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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 massi

by dzink 7mo ago

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 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
      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.
      - PaulHoule 7mo ago
        A lot of what I've seen is that boring small civil and criminal cases (shoplifting) aren't that different in China than they are here.
      - jordanb 7mo ago
        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 7mo ago
        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 7mo ago
      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.
- eru 7mo ago
  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.
  - arcticfox 7mo ago
    Singapore is also an island that is ~twice as wealthy as the UK per capita. I believe you in general but I'd love a lower-income country that could be true for.
    - bluGill 7mo ago
      High trust builds wealth - thus what you ask is a direct contradiction of the thesis. There is a lot of 'well' and details of what high trust means, but low trust doesn't allow for many wealth building investments - there is no possible way to make a better life (money is only a proxy) so few try and those that do are worse off.
    - eru 7mo ago
      The causation likely goes both ways. Singapore was high trust before it become wealthy, though.
  - miroljub 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - eru 7mo ago
      > [...] 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.
      - 7mo ago
- angiolillo 7mo ago
  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.
- zeroCalories 7mo ago
  These are for high stakes business, and even those are based on a lot of trust. If you commit a minor crime, where the cost of settling things is lower than what you'll get, it's easy to get away with it. It requires a great deal of trust on the individual level that many perpetually developing countries lack.
- hedora 7mo ago
  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.)
  - hunterpayne 7mo ago
    "Do you really think this is how the US will win at AI" Define "win at AI". Because this kind of idea seems more at home in some fact free political discussion. Many models are already open. Anyone who can get GPUs can run them. Its hard (for anyone) to win in a nationalistic sense when that's the case. That being said, I really don't like Dario but I still don't want him to be exhorted by the government. PS take your meds, the numbers you present are clearly a fabrication. PPS Interest rates are the most important factor influencing the amount of industrial investment in the US...always have been.
- hshdhdhj4444 7mo ago
  This is the difference between personal trust and a high/low trust society. Personal trust is about how much you trust an individual in the absence of enforcement mechanisms. But when looking at a society level those enforcement mechanisms matter. A high trust society could theoretically have extremely low personal trust and still be a high trust society because the enforcement mechanisms are strong enough. Although in reality high trust softies tend to have higher personal trust (both as a cause and effect). The presence of functional enforcement mechanisms is not evidence of a lack of personal trust.
- inetknght 7mo ago
  > 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 7mo ago
Did you meant to write "You *can't* make massive leaps in technology or medicine" instead of *can*?
- dzink 7mo ago
  corrected.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
andai 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    Exactly, sounds inherently unsafe and the work is only done superficially to keep more EU funds coming (like in Hungary).
  - order-matters 7mo ago
    >those people fixing the roads are incentivized to do the work cheaply this incentive exists with or without corruption
    - akdev1l 7mo ago
nyeah 7mo ago
Yeah, exactly. One example of a low-trust society was the US in the decade after 1929.
- trollbridge 7mo ago
  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.
  - hunterpayne 7mo ago
    I'm sure that happened at least once, but most of the time it didn't. This is where the concept of the penny auction came from. Those were far more common. Basically locals prevented outsiders from bidding in foreclosure auctions by either tricking or physically preventing them from getting to the farm (where the actual auction was held). Then the original owner bought the farm back for a few pennies as there were no other bidders.
zelphirkalt 7mo ago
> 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.
- nkassis 7mo ago
  When you say leap ahead do you mean leap forward of their current position or lead ahead of competitors in the world? I would agree many countries are making progress but I would contend they are mostly closing the gap. I don't see countries advancing far above the pack while being extremely corrupt that hinders their ability to progress beyond the rest of the advanced nations.
lokar 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
Your example isn't corruption. That's just crime. But it does do massive damage.
- vlovich123 7mo ago
  I’m confused. Corruption isn’t crime? I know white collar crime was controversial 100 years ago, but are we back to arguing whether corruption is crime or not?
  - aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
    > Corruption isn’t crime? Societies have very different opinions which kinds of corruption are perfectly fine, and which kinds are criminal.
  - mb7733 7mo ago
    Corruption is crime but not all crime is corruption. Stealing copper isn't corruption.
    - terminalshort 7mo ago
      Not all corruption is crime either as any ex politician earning mid 6 figures for a speech could tell you.
    - pyrolistical 7mo ago
      Not all corruption is crime, but prob ought to be put into the laws to become crimes
aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
> 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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
        According to this [https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapons/ https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapo...], the US has already spent more than five trillion dollars on nuclear weapons.
danny_codes 7mo ago
> You can’t make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust. Incorrect. You can’t do it without cooperation. You can cooperate without trust.
- kelseyfrog 7mo ago
  Is this some sort of mathematical model that doesn't play out in reality?
  - pyrolistical 7mo ago
    There is a mathematical model where it does. In game theory it is called tit for tat
tlogan 7mo ago
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.

by dzink 7mo ago

cucumber3732842 7mo ago

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 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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.
    - PaulHoule 7mo ago
      A lot of what I've seen is that boring small civil and criminal cases (shoplifting) aren't that different in China than they are here.
    - jordanb 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
    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.
eru 7mo ago
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.
- arcticfox 7mo ago
  Singapore is also an island that is ~twice as wealthy as the UK per capita. I believe you in general but I'd love a lower-income country that could be true for.
  - bluGill 7mo ago
    High trust builds wealth - thus what you ask is a direct contradiction of the thesis. There is a lot of 'well' and details of what high trust means, but low trust doesn't allow for many wealth building investments - there is no possible way to make a better life (money is only a proxy) so few try and those that do are worse off.
  - eru 7mo ago
    The causation likely goes both ways. Singapore was high trust before it become wealthy, though.
- miroljub 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - eru 7mo ago
    > [...] 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.
    - 7mo ago
angiolillo 7mo ago
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.
zeroCalories 7mo ago
These are for high stakes business, and even those are based on a lot of trust. If you commit a minor crime, where the cost of settling things is lower than what you'll get, it's easy to get away with it. It requires a great deal of trust on the individual level that many perpetually developing countries lack.
hedora 7mo ago
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.)
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  "Do you really think this is how the US will win at AI" Define "win at AI". Because this kind of idea seems more at home in some fact free political discussion. Many models are already open. Anyone who can get GPUs can run them. Its hard (for anyone) to win in a nationalistic sense when that's the case. That being said, I really don't like Dario but I still don't want him to be exhorted by the government. PS take your meds, the numbers you present are clearly a fabrication. PPS Interest rates are the most important factor influencing the amount of industrial investment in the US...always have been.
hshdhdhj4444 7mo ago
This is the difference between personal trust and a high/low trust society. Personal trust is about how much you trust an individual in the absence of enforcement mechanisms. But when looking at a society level those enforcement mechanisms matter. A high trust society could theoretically have extremely low personal trust and still be a high trust society because the enforcement mechanisms are strong enough. Although in reality high trust softies tend to have higher personal trust (both as a cause and effect). The presence of functional enforcement mechanisms is not evidence of a lack of personal trust.
inetknght 7mo ago
> 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 7mo ago

Did you meant to write "You *can't* make massive leaps in technology or medicine" instead of *can*?

dzink 7mo ago
corrected.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

andai 7mo ago

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 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  Exactly, sounds inherently unsafe and the work is only done superficially to keep more EU funds coming (like in Hungary).
- order-matters 7mo ago
  >those people fixing the roads are incentivized to do the work cheaply this incentive exists with or without corruption
  - akdev1l 7mo ago

nyeah 7mo ago

Yeah, exactly. One example of a low-trust society was the US in the decade after 1929.

trollbridge 7mo ago
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.
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  I'm sure that happened at least once, but most of the time it didn't. This is where the concept of the penny auction came from. Those were far more common. Basically locals prevented outsiders from bidding in foreclosure auctions by either tricking or physically preventing them from getting to the farm (where the actual auction was held). Then the original owner bought the farm back for a few pennies as there were no other bidders.

zelphirkalt 7mo ago

> 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.

nkassis 7mo ago
When you say leap ahead do you mean leap forward of their current position or lead ahead of competitors in the world? I would agree many countries are making progress but I would contend they are mostly closing the gap. I don't see countries advancing far above the pack while being extremely corrupt that hinders their ability to progress beyond the rest of the advanced nations.

lokar 7mo ago

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 7mo ago

Your example isn't corruption. That's just crime. But it does do massive damage.

vlovich123 7mo ago
I’m confused. Corruption isn’t crime? I know white collar crime was controversial 100 years ago, but are we back to arguing whether corruption is crime or not?
- aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
  > Corruption isn’t crime? Societies have very different opinions which kinds of corruption are perfectly fine, and which kinds are criminal.
- mb7733 7mo ago
  Corruption is crime but not all crime is corruption. Stealing copper isn't corruption.
  - terminalshort 7mo ago
    Not all corruption is crime either as any ex politician earning mid 6 figures for a speech could tell you.
  - pyrolistical 7mo ago
    Not all corruption is crime, but prob ought to be put into the laws to become crimes

aleph_minus_one 7mo ago

> 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 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
      According to this [https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapons/ https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapo...], the US has already spent more than five trillion dollars on nuclear weapons.

danny_codes 7mo ago

> You can’t make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust. Incorrect. You can’t do it without cooperation. You can cooperate without trust.

kelseyfrog 7mo ago
Is this some sort of mathematical model that doesn't play out in reality?
- pyrolistical 7mo ago
  There is a mathematical model where it does. In game theory it is called tit for tat

tlogan 7mo ago

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.