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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 offlo

• tw04 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
    • AlecSchueler 8mo ago
      > In China, its considered a joke career. Is there a source for this or is more of a vibes thing?
      • ecshafer 8mo ago
        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 8mo ago
        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 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.
        • AlecSchueler 8mo ago
          > It's widely believed in Western society due to the language barrier to access Chinese social media. > But it's not true Is it even widely believed in the west? I'm European and my idea of China is that it's the home of Confucianism and legalism and that bureaucracy, the state and the law are all taken seriously there.
    • jordanb 8mo ago
      I feel like that's breaking down in the west. I've seen more and more news articles describing someone as a "well-connected lawyer." The idea that the most important things that a lawyer possesses is connections to people in power is becoming normalized. When I was young I remember people describing Alan Dershowitz as "the greatest legal mind in America." The idea was that he got his clients what they wanted through fiendishly good logic and argument. Of course we now know that he just knew who to send poorly-written emails to.
      • mothballed 8mo ago
        I'm of the opinion that most legal judgements and arguments (especially at the highest levels like SCOTUS or circuit courts) are just post-facto rationalization of the outcome they want. Any superior logic and argument is just a reflection that such minds tend to be more cunning at access the inner workings of power if they weren't already born there.
        • jordanb 8mo ago
          Mid-century I think judges were more committed to "fair and honest application of the law." This actually led conservatives to rage against judges who would "become liberal" on the bench. The quintessential example of this was Chief Justice Earl Warren (appointed by Dwight Eisenhower) but there were may other cases like Justice Souter (appointed by George HW Bush). So conservative groups started developing lists of "ideologically reliable" judges who the Republicans were supposed to appoint. Reagan and HW Bush would negotiate with these groups that they would appoint a judge from the list followed by a more "normal" judge, splitting their appointees between hardliners and institutional jurists. Clearance Thomas was one of HW Bush's "hardliner" appointments opposite Souter. In the Clinton era, Thomas was frustrated at the pay SC justices received and threatened to resign to make his fortune in private practice. To prevent this conservative activists started showing him with gifts. His main benefactor was mega-landlord Harlan Crow.[1] This more than anything started the eara of "justice for pay" in America, where the purpose of getting on the bench was to be ideologically reliable, partisan, and to make a fortune off of the people coming before the bench. https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-money-complaints-sparked-resignation-fears-scotus https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-money-com...
    • AngryData 8mo ago
      I certainly do not believe the Rule of Law matters at all in the US, even if we ignore the current administration. US courts have been corrupt for many decades, if not longer, and the only thing that matters to US cops and courts is extorting civilians for money. People with money to spend on lawyers get off easy every time, people without money for lawyers get fucked every time.
  • dzink 8mo ago
    In places where you can’t trust courts, you see organized crime fill the gap - goons start enforcing rules for the bad guys and there are no individual good guys big enough to stop an army of well paid goons. With tech enabling every kind of surveillance in the US, that could be a very dangerous combination (bad guys get privacy, while normal people can be ripped out of their homes).
  • pohl 8mo ago
    > contracts Are you assuming that the foundation for those, Rule of Law, is alive & healthy in an autocracy?
  • graemep 8mo ago
    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.
  • einpoklum 8mo ago
    If a person or an organization can "trust the government", that means they don't have to trust their business partners that much, and don't even have to bother with a lot of contract language, since the government will force the other party to general legal norms and to act in good faith. If the government cannot be trusted, or rather, can be trusted to be biased and corrupt, then - a person or an organization needs a lot of trust in their partner, and writing contracts is, like you say, not very interesting. But actually, I would say it's the middle ground, where trust is partial, is where you see long and detailed contracts with provisions and indemnification clauses and long definitions and long lists of corner cases etc.
• eru 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
      The causation likely goes both ways. Singapore was high trust before it become wealthy, though.
  • miroljub 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • eru 8mo 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.
      • 8mo ago
• angiolillo 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.