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> In recent history, the Panama Papers have comprised one of the largest and most influential leaks detailing information on offshore entities, company officers

> In recent history, the Panama Papers have comprised one of the largest and most influential leaks detailing information on offshore entities, company officers and financial (and legal) intermediaries, and has led to a global exposé of corruption and tax evasion. A systematic analysis of this information can provide valuable insights into the structure and properties of these entities and the relations between them. OK, I get that. What are the insights? In the Summary it says: > We iterate that, while we certainly did not expect small-world phenomena to emerge in all networks, the fact that it did not emerge in even a single network, and also that the distribution of connected components (as a function of size measured in terms of number of nodes) seems to follow a clear and consistent trend throughout, suggest a similar fundamental difference compared to small-world networks. Um, what does that tell us about corruption and tax evasion? Can somebody please explain in layman's terms?

davisr 6y ago
It means the corruption is spread far and wide, without a central group of 'authority'.
- hashtagmarkup 6y ago
  It means the author has to worry about car bombs from more than a single entity.
  - idclip 6y ago
    Hah.
    - hashtagmarkup 6y ago
      Murder. Lol.
civilized 6y ago
It means the authors were trained to plot degree distributions of any network they come across, and hey, here's another network, let's plot some degree distributions
idclip 6y ago
It means corruption is a basic human behavior. Its a self generating phenomena, and is „natural“. So there is no „illuminati“ to go after to solve this. Studies try and see how problems can be solved - if there was a single organizing entity like a mafia boss, it would be simpler to tackle the issue but there isn't, so its Marder than first expected. As to tax evasion, id posit the question „so why are these people evading? Is it the law itself? Can they be otherwise somehow incentivized to invest in their Communities rather than evade? And how big is the contribution here? Is it worth pursuing?“
- guerrilla 6y ago
  > It means corruption is a basic human behavior. That is most certainly not what the study means. If you were going to extrapolate, you might be able to get away with corruption is basic rich people behavior, but even that is going way further than what the study is actually saying.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    >That is most certainly not what the study means. If you were going to extrapolate, you might be able to get away with corruption is basic rich people behavior, but even that is going way further than what the study is actually saying. Corruption is incredibly widespread globally across all demographics. It tends to show up the least in WEIRD places, and be most obvious in poorer countries, but it's everywhere and every level of society.
    - karlp 6y ago
      > It tends to show up the least in WEIRD places What do you mean by that?
      - barumi 6y ago
        I'm not the OP, but to me the world "corruption" is a blanket term used to refer to the apparent or actual distortion of a system for personal gain. Thus corruption can be found on any system, no matter the scale, and regardless of the shape and form of the gain that may be attained. This definition implies that hypothetical cases such as a college professor using his right to park free of charge on campus to store his car collection, or a secretary using the company's printer to print out fliers, might surprise people who believe that corruption is the fruit of sinister morally and ethically empty sociopaths who are super wealthy and very powerful.
xavriley 6y ago
In network science, it’s fairly common to take a graph of something and be able to apply techniques like neighbourhood analysis or clustering which then reveal something about the data. This comes up in all kinds of real world examples from social networks to music preferences etc. What the authors are saying (I think) is that they tried the same tricks on the Panama data and got nothing useful out of it. The standard graph techniques don’t explain anything useful about what’s going on. I would guess (from previous experience working on similar things at opencorporates.com a few years ago) that this is because these networks aren’t constructed according to the real world - instead they’re a response to specific tax rules. For example if you use a specific tax avoidance scheme like the Irish dog leg then the company structure will be defined by the laws of the countries involved. Another reason would be that intermediaries like company formation agents are likely to show connections where they don’t exist in reality. If I use the same company formation agent as say, Donald Trump, it doesn’t follow that we’re related financially. Finally the Panama papers were just about hiding assets in many cases, so you’ll have these chains of ownership going through as many countries as they could be bothered to work with. This is just to give law enforcement etc. a hard time. Again I wouldn’t expect graph analysis to make sense of that on its own. If anyone is interested, banks in the US are required to document their corporate structures so there’s good data available on their structures. It suffers from the same issues though - it’s hard to tell from looking at a graph of companies where the bad stuff is happening.
- nobody9999 6y ago
  >What the authors are saying (I think) is that they tried the same tricks on the Panama data and got nothing useful out of it. The standard graph techniques don’t explain anything useful about what’s going on. The impression I got was not that they found nothing useful, but that they didn't find broadly interconnected networks within the data. If that's the case, it's likely that the transactions in the data aren't tightly linked. Which is useful, in that it tells us that those involved in such activities are not a cabal of evil elites, rather they're disparate groups with little in common except their desire to avoid taxes/hide assets. That conclusion certainly implies that addressing these activities will be more difficult as they are decentralized and widespread, but it's certainly not useless IMHO.
canjobear 6y ago
It means they ran a bunch of off the shelf graph theory algorithms and the results were confusing.
plutonorm 6y ago
There are no lizard people. No New world order and no Illuminati. Disappointing because that makes it all much harder to solve and makes it that much harder to view humanity in a favourable light.
- WealthVsSurvive 6y ago
  Humans are easy to view in a favorable light. Humanity, less so. Humans take individual actions that help themselves. Humanity forms networks of perverse incentives that harm others. If we build a network of perverse incentives, and catastrophe befalls us, an interesting thing happens: no one wants to lose in the time of loss. This is when you get revolutions, invasions, fascism threatening where the imaginary border lines are drawn. It's all merely loss aversion. Change is necessitated by material reality, in which the average person, fearing for their loss of wealth or for their loss of potential future life, are driven to extreme or violent actions. There needs to be one world currency, and it needs to be subject to entropy without human intervention (and something similar with material buildup and 'property'); we will kill ourselves otherwise as that which nourished us in the past is today's poison. Nothing is forever, why is wealth? Loss over time due to entropy as law needs to be more accounted for in our world economy as a whole. There is a level of individual wealth and capital advantage one may gain that literally destabilizes international peace (I'm looking at you global oil): why do we allow it? It's like nations have become lame date-show suitors to international oligarchs, offering missiles as flowers, and it's pathetic, and it's weak.

davisr 6y ago

It means the corruption is spread far and wide, without a central group of 'authority'.

hashtagmarkup 6y ago
It means the author has to worry about car bombs from more than a single entity.
- idclip 6y ago
  Hah.
  - hashtagmarkup 6y ago
    Murder. Lol.

civilized 6y ago

It means the authors were trained to plot degree distributions of any network they come across, and hey, here's another network, let's plot some degree distributions

idclip 6y ago

It means corruption is a basic human behavior. Its a self generating phenomena, and is „natural“. So there is no „illuminati“ to go after to solve this. Studies try and see how problems can be solved - if there was a single organizing entity like a mafia boss, it would be simpler to tackle the issue but there isn't, so its Marder than first expected. As to tax evasion, id posit the question „so why are these people evading? Is it the law itself? Can they be otherwise somehow incentivized to invest in their Communities rather than evade? And how big is the contribution here? Is it worth pursuing?“

guerrilla 6y ago
> It means corruption is a basic human behavior. That is most certainly not what the study means. If you were going to extrapolate, you might be able to get away with corruption is basic rich people behavior, but even that is going way further than what the study is actually saying.
- nullsense 6y ago
  >That is most certainly not what the study means. If you were going to extrapolate, you might be able to get away with corruption is basic rich people behavior, but even that is going way further than what the study is actually saying. Corruption is incredibly widespread globally across all demographics. It tends to show up the least in WEIRD places, and be most obvious in poorer countries, but it's everywhere and every level of society.
  - karlp 6y ago
    > It tends to show up the least in WEIRD places What do you mean by that?
    - barumi 6y ago
      I'm not the OP, but to me the world "corruption" is a blanket term used to refer to the apparent or actual distortion of a system for personal gain. Thus corruption can be found on any system, no matter the scale, and regardless of the shape and form of the gain that may be attained. This definition implies that hypothetical cases such as a college professor using his right to park free of charge on campus to store his car collection, or a secretary using the company's printer to print out fliers, might surprise people who believe that corruption is the fruit of sinister morally and ethically empty sociopaths who are super wealthy and very powerful.

xavriley 6y ago

In network science, it’s fairly common to take a graph of something and be able to apply techniques like neighbourhood analysis or clustering which then reveal something about the data. This comes up in all kinds of real world examples from social networks to music preferences etc. What the authors are saying (I think) is that they tried the same tricks on the Panama data and got nothing useful out of it. The standard graph techniques don’t explain anything useful about what’s going on. I would guess (from previous experience working on similar things at opencorporates.com a few years ago) that this is because these networks aren’t constructed according to the real world - instead they’re a response to specific tax rules. For example if you use a specific tax avoidance scheme like the Irish dog leg then the company structure will be defined by the laws of the countries involved. Another reason would be that intermediaries like company formation agents are likely to show connections where they don’t exist in reality. If I use the same company formation agent as say, Donald Trump, it doesn’t follow that we’re related financially. Finally the Panama papers were just about hiding assets in many cases, so you’ll have these chains of ownership going through as many countries as they could be bothered to work with. This is just to give law enforcement etc. a hard time. Again I wouldn’t expect graph analysis to make sense of that on its own. If anyone is interested, banks in the US are required to document their corporate structures so there’s good data available on their structures. It suffers from the same issues though - it’s hard to tell from looking at a graph of companies where the bad stuff is happening.

nobody9999 6y ago
>What the authors are saying (I think) is that they tried the same tricks on the Panama data and got nothing useful out of it. The standard graph techniques don’t explain anything useful about what’s going on. The impression I got was not that they found nothing useful, but that they didn't find broadly interconnected networks within the data. If that's the case, it's likely that the transactions in the data aren't tightly linked. Which is useful, in that it tells us that those involved in such activities are not a cabal of evil elites, rather they're disparate groups with little in common except their desire to avoid taxes/hide assets. That conclusion certainly implies that addressing these activities will be more difficult as they are decentralized and widespread, but it's certainly not useless IMHO.

canjobear 6y ago

It means they ran a bunch of off the shelf graph theory algorithms and the results were confusing.

plutonorm 6y ago

There are no lizard people. No New world order and no Illuminati. Disappointing because that makes it all much harder to solve and makes it that much harder to view humanity in a favourable light.

WealthVsSurvive 6y ago
Humans are easy to view in a favorable light. Humanity, less so. Humans take individual actions that help themselves. Humanity forms networks of perverse incentives that harm others. If we build a network of perverse incentives, and catastrophe befalls us, an interesting thing happens: no one wants to lose in the time of loss. This is when you get revolutions, invasions, fascism threatening where the imaginary border lines are drawn. It's all merely loss aversion. Change is necessitated by material reality, in which the average person, fearing for their loss of wealth or for their loss of potential future life, are driven to extreme or violent actions. There needs to be one world currency, and it needs to be subject to entropy without human intervention (and something similar with material buildup and 'property'); we will kill ourselves otherwise as that which nourished us in the past is today's poison. Nothing is forever, why is wealth? Loss over time due to entropy as law needs to be more accounted for in our world economy as a whole. There is a level of individual wealth and capital advantage one may gain that literally destabilizes international peace (I'm looking at you global oil): why do we allow it? It's like nations have become lame date-show suitors to international oligarchs, offering missiles as flowers, and it's pathetic, and it's weak.