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If anyone lives in a state that is not corrupt, please raise your hand. Don't be shy. We promise that we won't move in and ruin it for you all at once. ...No

If anyone lives in a state that is not corrupt, please raise your hand. Don't be shy. We promise that we won't move in and ruin it for you all at once. ...No one? Corruption follows the money. Highly paid jobs follow the money. By an argument purely by correlations and assumptions, I'd say that most of the people on HN have highly paid jobs in states with plenty of people, and plenty of money to spend on the tech industry, and therefore also experience some local corruption. It's easy for a county, parish, or state to be honest when there's really nothing around to steal and no one rich enough to extort. It's only when someone shows up flashing a big wad of cash that people start to think about how to peel a few bills off of it. But then there are also plenty of places that steal as much as they can from everybody, all the time, no matter how poor, because they're the only ones around, and the system is already in place to do it. So, in short, all rich counties are a little bit corrupt, because they're where the money is. Poor counties are either all the way corrupt, because that's the only way to pay for their corruption, or not corrupt at all, because there'd be no profit in it. So by this hypothesis, California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Georgia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Virginia, Washington, Michigan, and Maryland are all at least a little bit corrupt. Vermont, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Maine, Idaho, Delaware, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Puerto Rico might possibly not be corrupt, or might be sickeningly pervasively corrupt, but you don't live there, so how would you know?

scottlocklin 8y ago
New Hampshire is great; unlike California corruption, whatever hypothetical corruption there is here, I don't have to pay for with my tax dollars. The place is run with Prussian efficiency, so hypothetical corruption doesn't impact my daily life. It's an astounding upgrade. Unlike California, the roads work (the potholes start on 93 as soon as you cross the border to Massachusetts). Let's do a full stop there. California basically doesn't have weather, meaning the simple governmental function of road maintenance should be trivial. Here we have snowstorms (yes, yes California does too ... in the mountains where nobody lives), and somehow the roads are vastly better. Building new lanes or new stretches of highway also takes months instead of decades. Beyond that, despite the existence of copwatch in places like Berkeley, and the lack thereof here, somehow NH police are not insane stormtroopers. Housing outside of Portsmouth is zoned to be easy to build in, so property is what it should cost. Small businesses aren't regulated to death. Streets are safe despite the fact that you can walk around with a submachine gun in your pocket. Water is clean. There is no pollution to speak of. There aren't vast seasonal forest fires because the state doesn't have lunatics preventing normal forestry management practices. I've been here a year and there have been no pitched street battles between gangs of thugs over ... people talking ... in the entire state; a regular fall occurrence in Berkeley (and no doubt other towns in California). Oh yeah, and it took me 20 minutes to get a NH drivers license and register a car; something that would probably take me multiple days in California. You can talk about corruption as if it is "well this many people went to jail for corruption" -IMO that is a lousy proxy for corruption. Nothing works in California; it is "failed state" level corruption; anarcho-tyrrany except for Google/Facebook oligarch tier people who probably don't pay California taxes either. If I could bribe minor officials like I could in other failed states, it would actually be an improvement over the way California works now. California is an IRL dystopia. Nice weather though, and some interesting people live there out of what I assume is inertia and provincialism.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  That's one anecdotal datum in support of the hypothesis: NH is #12 on the "not enough money to be corrupt" candidate list. The NH economy is 3% the size of California's, with 5.7% the land area, and 3.4% the population. That suggests it has less than 3% the corruption opportunity, because the state still has to accomplish a lot of the same functions with about 3% as much money. Some things scale by land area or population, and other things are simply flat administrative burden, such as keeping the lights on in the sole state legislature building. Any person wanting to profit from their own corruptibility would therefore not stay in NH, and would not go to Maine or Vermont, who have even less money to be stolen, but would instead go to Massachusetts, which is #11 on the "enough money to steal" candidate list. And take a ladle, to skim off some of the extra money sloshing around Boston. This suggests that many of our largest (by money) states could be broken up as an anti-corruption measure, to divide the flows from tax revenues into expenditures into more channels, with less flowing through each. A corrupt person can only fish for dishonest opportunities in one metaphorical river at any one time. How corrupt would Illinois be, if Chicago-Naperville-Elgin-Gary were no longer attached to it? How would California differ if Los-Angeles-Long-Beach and San-Francisco-Oakland-San-Jose were no longer part of it? Would the effect be more pronounced in states where the current capital is not also the largest city: New York, California, Illinois, Texas, Florida?
- cc439 8y ago
  You've basically summed up my opinion on CA in comparison with my current state of residence. The only major diffetence is our roads also suck like CA's despite having a similar weather advantage but at least I can blame them on the insane amount of truck traffic (~50% of interstate traffic outside of rush hour) fhat stems from our status as a major manufacturing hub. We don't pay much in taxes and all that sweet, sweet value added manufscturing employment and wage growth is worth the potholes in my opinion. I recently visited SF, the capitol city of HN's core demographic and my wife and I stood aghast at the sheer filthiness and unseemly nature of the place. Present day San Francisco is a place ripped straight from the pages of a dystopian cyberpunk-ish novel from 20-40 years ago. Excessive wealth cloistered in enclaves surrounded by slums (homeless camps) and a complete degenration of the public square (in a broad sense, I'm referring to all the public spaces in the city center) into a gallery of feces, drug abuse, and general decay all bathed in the glow of private spaces reserved for the wealthy tech elite. The "high tech, low life" aesthetic popularized by that genre has been given life in that city and it is terrifying to see such a nightmare become reality.
castlecrasher2 8y ago
According to this link someone posted https://www.justice.gov/criminal/file/1096306/download https://www.justice.gov/criminal/file/1096306/download your hypothesis for money = corruption doesn't really hold water. The most corrupt areas (most arrests of government officials by federal law enforcement) per capita are Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  I don't think corruption can be measured by arrests, as the mechanisms to arrest the corrupt are themselves corruptible. Nor do I think that per-capita is the correct way to compare jurisdictions of dissimilar sizes. With corruption, it is not the number of residents that matters, but the organization of the independently corruptible units of government, and the amounts of money that can be quietly sucked out of them. The desired metric--that we want to approximate from the more easily obtainable data--is corruption profits per corruptible individual. Each corruptible individual has an incentive to move to places where that metric is higher, thus performing sleazebag arbitrage between those areas where corruption is endemic. Are the examples you cited outliers, with explainable reasons for poorly fitting the trend? Could it be that they are all territories, where crimes of corruption by officials at lower levels in the administrative hierarchy would be investigated by the federal Dept. of Justice from the start, without any states' attorneys-general getting a crack at them first or asking the feds for assistance or joint prosecution? If you separate out DC and the island territories, does the remainder of the set hold up?

scottlocklin 8y ago

New Hampshire is great; unlike California corruption, whatever hypothetical corruption there is here, I don't have to pay for with my tax dollars. The place is run with Prussian efficiency, so hypothetical corruption doesn't impact my daily life. It's an astounding upgrade. Unlike California, the roads work (the potholes start on 93 as soon as you cross the border to Massachusetts). Let's do a full stop there. California basically doesn't have weather, meaning the simple governmental function of road maintenance should be trivial. Here we have snowstorms (yes, yes California does too ... in the mountains where nobody lives), and somehow the roads are vastly better. Building new lanes or new stretches of highway also takes months instead of decades. Beyond that, despite the existence of copwatch in places like Berkeley, and the lack thereof here, somehow NH police are not insane stormtroopers. Housing outside of Portsmouth is zoned to be easy to build in, so property is what it should cost. Small businesses aren't regulated to death. Streets are safe despite the fact that you can walk around with a submachine gun in your pocket. Water is clean. There is no pollution to speak of. There aren't vast seasonal forest fires because the state doesn't have lunatics preventing normal forestry management practices. I've been here a year and there have been no pitched street battles between gangs of thugs over ... people talking ... in the entire state; a regular fall occurrence in Berkeley (and no doubt other towns in California). Oh yeah, and it took me 20 minutes to get a NH drivers license and register a car; something that would probably take me multiple days in California. You can talk about corruption as if it is "well this many people went to jail for corruption" -IMO that is a lousy proxy for corruption. Nothing works in California; it is "failed state" level corruption; anarcho-tyrrany except for Google/Facebook oligarch tier people who probably don't pay California taxes either. If I could bribe minor officials like I could in other failed states, it would actually be an improvement over the way California works now. California is an IRL dystopia. Nice weather though, and some interesting people live there out of what I assume is inertia and provincialism.

logfromblammo 8y ago
That's one anecdotal datum in support of the hypothesis: NH is #12 on the "not enough money to be corrupt" candidate list. The NH economy is 3% the size of California's, with 5.7% the land area, and 3.4% the population. That suggests it has less than 3% the corruption opportunity, because the state still has to accomplish a lot of the same functions with about 3% as much money. Some things scale by land area or population, and other things are simply flat administrative burden, such as keeping the lights on in the sole state legislature building. Any person wanting to profit from their own corruptibility would therefore not stay in NH, and would not go to Maine or Vermont, who have even less money to be stolen, but would instead go to Massachusetts, which is #11 on the "enough money to steal" candidate list. And take a ladle, to skim off some of the extra money sloshing around Boston. This suggests that many of our largest (by money) states could be broken up as an anti-corruption measure, to divide the flows from tax revenues into expenditures into more channels, with less flowing through each. A corrupt person can only fish for dishonest opportunities in one metaphorical river at any one time. How corrupt would Illinois be, if Chicago-Naperville-Elgin-Gary were no longer attached to it? How would California differ if Los-Angeles-Long-Beach and San-Francisco-Oakland-San-Jose were no longer part of it? Would the effect be more pronounced in states where the current capital is not also the largest city: New York, California, Illinois, Texas, Florida?
cc439 8y ago
You've basically summed up my opinion on CA in comparison with my current state of residence. The only major diffetence is our roads also suck like CA's despite having a similar weather advantage but at least I can blame them on the insane amount of truck traffic (~50% of interstate traffic outside of rush hour) fhat stems from our status as a major manufacturing hub. We don't pay much in taxes and all that sweet, sweet value added manufscturing employment and wage growth is worth the potholes in my opinion. I recently visited SF, the capitol city of HN's core demographic and my wife and I stood aghast at the sheer filthiness and unseemly nature of the place. Present day San Francisco is a place ripped straight from the pages of a dystopian cyberpunk-ish novel from 20-40 years ago. Excessive wealth cloistered in enclaves surrounded by slums (homeless camps) and a complete degenration of the public square (in a broad sense, I'm referring to all the public spaces in the city center) into a gallery of feces, drug abuse, and general decay all bathed in the glow of private spaces reserved for the wealthy tech elite. The "high tech, low life" aesthetic popularized by that genre has been given life in that city and it is terrifying to see such a nightmare become reality.

castlecrasher2 8y ago

According to this link someone posted https://www.justice.gov/criminal/file/1096306/download https://www.justice.gov/criminal/file/1096306/download your hypothesis for money = corruption doesn't really hold water. The most corrupt areas (most arrests of government officials by federal law enforcement) per capita are Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

logfromblammo 8y ago
I don't think corruption can be measured by arrests, as the mechanisms to arrest the corrupt are themselves corruptible. Nor do I think that per-capita is the correct way to compare jurisdictions of dissimilar sizes. With corruption, it is not the number of residents that matters, but the organization of the independently corruptible units of government, and the amounts of money that can be quietly sucked out of them. The desired metric--that we want to approximate from the more easily obtainable data--is corruption profits per corruptible individual. Each corruptible individual has an incentive to move to places where that metric is higher, thus performing sleazebag arbitrage between those areas where corruption is endemic. Are the examples you cited outliers, with explainable reasons for poorly fitting the trend? Could it be that they are all territories, where crimes of corruption by officials at lower levels in the administrative hierarchy would be investigated by the federal Dept. of Justice from the start, without any states' attorneys-general getting a crack at them first or asking the feds for assistance or joint prosecution? If you separate out DC and the island territories, does the remainder of the set hold up?