advertised. The conspiracist in
| me however thinks, that the system works as intended.
| energy123 wrote:
| That's not what _you_ voted for. Homeowners, on the other
| hand, did vote for it. In most countries they 're the
| majority, and they're better at mobilizing politically.
| Autocracies are probably less likely to have the same issue
| because the leaders are petrified of a revolt from the lower
| classes. In a democracy, the majority (homeowners) will vote
| away your money.
| modo_mario wrote:
| > There is always few groups advertising affordable living in
| Munich. Never happened. Every year the rent climbs to new
| never seen high.
|
| Well your population grows trough migration, your land does
| not and your construction doesn't match either in a long term
| inflationary environment with every incentive pointing in the
| continuation of that path.
|
| See also Canada, Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Australia, etc,
| etc
| fedeb95 wrote:
| and this is a good thing.
| tmilard wrote:
| I wonder more : in wich side is considered today USA ?
| pikachu0625 wrote:
| Everyone works for their community, and rewarding those who
| contribute the most by consensus is trust, regardless of gender,
| race, skill, or inheritance. The opposite is corruption.
| Stranger43 wrote:
| And completely understandable once you understand the narratives
| of both system.
|
| An autocrat is supposed to be "Powerful" beyond all else and
| typically aren't required to be accountable to anyone so as long
| as the narrative of "Powerfully competent" holds corruption is
| merely an part of the narrative.
|
| In democracies the leadership is very much meant to be by and off
| the people and held accountable under the same legal standard
| they enforce on everyone else, and when that leadership start to
| act with the impunity of an "entrenched" aristocracy and stop
| following the rules the narrative breaks.
|
| And lets not forget that the original feudal aristocracy held
| their position almost entirely by the mechanism of
| unchallengeable property rights in an zero sum economy* and we
| begin to understand why the accumulation of property/wealth into
| fewer and fewer hands is a almost unmanageable threat to the
| narratives of western democracy.
|
| *We are returning to an zero sum economy as the planet have
| essentially run out of unowned/unused resources and that means
| that modern western economic solutions(grow grow grow) is simply
| not available anymore.
| otikik wrote:
| Of course. If there's no trust, you can't erode it (pointing
| finger to his temple meme jpg).
| bparsons wrote:
| Something a lot of people don't understand about operating within
| a corrupt system -- the person paying the bribe is usually the
| one being controlled.
|
| Yes, those who pay receive special benefits, but it is against
| the background threat of reprisal if you cease paying.
|
| Hey, that's a nice software company, it would be a shame if
| something happened to it. By the way, my son is raising money for
| his new crypto venture. You should think about investing.
| yason wrote:
| It's well known that in authoritarian regimes (which autocracies
| generally are) corruption is, rather than a problem, a necessary
| element of society to keep things going.
|
| Anyone with the slightest amount of official power, like a
| government officer, has the ability to prevent things going
| forward on his part. In this kind of society, most people are
| poor and it would be considered stupid to not demand a small (or
| large) bribe from the citizen in order to unlock the process.
| Everyone does it, more with outsiders and to a lesser extent with
| one's circle of acquaintances (because the social fabric between
| known parties is the other way to unlock things). Corruption
| surely is one thing that really trickles down from the top.
|
| So, things like like obediently waiting in the queue for your
| turn or complaining about the officer won't help unlike in high-
| trust societies. If you try that in a low-trust society there
| will be additional documents, stamps, acknowledges, or signatures
| you need, and keep needing, in order to complete your request
| until you get the drift and bring a little something. Corruption
| gets things going and in a society that has no trust it is a
| positive trait.
|
| In Western democracies this sounds unimaginable because there's a
| stronger sense that right things will work out right just because
| of the rules. Western corruption happens on a different level: a
| regular western citizen has no benefit from giving bribes and he
| would object to the police or government officials from demanding
| one. Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and
| rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing
| bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and
| richer.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Reminds me of a report that Russians have no word for "bribe" -
| it's just an expected custom to give an official something
| 'extra' if you want anything to go forward even in the
| 'official' process.
|
| That's where the US is heading with the administration's great
| replacement of federal officials. A kleptocracy down to its
| lowest ranks. As the saying goes: First the Meritocracy goes,
| then the Freedom goes.
| brightball wrote:
| As a matter of perspective, the push to do so is to replace
| corrupt officials.
|
| Ultimately, if you believe that the officials currently in
| place were doing their jobs without bias then this looks like
| corruption. If you believe that the existing officials were
| compromised by their politics, then this looks like removing
| corruption.
|
| It's all perspective.
| mystraline wrote:
| The problem with meritocracy: who decides what "merit" is?
|
| The answer is: those who are already in power.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Stop the relativism. In a democracy it's mostly all of us
| that have a say, in a dictatorship it's one guy and his
| fascist rank's whim.
| drysine wrote:
| >it's mostly all of us that have a say
|
| Do you?
| wewtyflakes wrote:
| I mean, literally so in a democracy, no? You could argue
| 'we' (whoever that is) do not live in a democracy, but to
| say that a plurality of voices do not matter in a
| democracy seems wrong at face-value.
| timojaask wrote:
| > Reminds me of a report that Russians have no word for
| "bribe"
|
| This is just false. The word is "vziatka".
|
| If I were you I would not trust that report you're referring
| to.
| dc96 wrote:
| Why would one of the most popular languages in the world not
| have a word for "bribe"? Seems a bit condescending, implying
| Russians can't tell the difference between a "bribe" and
| customary behavior.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| Bullshit. We have more words for flavors of bribery than for
| types of snow.
| drysine wrote:
| Do we?
| drysine wrote:
| >Reminds me of a report that Russians have no word for
| "bribe"
|
| You could've checked that faster than it took you to write
| your russophobic comment
| Telemakhos wrote:
| How does this square with regimes like Singapore, which is one
| of the least corrupt nations in the world yet also an
| authoritarian, one-party system?
| mentalgear wrote:
| These are the 'benevolent authoritarian-ship' outliers - very
| rare and depends on chance that the current person in power
| truly acts in the interest of the public - but when they are
| gone there's no legal framework in place that keeps their
| successors to do whatever they please.
|
| EDIT: commenters are still all referring to Singapore which I
| remind you is the very rare outlier case.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I guess it's a good thing that the ruling party has been in
| power for about 6 decades at this point.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Part of what makes Singapore interesting is that they have
| yet to have a leader truly invested in subsuming the power
| of the system. A big thing of Xi Jinping's rise to power
| has been the systematic dismantling of post-Mao checks on
| power.
|
| Singapore has yet to have a leader willing to take over the
| system, because two of its leaders were the dynasty that
| created the system. The real test is what happens when
| someone like that shows up; but even Western democracies
| face this problem, it's just that the system has more built
| in speed bumps to overcome.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Rare outliers indicate the root problem is not the
| structure. All the interesting questions arise from the
| outliers
| zipy124 wrote:
| It doesn't because their premise falls apart in democracies
| too. Civil servants in democracies are not elected and they
| have the same 'stopping power'. A planning officer in the UK
| could just as easily decide to arbritrarily block plans they
| disagree with as in an authoratian country.
| collabs wrote:
| My guess is there is some kind of momentum with these
| things. If everybody demands bribes, then by not demanding
| bribes yourself when you are in a position to do so, you
| are effectively pissing away your take but remember you
| still need to pay bribes to everyone else because they
| don't care you didn't take bribes.
|
| On the flip side, if nobody else requires bribes but you
| do, you will surely stick out like a sore thumb. If I don't
| get paid bribes and I am an influential powerful person,
| why should I pay you any bribes? Especially for something
| that is legitimate and a part of your duties?
| walthamstow wrote:
| A planning officer, who happens to share an uncommon
| surname with the local MP, did just that with an
| application of mine recently. No site visit, no photos, no
| respect to the law, just NO.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| That provides an easy solution: complain to your MP. At
| length. And then ask if the planning officer happens to
| be a relative, as though it has just occurred to you.
|
| And then you might consider talking to the local paper to
| see if it would make a story. Also the crapper tabloids
| might even pay for the story.
| mentalgear wrote:
| I fundamentally disagree. While there may be outlier cases,
| the core of a democracy is the separation of powers: the
| judiciary, the executive, and the legislative branches. If
| an agent within one branch violates the rules, you have the
| legal recourse to appeal to the others. In an authoritarian
| state, there is only one pillar of power - meaning there is
| zero recourse for citizens.
|
| Furthermore, I'm tired of the false equivalence some people
| in this thread draw between the level of corruption in
| democracies and authoritarian regimes. They are simply not
| on the same scale - if you ever experienced both you would
| know that.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| I am not a historian but the difference is between a
| society with a "rule of law" and "law of the jungle".
| Probably high democracy correlates with rule of law, but
| they are not the same thing.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| I don't think this is true. 20th century authoritarians
| made great effort to leverage the law and use legal
| systems.
|
| Rule of law doesn't address the problem of bad laws (from
| bad governance).
| oersted wrote:
| That's not true, in a democracy you tend to have methods of
| appeal that actually work, and their threat keeps the
| wheels of bureaucracy greased.
|
| This is because, in principle, everything comes down to the
| fundamental threat that the people can remove the current
| government, and the government does have full control over
| the unelected civil servants. If they keep ignoring
| appeals, they'll eventually get dethroned.
|
| There's a nice symmetry between this and the fact that the
| law is ultimately guaranteed by the governments monopoly on
| violence. They can dethrone you too if you don't comply.
|
| When a democracy works, there can be a very effective
| balance between the people's leverage towards the
| government and the governments leverage towards the people.
|
| In an authoritarian regime the same forces are present but
| they are not balanced in the same way. The people can still
| rise up and dethrone the ruler through violence, but that
| is so much harder, and it is mostly offset by the
| governments greater power of violence. So they can get away
| with so much more.
| peyton wrote:
| I think this is completely wrong. For a democracy to
| form, substantially everyone must have bought in. That's
| the upstream, not the threat of removal. Authoritarian
| "regimes" are constantly under threat of removal.
| t-3 wrote:
| This is one thing many forget, mostly due to drinking our
| own koolaid about the inherent superiority of liberal
| democracy. Authoritarian regimes almost by definition
| have high public support, because they couldn't function
| at all if even a relatively small proportion of society
| went against them. The people who want to overthrow them
| are either out of the country or insignificant.
| Dictatorship is impossible without populism.
| greedo wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense to me. There are and have
| been numerous authoritarian regimes that lack "high
| public support", now and in the past. The entire idea for
| most authoritarian regimes is to slowly minimize the
| power of those who oppose them. And then, they spend a
| huge amount of resources looking for dissent (SD/Gestapo,
| Stasi, etc.) and trying to control the societal
| narrative.
| t-3 wrote:
| Any government that lacks public support collapses.
|
| Democratic governments can operate without a plurality of
| support for the current government, because the
| population generally supports and is invested in the
| system of government. When democratic governments fail,
| there is usually very little danger of violence or
| economic and societal instability, because there is trust
| in those systems. Corruption and malfeasance harms trust
| in the systems of governance which democracies depend
| upon.
|
| Authoritarian governments depend on confidence in _the
| government_ to continue functioning. The system of
| government isn 't necessarily trusted, the workers of
| government aren't necessarily trusted, but the leaders
| are _in charge_ and _doing things_. Media manipulation
| and effective propaganda is certainly an important tool
| for these governments, but pointing out that it exists
| doesn 't mean that it doesn't work! Propaganda totally
| does work, by almost all measures. Russia, China, Cuba,
| Iran all have high domestic support for the government.
|
| Authoritarian governments also tend to be very stable -
| people know what to expect. Democracies change
| periodically. The stability and familiarity are key to
| the trust that authoritarian governments maintain. The
| protests in Iran prior to the current conflict are a good
| example of what happens when a government fails to
| maintain the trust of the people - the arrival of war
| saved the current regime from falling apart at the seams
| when Khomeini died of cancer in a few months and a
| squabble for the leadership broke out amid a collapsing
| economy.
| greedo wrote:
| I think that you're underestimating the power of
| authoritarianism. For Iran, I don't think the government
| was in any danger prior to the war. It was capable of
| exerting control through the state apparatus quite
| easily. And look at North Korea, you think that the
| people under that government are supportive? That's
| nonsense on stilts.
|
| Also, that collapse you refer to can take an awful long
| time under authoritarian control.
| wagwang wrote:
| The US elected government has no control over the
| unelected civil servants as congress over the past 150
| years did everything they could to prevent the spoils
| system.
| wwweston wrote:
| Elected officials have significant influence they can
| bring to bear on specific decisions, general operations,
| and in many cases personnel decisions. That's true at the
| level of individual house members and can be more true
| for other offices.
|
| The rule of law and checks and balances also means these
| elected officeholders don't have _arbitrary_ control,
| which has a lot of upsides (and produced a professional
| and effective federal workforce) as well as some limits.
|
| I swear we have a problem where we quantize to
| caricatures rather than recognizing tuned balance, and
| control theorists would probably anticipate this means
| things will start to swing a bit wildly.
| wagwang wrote:
| Executive power over the civil service is an ant driving
| an elephant. You can say it's a good thing and it's
| intentional, but the fact of the matter is that the
| executive appoint a fraction of a percent of the
| positions and those positions have nominal personnel
| powers that they can't really use without fear of getting
| sued.
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is why so much planning gets decided in judicial
| review.
| Shitty-kitty wrote:
| Resepect for the rule of law is whats important. In
| Singapore you can sue the government, same as in the U.S
| Try to do that in China and the only thing that's going to
| happen, is you being sent a a reducation camp.
| thighbaugh wrote:
| More easily because in a democratic society there is
| absolutely no risk of having something like that come out
| and the need for the autocrat to save face and jealously
| assert the civil servant acted outside of the will of the
| autocrat thus behead the arbitrary civil servant to
| cheering crowds according to popular demand.
|
| At worst the person gets fired and is prohibited from
| public sector jobs at that tier of government afterwards
| for a period of time while the story is fresh in peoples
| minds, in the rare case the plutocratic owned media let's
| such a story come out of its mass media products about the
| not-paid-for bureaucratic elements of government in hopes
| of reducing polarization that comes from over-promoting one
| of the arbitrarily different parties as a means of
| providing the commoners what Orwell called "Two Minutes
| Hate" or a means of obtaining cathartic release from the
| tensions that making them believe they are somehow co-
| authors of the government to keep them engaged as willing
| participants.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| The culture and trust of the people makes the system work
| or fail, not the system itself.
| newyankee wrote:
| Civil Servants in India (with traces to British era) are
| considered the invisible rulers of the country. Getting
| selected is like becoming a local lord.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Democracies are different from each other. There are many
| ways you can build a society from the same basic
| principles.
|
| One key difference is the extent the authorities have
| discretionary powers. Can they do whatever the consider
| necessary to do their jobs (until the courts tell
| otherwise), or do they only have the powers explicitly
| given by the law? Common law systems tend to favor
| discretionary powers, but they vary on how eager the courts
| are to keep the officials in check. Civil law systems can
| be anywhere on the spectrum, but it's usually a legislative
| choice made in advance rather than a judicial choice made
| after the fact.
| dzonga wrote:
| this is the uncomfortable truth people are unwilling to
| accept.
|
| can democratic societies be corrupt, can autocratic
| societies be not corrupt this is also true.
|
| accept things as they're, not as they ought to be - one of
| the fundamental lessons one has to learn to operate in this
| world.
| Aloha wrote:
| To my knowledge, while authoritarian it's not a totalitarian
| state, and Singapore has fairly effective means of redress
| (aka, rule of law).
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I would not say that corruption is a positive trait, but rather
| that in societies with an authoritarian regime, corruption has
| a positive impact on getting you what you want. Which, of
| course, makes sense when there are no rules to follow, and it
| enables you to get things going.
|
| Where this fails is when the person who wants to get things
| going their way doesn't have enough money. And that's why it's
| usually paired with inequality as well.
| morkalork wrote:
| This reminds me of a quote, purportedly from living in a soviet
| state: "he who does not steal, steals from his family".
| jancsika wrote:
| > Corruption gets things going and in a society that has no
| trust it is a positive trait.
|
| That's a red herring:
|
| > We first demonstrate that perceiving corruption predicts
| lower generalized trust almost universally across individuals.
|
| That couldn't be the case if autocracy meant a "society that
| has no trust." You're just speculating (or perhaps
| "anecdozing") while the article is attempting to measure these
| things.
|
| Edit: clarification
| btilly wrote:
| Modify "has no trust" to "has no trust in the official
| system", and the red herring points to one of the key
| dynamics behind why this happened.
|
| This key dynamic is what Russians call blat. My explanation
| of it is summarized from
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg.
|
| When we witness corruption, our trust is eroded the distance
| between how we think that things should work, and how they do
| work.
|
| In a democracy, there are official rules about how things are
| supposed to work. Those rules are how we expect things to
| work. Therefore, encountering corruption violates our
| expectations. And reduces our trust.
|
| In an autocracy, nobody expects that the official rules are
| how things actually work. You don't say that - doing so is
| dangerous - but everybody knows it.
|
| However behind the scenes, people learn to cope. And a key
| part of coping is a blat network. This is the classic, "I
| know someone who knows someone who can make this happen..."
| In other words, people develop personal networks of others
| that they trust.
|
| This trust is not eroded by encountering official corruption
| - that's expected.
|
| This trust is also not eroded by having to grease a few palms
| as part of getting something through the blat network. In
| fact it is _improved_. You expect to have to pay something.
| The whole point of a blat network is to get something
| otherwise unavailable, or at a better price than you
| otherwise could. And so these encounters with corruption
| increase your trust in the power and effectiveness of your
| personal network!
|
| Now go watch that video. It explains that what Jeffrey
| Epstein was doing was running a blat network. The
| availability of sex crimes was social proof that created
| trust among elites in what Jeffrey Epstein could do. His real
| money came from fundraising, brokering deals, and so on. For
| example Leon Black paid Epstein about $158 million for
| financial advice, such as structuring tax shelters. (Care to
| bet whether Epstein's connections made the IRS less likely to
| question those arrangements?) Bill Gates paid him some
| unknown amount for brokering deals with JP Morgan, meeting
| Saudi princes, etc.
|
| We, the general public, have mostly focused on the sex
| crimes. But we should also be concerned about the
| normalization of corruption as "business as usual" among
| elites. Because politics is like a fish - it rots from the
| head. Corruption at the top will not forever remain
| corruption at the top. If left unchecked, it will some day be
| corruption for all of us.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Very well said. I live in Sweden, one of the world's highest-
| trust societies, but I have experience from a more corrupt
| environment and my whole family lived most of their lives in a
| corrupt autocracy.
|
| This means that in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult
| as an individual not to participate. The corruption isn't
| something that happens at some level, it's a core part of the
| economy. If you try to do things by the book, you will just not
| get any result. You won't get to buy a limited product by
| waiting your turn. You won't get your kids into a better high
| school by having them display academic excellence. If you take
| a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many
| small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have
| a harder life. I don't want to say it's impossible but I would
| compare it to living off-grid in a modern Western country. It's
| possible but it requires a lot of dedication and that lifestyle
| then determines many aspects of your life.
| btilly wrote:
| As I commented elsewhere, the Russian name for this is blat.
| It isn't just corruption. It is a personal trust network for
| getting things done, that you can't get done if you follow
| the official rules. You get what you need through corruption,
| and your ability to do so strengthens your trust in your
| personal network.
|
| See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg for an
| excellent explanation of it. And also an explanation of why
| the most important thing that Epstein did (the thing that
| actually made him most of it money), was run a blat network.
| Elites who had learned to trust that he could let them have
| otherwise impossible sexual experiences, were willing to pay
| him large amounts to broker introductions and financial deals
| that others couldn't.
| petsfed wrote:
| I was initially confused because blat
| (blat,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors)) sounds,
| to my non-slavic-speaking-ear very close to bylad (bliad',
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_profanity#Bly%C3%A1d'
| ), and I thought "even the Russians wouldn't be that
| cynically direct about it, right?"
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| I can confirm those words do not in fact sound very
| close. They're not etymologically related either, and to
| a fluent Russian speaker they don't sound particularly
| similar.
| btilly wrote:
| They may sound somewhat similar, but apparently have
| unrelated origins. blat is borrowed from Yiddish, while
| bliad' has a Slavic root.
|
| That said, they do sound less similar to someone who has
| learned a Slavic language. We learn to distinguish pairs
| of sounds that differ in our language. English doesn't
| have a lot of words with a "ya" sound, and so to us
| "ia"and "a" are easy to confuse. It is easy to confuse
| "d" and "t". But the easier to hear distinction is a hard
| sign t versus the soft sign on d'. But hard versus soft
| isn't even a concept in English, so you're not listening
| for it.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Right. And oh my do I hate blat.
|
| It's a difficult concept to translate to English because
| it's not synonymous with corruption or bribes. A one-time
| bribe transaction isn't blat. You want a school to accept
| your kid so you "gift" the school some supplies, that's not
| blat, it's a one-time thing and the school principal
| doesn't owe you any additional favors. Blat is more like a
| social network of people trading favors, and each
| individual transaction within your blat network may involve
| different things. It could be money, it could be access to
| a product (that you still have to pay for), it could be
| time or labor.
|
| Maybe you know a plumber and he will come look at plumbing
| problems for you and your family, for free or for a low
| price. But you work at a grocery store and the plumber can
| always buy cheese because you set some aside for him.
| That's a blat relationship. And then the blat network grows
| - one day you mention you'd like to see a theater pay and
| it turns out the plumber's wife works in a theater and can
| help you get tickets, he'll set you up. Your husband is an
| engineer though so he can help tutor their child in
| mathematics.
| fwipsy wrote:
| None of those examples you gave sound like corruption to
| me, with the possible exception of tickets. It seems to
| me that the problem is when people who are in a position
| of power and responsibility abuse their power for
| personal ends. Plumbing or tutoring or cheese are
| privately held goods and surely the possessors of those
| goods can dispose of them how they want?
|
| Or perhaps in all of these examples the
| plumber/grocer/engineer is entrusted with responsibility
| from the government to ration a scarce resource?
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Well in the Soviet case, plumbing and cheese are most
| certainly not privately held resources. Doing such work
| as a plumber means you're essentially acting as self-
| employed or a business, which is illegal. The cheese is
| probably produced on a collective farm and sold at a
| state-owned store.
|
| But surely the cheese case would not be okay even in a
| Western capitalist context where the store is privately
| owned. Just replace it with a more scarce product. A
| store employee isn't allowed to tell customers the store
| is out of iPhones while keeping a dozen stashed for
| preferred buyers.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| For a Western context, perhaps "tickets to a highly
| sought after event"
| fwipsy wrote:
| In Western capitalist context, An apple employee can't do
| that because they would be stealing from Apple. If they
| are reselling phones that belong to them, they can
| dispose of them however they like.
|
| I think the Soviet context is key. Because the state is
| rationing these items, it creates a black market based on
| personal connections. In Western society nobody cares
| because (ideally) the market is competitive and you can
| just buy from someone else.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Yes, an Apple employee doing that would be stealing from
| Apple. But in the capitalist context, we also have
| entirely legal business models that I would argue are
| equivalent to corruption ethically. A business that
| chooses to sell its products or services only to a select
| group of customers (entirely legal) and then picks those
| customers not exclusively based on their finances but
| based on what else they can provide. Such as access to
| certain people, different favors, etc. That is IMO
| ethically questionable.
|
| But the Soviet everyday corruption variety of retail
| employees reserving cheese for someone who can return
| favors, that particular thing is particular to a
| socialist economy with a scarcity of relatively basic
| goods.
| btilly wrote:
| They are all corruption, or corruption adjacent.
|
| The plumber is working for a company. He's supposed to be
| working on an official job. But he's doing the work
| slowly because he's actually working on your plumbing
| problem.
|
| You are working for the grocery store. You are stealing
| cheese from the store system that is supposed to allocate
| it, and making it available it to the plumber as payment
| for your plumber being corrupt on your behalf.
|
| Again, the wife "who can help you get tickets" is
| stealing access to them. That's corruption.
|
| The engineer who is tutoring, is paying for that act of
| corruption. This may or may not happen when the engineer
| is officially supposed to being doing something else as
| part of their job. If so, that's possible because people
| learn to look the other way for you, so that you'll look
| the other way for them.
|
| And in a society where everything works this way, what do
| you think happens to overall economic productivity?
| Exactly! Which creates scarcity. Scarcity that makes the
| ability to get things through the blat network even more
| valuable!
| fwipsy wrote:
| None of that was specified. As I said earlier, the
| problem is not with quid pro quo; it's in the stealing
| which you've now specified as additional context. I could
| just as easily specify another context where each of
| these actions are legitimate. (Perhaps free tickets are
| part of the theater worker's perks.)
|
| If I said "I baked a cake for my mother," then you could
| say "BUT YOU STOLE THE FLOUR!" It doesn't prove anything.
| btilly wrote:
| My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the
| corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that
| it is easy to forget that others might not get the
| context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish
| live, but not remembering to remind people that water is
| wet.
|
| That said, there were contextual clues. If you go back, I
| said, "You get what you need through corruption..." The
| next reply was agreeing and expanding on that. This
| strongly suggests that each step in the description
| involves corruption in some way.
|
| That said, hopefully you're now clear that these blat
| networks involve pervasive corruption.
|
| When a community that is used to blat networks moves to a
| different country, the blat network doesn't go away.
| Throughout US history, it has been common to see blat
| networks in immigrant communities turn into straight up
| organized crime. The most famous example being the rise
| of the Mafia. But it is hardly an isolated example.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| > My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the
| corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that
| it is easy to forget that others might not get the
| context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish
| live, but not remembering to remind people that water is
| wet.
|
| Yes. It's fascinating, HN is in most ways a bubble with a
| particular kind of leadership, but sometimes these
| cultural differences shine through.
|
| To me, it's completely obvious that in the case of a
| plumber working through blat, he's not just legitimately
| doing extra work (assuming the law allows that in the
| first place). Of course it means the plumber is working
| on your pipes while he's supposed to be doing his actual
| job, or maybe he actually does it outside the hours but
| when he needs to replace some part for you, he steals it
| from his work. But apparently to people who grew up in a
| different environment, what comes to mind is legitimate
| side business.
| thatcat wrote:
| Would you say the scarcity is what starts the corruption?
|
| Like you can't get a plumber so you have to use your
| personal network or there aren't enough tickets so you
| have to obtain one through your personal network, etc?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I guess I don't get it either. I know someone who
| can eat at a local restaurant for free whenever he wants
| because he knows the owner. In return, he helps the owner
| maintain his car and does little odd handyman jobs around
| the owner's house for him. Is this blat? Is it
| corruption? Or is it just friends doing each other
| favors?
| creato wrote:
| It's pretty tiring seeing so many people push the bounds
| of acceptable behavior. It's pretty simple: _should_
| someone in your chain of management discipline you for
| setting aside that cheese? If yes, you are engaging in
| corruption.
|
| That action is basically stochastic theft from the
| grocery store, because you've altered the pricing of a
| possibly scarce good.
| btilly wrote:
| It's a slippery slope.
|
| What rules are you breaking to do your favor? What rules
| do you expect someone else to break for the return favor?
| What rules might they later expect you to break? To what
| extent do you stop seeing the rules of external society
| as rules that you're supposed to follow?
|
| It starts as favors.
|
| By the time you're stealing from your employer, it's
| blat.
|
| By the time you're recruiting one friend to submit
| paperwork to help another friend commit insurance fraud,
| it's still blat. But also its starting to look like
| something else.
|
| Once you owe a favor to a Mafia Don, it's called
| organized crime. But the underlying blat is still
| recognizable.
| nephihaha wrote:
| We call that restaurant thing "mate's rates" here. There
| is a symbiotic relationship there, a trace of barter and
| also keeps work off the tax books.
| hatthew wrote:
| From the sound of it (I have never heard of blat before
| this post), the important distinction is that the _owner_
| is on board with it. If he could eat for free because he
| knew a server who would give him the employee discount,
| it would be blat. If he worked as a mechanic and took
| parts from his employer to repair his friend 's car, it
| would be blat.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| > the problem is when people who are in a position of
| power and responsibility abuse their power for personal
| ends
|
| Is that not the definition of corruption?
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| I don't know about difficult to translate, sounds a lot
| like being a "Good Old Boy"
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/good_old_boy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_boy_network#United_Stat
| es
|
| Of course, it has several connotations depending on exact
| context.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Seems like a big part of it is an extensive barter
| network since the straightforward exchange of cash for
| services has broken down, so you need to know the right
| people with skills or access to, and something of value
| to offer them in return.
| torginus wrote:
| It's interesting that you contrast Sweden and Russia,
| considering while I have not lived and worked in Russia,
| I've worked with Swedes quite a bit and my experience with
| them is that they don't really emphasize red tape that much
| - in the context of development, they don't really mind if
| you bend the rules if it's for a good cause - what I mean
| is there's a general attitude of pursuing sensible outcomes
| over blindly following processes.
|
| They're also not big on oversight and I got what it looked
| like to me a surprising amount of autonomy and
| responsibilty in a very short amount of time, that I felt
| out of depth for a while, but got accustomed to it. A very
| laissez faire way of work.
|
| I felt much of the system was informal, and based on the
| expectation of not abusing trust. Which was very
| refreshing, as most companies in my experience exist in a
| state of bureaucratic gridlock - you need to push the
| change to repo X, but Y needs to sign off on it, and it
| depends on changes by person Z, who's held up by similar
| issues etc.
|
| It's a very emotionally draining and unproductive way of
| working, and is usually overseen by bosses who create these
| processes, because they don't trust their employees, or to
| get a feeling of power and control, or they simply don't
| understand how and what their subordinates do, so they kind
| of try to force things into these standard flows.
|
| Which also doesn't work, but it _accountably_ doesn 't
| work. Even if a days' changes take a week, and still end up
| lacking, you can point to that Task A is blocked by
| deliverable B, which is at a low priority at team Foo, so
| lets have a meeting with that teams manager to make sure to
| prioritize that in the next sprint etc etc etc.
|
| This is how most places turn into that meme picture where
| there's one guy digging a hole and 5 people oversee him.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| I didn't mention Russia, and I've never had the
| misfortune of living there - though I speak the language
| and am well familiar with the capture.
|
| The Swedish term for how you describe work is "frihet
| under ansvar" - translated, "freedom under
| responsibility". That's a common approach at workplaces
| where you're doing qualified work, like engineering, and
| the meaning is that you're given a lot of flexibility and
| freedom in how you do your work as long as you reach the
| expected result and you take responsibility if things
| don't work out. That's good, and yes companies here are
| very informal. We don't even culturally like things like
| managers instructing employees on what to do, it's all
| phrased very casually.
|
| In context of government work or the public sector, I'd
| say we take rules and procedures seriously, which is one
| of my favorite things about the country. To me, that
| makes interactions much more predictable than in
| countries with a "people before systems" culture.
| jimbokun wrote:
| One interesting effect of LLMs getting so good at
| generating code, all of the process related things you
| mention take up a greater and greater percentage of the
| overall time to develop and deploy a feature, making them
| even more salient.
| torginus wrote:
| They always have. I would guess the majority of people
| employed and salaries paid on a given project basically
| goes to waste. Just today I had an hour-long meeting
| about an impact of a bug, which was clear as day with a
| simple fix, but would've involved so much red tape to fix
| (for no good reason), that the couple minute fix-deploy-
| test-merge cycle would've taken at least a week of effort
| spread across people.
| gkoz wrote:
| What a blast from the past, this word. Exactly right. It
| was a spectrum from a sort of mutual aid to regular
| corruption to outright mafia.
| gmd63 wrote:
| Access to corruption is never widely understood and
| accessible to every person, otherwise it would be written
| into law and stated plainly for everyone to see. Corruption
| is a form of economic eugenics that breeds fraudsters and
| cheaters who can buy into the in-group via know-how, money or
| aesthetics while slowing the growth of a law abiding populace
| that competes honestly on merit but doesn't fit the unwritten
| rules of admission. Any participation in that system is a
| spiraling force that makes the world worse, and it's always a
| choice.
|
| In the US we're being led by a career fraudster who was a
| Wharton grad only because he had a family friend who was an
| admissions officer, and according to his sister, he paid
| someone to take his SATs for him. We have not been serious
| about the massive consequences of white collar fraud and
| corruption and we are now beginning to understand the
| butterfly effects.
| tines wrote:
| > Access to corruption is never widely understood and
| accessible to every person, otherwise it would be written
| into law and stated plainly for everyone to see.
|
| This is an uninformed non-sequitur. In China or Mexico for
| example, it's well known that to get certain things done
| you have to bribe local officials. The central government
| is against corruption by policy, but nevertheless
| corruption is endemic. It's only "inaccessible" to some
| because some people are poor and can't afford the bribes.
| drysine wrote:
| >in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an
| individual not to participate
|
| Russia is considered a corrupt country by the West, but I
| have never bribed anyone and never felt that a bribe is
| expected.
|
| >better high school by having them display academic
| excellence
|
| Worked just fine for me.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| One thing that I want to add - Westerners have experience of
| this sort of corruption, every day.
|
| Not at a governmental level, and not powered by cash, but it
| is seen when working for companies.
|
| Managers are highly corruptible - it's got next to nothing to
| do with the output of a given worker, instead it's about
| their ability to "kiss up" (something framed as "soft
| skills")
| hunterpayne wrote:
| If the managers are not taking bribes or favors for better
| treatment that isn't corruption...its just bad management.
| Those aren't he same thing even though you might have the
| same emotional reaction to them.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate
| in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs
| on, you'll have a harder life.
|
| I think increasingly this describes how things work in the
| US, if we broaden our definition of "corruption" a bit to
| include things like corporations stealing your data, charging
| hidden fees, etc.
| geodel wrote:
| I'd add tipping system for various services, but specially
| restaurants etc in definition of corruption too. Here blame
| pass around between employees, owners, restaurant
| associations, govt officials making/ passing laws etc. But
| end result is customer keep paying extra charges or being
| labeled as worst customers.
|
| I love how media is in this game , printing endless
| articles how customers are really supposed to pay tips
| because poor server. And even when customers are revolting
| against tipping culture it is going from 25% to 22% as a
| way of speaking truth to power.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and
| rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing
| bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and
| richer.
|
| There's an awful lot of low level corruption in the form of
| NGOs who receive government funding with no accountability for
| what the funds are spent on.
| sysguest wrote:
| well that's a different 'kind' of corruption
|
| corruption you have to GIVE to get stuff done
|
| vs corruption with loophole for RECEIVING money
|
| (I'd rather have the latter )
| WalterBright wrote:
| The NGOs find ways to route the received money back to the
| politicians in the form of campaign donations, or having a
| politician's friend/relative being an executive at the NGO.
|
| The NGOs also subcontract to other NGOs, who take their
| cut, and eventually just a trickle winds up going to the
| purpose of giving money to the NGO.
| gpvos wrote:
| The first part sounds like it's US-specific; campaign
| donations are less of a thing, and more strongly
| controlled, in Europe. The second could happen here too,
| though, and probably does.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I was indeed referring to the US. I don't know much about
| corruption in other countries.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The two aren't really separate, because the grifters who
| are on the receiving end also often end up being ones
| "donating" to the corrupt politicians who select their
| organizations to receive money.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Not just state NGOs. Remember the UN has plenty of NGOS such
| as the WHO, UNHCR, UNESCO and so on. No accountability in
| them either.
| PieTime wrote:
| My rich friend drove home drunk from a police ball even though
| his parents gave him an unlimited taxi card, the police stopped
| him and recognized his family, and then told him to get home
| safely.
|
| My other friend forgot his drivers license at home while being
| non-white and was arrested/charged and forced to explain why he
| didn't bring his license to a judge.
| gpvos wrote:
| That sounds like it's in the US? That's a known third-world
| country, in this respect at least.
| jkman wrote:
| If you don't think this would happen even in an 'idyllic'
| scandi country or wherever, you're mistaken.
| wtmt wrote:
| I've known the difference in corruption at different levels
| between a country like India and a country like the US.
|
| India hasn't had a very long authoritarian regime since its
| independence. Yet, corruption has existed at every touch point
| with the government and shows no signs of reduction. In India,
| getting a driver's license or getting a passport (for which
| there's a "police verification" step) or buying/selling real
| estate or filing a police complaint or getting some work done
| in a court of law or even getting the final rites of a deceased
| person (burial or cremation) done require bribes in most
| places.
|
| Also, paying a bribe means standing in line with the rest of
| the people who paid bribes. Things don't move fast just because
| money exchanged hands.
|
| All this is to say that I don't know what to make of your
| statement on authoritarian vs. democratic regimes (though you
| mentioned "western"). The main factor seems to be the culture
| and what others here have described as low trust vs high trust.
| gotwaz wrote:
| Thats a very nice story. Tell us where Morality comes from and
| why it hasnt gone extinct?
| Aunche wrote:
| > Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and
| rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing
| bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and
| richer.
|
| Believe it or not, this is how lawmaking is supposed to work in
| a democracy. No one in a position of power is going to be
| completely selfless. The Civil Rights Acts were only able to
| pass because NAACP promised to endorse the Republicans and
| Southern Democrats who were the deciding votes. Voters have
| since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact
| become hostile to it. For example, in the first half of the
| Biden administration, there was a real possibility for a
| minimum wage increase, but voters saw any compromise to the $15
| target as weakness even though they depended the vote of Joe
| Manchin, a Senator of a poor state that would suffer from
| economic turmoil with a California level minimum wage.
|
| To be clear, it's not fair that the rich and powerful are
| better equipped to influence lawmaking. However, that's mainly
| a consequence of the utility of money and power rather than the
| system being fundamentally broken. Dismissing things like
| lobbying as corruption may provide comfortable explanation of
| why you're losing, but only helps the rich and powerful by
| eroding interest in grassroots lobbying and normalizing actual
| corruption (e.g. Binance insisting that its $2 billion
| investment be settled in Trump's stablecoin shortly after CZ
| was pardoned).
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and
| have in fact become hostile to it.
|
| This is a very succinct description of arguably the biggest
| problem of our democracy right now.
|
| A huge part of Trump's success is convincing voters that
| everyone in politics is corrupt, to inoculate himself from
| criticism for the very overt acts of corruption he engages
| in.
|
| Many people seem to support him under the argument "they're
| all corrupt, at least he's not pretending to NOT be corrupt."
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > A huge part of Trump's success is convincing voters that
| everyone in politics is corrupt...
|
| Trump didn't have to convince anyone of that. Voters
| already believed that, and have for some time. Trump merely
| had to speak to that widespread, preexisting belief.
| m463 wrote:
| This reminds me of that article where a person came from china
| to the US for a while, and wrote a book about it when he
| returned.
|
| one thing he said was (in my words) - the americans don't refer
| to a person in charge, they refer to the constitution.
|
| so your comment makes sense. In other societies they corrupt a
| person, in the US they corrupt the law.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| The word democracy is so overused, the US is a plutocracy for
| instance.
| tmountain wrote:
| Plutocracy or oligarchy with the amount of nepotism recently.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| I think this research really suffers by not acknowledging that
| there are different types and scopes of corruption, and these
| different types impact societies in considerably different ways.
|
| The "four types of corruption" breakdown by Yuen Yuen Ang I think
| is really informative here, with its two-axis breakdown (https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#:~:text=Petty%20the...).
|
| Amalgamating all corruption into a single corruption index
| doesn't distinguish between these types, and it seems reasonable
| that different "flavors" of corruption impact social trust in
| different ways.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| The top is always corrupt. When the bottom realizes this, then
| the poison has spread.
| jjk166 wrote:
| I think modern democracies and autocracies are really just
| proxies for societies where wealth begets power and where power
| begets wealth, respectively.
|
| A rich person buying their way into power (either through gaining
| a formal position or influence) robs the people of that society
| of their power, which is a limited resource. There is no upside
| to it, if it were good for the people at large there would be no
| need for the corruption.
|
| Conversely, a powerful person enriching themself can be a good
| thing. A crony being put in charge of a state owned corporation,
| for example, doesn't really take anything away from the common
| person. It's not like you were in line to be the CEO of a random
| oil company. So long as your material condition is improving, the
| rising tide is lifting your boat, who cares if the tide is also
| lifting someone else's bigger boat. This sort of corruption
| aligns the interests of the powerful with the economic well being
| of the nation - the better things are run, the more comfortable
| the leaders will be - and it's certainly preferable to other ways
| they could potentially abuse their power. Who wants to be lead by
| someone so incompetent that they can't find a way to skim a
| little off the top?
|
| We in democratic society also don't really mind too much if a
| person achieves tremendous wealth so long as they don't dilute
| our power. Whether they be startup founders, business moguls,
| movie stars, rock stars, reality tv stars, socialites spending
| daddy's money, so long as they stay out of politics and avoid
| accusations of heinous crimes we not only put up with them, we
| idolize them. That's not to say that the Kardashians are morally
| equivalent to the current CEO of Gazprom in terms of how they
| gained their fortune, but none of us are under the illusion that
| their wealth is the consequence of hard work providing a much
| needed good or service to society at large, and if they leverage
| their status to make even more money that's not going to erode
| our social trust in any meaningful way.
| eszed wrote:
| That's a really interesting point of view, which puts things in
| terms I hadn't thought of before.
|
| Where it breaks down is the stage where the cronies being put
| in charge aren't competent, and their only qualification is
| their proximity to power. Then (too much of?) the tide gets
| diverted, and most of the boats stop rising.
|
| I can think of no examples where a society that permits
| leadership-by-crony did not reach that end-state.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| Was talking about this with some colleagues who are from Ukraine,
| Russia, and other countries.
|
| In the US, it seems corruption is only allowed at the top. If you
| tried to bribe your way out of a traffic ticket as a regular
| person, you'd get in big trouble, then meanwhile the president
| pardons wealthy fraudsters [1].
|
| Meanwhile, in countries like Russia, everyone can get in on the
| action. A colleague of mine told me if he were to get drafted to
| the war, he knew exactly how much to pay and who to pay off
| locally to get his name off the list. It's equal opportunity
| corruption.
|
| [1] - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/28/nikola-founder-trevor-
| milt...
| wraptile wrote:
| I'm Lithuanian familiar with soviet type of corruption and post
| soviet Lithuania which did a lot to remove corruption (also
| live in asia rn) and your assessment is somewhat correct but
| it's a terrible system.
|
| The availability of corruption is a huge grease for economic
| activity and weirdly - order - but soviet type of corruption
| has a massive flaw that bad corruption bets (big impact, high
| publicity) would be mostly unpunished. In asia however it's
| quite interesting how the face saving and family culture
| corrects for that a bit as bad corruption bets will backfire
| despite lack of legal framework for cleanup.
|
| Unfortunately it's _not_ equal opportunity corruption as low
| economic classes are left out and suffer the most, the cruelty
| of these systems are really hard to put in the words of a
| single comment. This also creates a massive overhead for
| corruption beaurocracy where entire positions are found not on
| actual product or activity but corruption "middle managers".
|
| So despite your friends take this is not a good system on it's
| own and merely a relief for terrible autocratic rule. Autocrats
| actually actively allow corruption as this relief is what keeps
| them in power precisely because people with some power get a
| relief and poor class bears the slave worker burden.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I've had Indian coworkers remark similarly. The way they put it
| was "In India, corruption is democratized. Everybody gets in on
| the act, and everybody can profit a little bit. In the U.S,
| corruption is reserved for the very top; only they can profit,
| and everybody else just suffers. Personally, I prefer the
| Indian system."
|
| Was kinda eye-opening as a native-born U.S. citizen. I'd always
| just assumed things worked according to the rules here, but
| then after he said it, I started seeing corruption at the top
| all the time.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Things do work according to the rules here.
|
| But the wealthy write the rules.
| cushychicken wrote:
| _It 's equal opportunity corruption._
|
| ...and look how nice it sounds it live in Russia.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The US is still mostly a Rule of Law country, in the sense that
| courts enforce the laws as written most of the time.
|
| But which laws are passed by Congress and signed by the
| President are mostly determined by financial donations more so
| than public opinion.
| keybored wrote:
| With enough money you can define what corruption means.
| JackYoustra wrote:
| Well yeah social trust is worse in autocracies, you'd imagine
| that corruption would be lower on the list of problems you
| perceive having when 1) you don't have a good press to report on
| them 2) you can be sent to jail basically wherever
|
| like people in democracies do not know how good they have it!
| nephihaha wrote:
| Corruption in democracies is misinformation and a conspiracy
| theory nowadays.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| IMO corruption is just a symptom. Everything goes back to one
| source point: lack of well-educated citizens who can push back
| without hesitation. Note that the two conditions: well-educated
| and can push back without hesitation. Missing any of them and the
| foundation cracks.
|
| Also I wouldn't bother comparing corruption between democracies
| and authoritarians. I have lived under both and the only thing I
| see is the common human nature represented in different ways. And
| I see "lack of well-educated citizens who can push back without
| hesitation" everywhere.
|
| I guess that's why we are in a world that keeps competing for
| incompetence.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| In Mexico, you either pay the bribe or go to jail on trumped up
| charges. I don't see what education level has to do with it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| That's why there are two pieces. You also need to push back.
| Collectively pushing back, not just individually. That's the
| only way.
| Fredy_Ke wrote:
| This resonates strongly from an African perspective. In countries
| like Kenya, corruption is almost an open secret.people expect it,
| budget for it, and navigate around it. Paradoxically that
| "normalized" corruption causes less acute trust erosion because
| nobody trusted the system deeply to begin with. In democracies
| the social contract is explicit The real question isn't which
| system suffers more, but it's which system has better recovery
| mechanisms when trust breaks down.
| Fredy_Ke wrote:
| This resonates strongly from an African perspective. In countries
| like Kenya, corruption is almost an open secret -- people expect
| it, budget for it, and navigate around it. Paradoxically that
| "normalized" corruption causes less acute trust erosion because
| nobody trusted the system deeply to begin with. In democracies
| the social contract is explicit -- you voted, you participated,
| you expected accountability. Betraying that feels personal. The
| delta between expectation and reality is where trust dies. The
| real question isn't which system suffers more -- it's which
| system has better recovery mechanisms when trust breaks down.
| ossianericson wrote:
| The Dictator's Handbook explained this in 2011: corruption in
| autocracies is the governance model -- it's how you pay a small
| winning coalition to keep you in power . So citizens aren't
| surprised by it, they're just not in the coalition. The paper's
| contribution is putting a multilevel regression on what Bueno de
| Mesquita already drew as a diagram.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Is there a reason not to simplify this to: corruption erodes
| social trust more in high-trust societies than in societies where
| trust is already degraded? Meaning: is the type of government
| actually the controlling factor, or just code for high vs. low
| trust societies?
| poontunia wrote:
| Yeah just look at ycombinator, they are all infected with bots
| cute_boi wrote:
| and full of garbage ai related post.
| jnpnj wrote:
| In a democracy, corruption is seen as the moral exception (if not
| impossibility), when it happens it's a bigger wound than in
| autocracy where the baseline is lower.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| In a good autocracy, and a good democracy, people will trust the
| system will push out the corruption as the right people become
| privy to it. In a bad autocracy, the people had no power to make
| the decision and therefore can't even hold each other liable. In
| a bad democracy, people view their fellow denizen at fault. It
| all boils down to who holds the power, because then people know
| who to blame and give less trust to when things go south.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| yeah, no shit.
| myylogic wrote:
| thanks
| 627467 wrote:
| The erosion of trust in democracies isn't about the act of
| corruption, but the nature of the promise. Democracies operate on
| high-resolution, precise contracts that attempt to surgically
| separate the Office from the Person. Ironically, democracies try
| to build machines out of people, while autocracies simply accept
| that the machine is a person.
|
| Autocracies are low-resolution systems trading on vague promises
| of 'order' and the explicit assumption of prerogative. In that
| framework, an official favoring their own isn't 'breaking' the
| machine; they are exercising it. You can't lose trust in a
| promise of impartiality that was never made. For the democratic
| actor, corruption is a breach of contract; for everyone else,
| it's just the weather.
| ray023 wrote:
| Of course, it does, because democracy is FAKE, and the corruption
| exposes this very fact. It's never the people (Demos) who
| actually control its fake freedoms that are getting taken away
| that gives the elites to control nations. Zionists and others
| control so-called democracies.
| leemelone wrote:
| In other news water is wet.
| bentt wrote:
| I've often thought that in the USA we could use a type of crime
| that's called "Betrayal of the Public Trust". It is reserved
| specifically for public servants and elected officials. The idea
| is that if you choose to do that job, it is contingent on the
| public's trust. If you betray that trust it is important to
| recognize that specifically. This should include harsher
| sentencing.
|
| This should be a deterrent to those who would pursue power for
| its opportunities in unethical behavior. It would also be a way
| for society to recognize the seriousness of this breach.
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