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The primary form of corruption we see is an indirect tit-for-tat. "You buy our x,y and z and we'll hire you for a cushy gig many years from now." And when we l

The primary form of corruption we see is an indirect tit-for-tat. "You buy our x,y and z and we'll hire you for a cushy gig many years from now." And when we look at amateur politicians (smaller elections, smaller electoral pools, first time candidates) then we see this happen.. more. Much, much more. Government by lotto would dramatically increase corruption.

cjbgkagh 1y ago
If the lotteries are regular the number of people that would need to be bribed increases as does the risk of exposure. At some point it stops being worth the risk. On the spectrum of centralization such that only one person decides to the other end with complete devolution such that each person decides there is a trade off on how much it cost to bribe the ‘politician’ and how much gain could be obtained from the bribe. In the extreme case of everyone deciding you’d have to bribe everyone and it would be impossible for the value extraction to be greater than the bribe. It would be hard to do worse than entrenched political parties and who tend to have lifetime and even hereditary tenures.
dylan604 1y ago
and when "many years from now" finally arrives, what guarantee is there that the promise of a cushy gig would be remembered if honored? seems like a very risky proposition for the one being corrupted much more than the one doing the corrupting. that's the best "i'll gladly pay you on tuesday for a hamburger today" arrangement.
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  If they want to be believed then they need to have a history of hiring post tenure politicians, the whole thing ends up a bit like a pyramid scheme with the success of new bribes having to cover the expense of the previous bribes.
patcon 1y ago
> And when we look at amateur politicians (smaller elections, smaller electoral pools, first time candidates) then we see this happen.. more. Much, much more. It's a known fact that smaller governments are more corrupt, but that's due to low levels of infrastructure for oversight, not because of some equivalence in corruptability of the career political players vs small/amateur players. [1] Small outsider players with similar oversight as federal politics would surely be less corruptible in the ways we normally track [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_local_government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_local_government

cjbgkagh 1y ago

If the lotteries are regular the number of people that would need to be bribed increases as does the risk of exposure. At some point it stops being worth the risk. On the spectrum of centralization such that only one person decides to the other end with complete devolution such that each person decides there is a trade off on how much it cost to bribe the ‘politician’ and how much gain could be obtained from the bribe. In the extreme case of everyone deciding you’d have to bribe everyone and it would be impossible for the value extraction to be greater than the bribe. It would be hard to do worse than entrenched political parties and who tend to have lifetime and even hereditary tenures.

dylan604 1y ago

and when "many years from now" finally arrives, what guarantee is there that the promise of a cushy gig would be remembered if honored? seems like a very risky proposition for the one being corrupted much more than the one doing the corrupting. that's the best "i'll gladly pay you on tuesday for a hamburger today" arrangement.

cjbgkagh 1y ago
If they want to be believed then they need to have a history of hiring post tenure politicians, the whole thing ends up a bit like a pyramid scheme with the success of new bribes having to cover the expense of the previous bribes.

patcon 1y ago

> And when we look at amateur politicians (smaller elections, smaller electoral pools, first time candidates) then we see this happen.. more. Much, much more. It's a known fact that smaller governments are more corrupt, but that's due to low levels of infrastructure for oversight, not because of some equivalence in corruptability of the career political players vs small/amateur players. [1] Small outsider players with similar oversight as federal politics would surely be less corruptible in the ways we normally track [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_local_government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_local_government