9 ms·

It's well known that in authoritarian regimes (which autocracies generally are) corruption is, rather than a problem, a necessary element of society to keep thi

by yason 7mo ago

It's well known that in authoritarian regimes (which autocracies generally are) corruption is, rather than a problem, a necessary element of society to keep things going. Anyone with the slightest amount of official power, like a government officer, has the ability to prevent things going forward on his part. In this kind of society, most people are poor and it would be considered stupid to not demand a small (or large) bribe from the citizen in order to unlock the process. Everyone does it, more with outsiders and to a lesser extent with one's circle of acquaintances (because the social fabric between known parties is the other way to unlock things). Corruption surely is one thing that really trickles down from the top. So, things like like obediently waiting in the queue for your turn or complaining about the officer won't help unlike in high-trust societies. If you try that in a low-trust society there will be additional documents, stamps, acknowledges, or signatures you need, and keep needing, in order to complete your request until you get the drift and bring a little something. Corruption gets things going and in a society that has no trust it is a positive trait. In Western democracies this sounds unimaginable because there's a stronger sense that right things will work out right just because of the rules. Western corruption happens on a different level: a regular western citizen has no benefit from giving bribes and he would object to the police or government officials from demanding one. Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer.

mentalgear 7mo ago
[flagged]
- mike_ivanov 7mo ago
  Bullshit. We have more words for flavors of bribery than for types of snow.
  - drysine 7mo ago
    Do we?
- brightball 7mo ago
  As a matter of perspective, the push to do so is to replace corrupt officials. Ultimately, if you believe that the officials currently in place were doing their jobs without bias then this looks like corruption. If you believe that the existing officials were compromised by their politics, then this looks like removing corruption. It's all perspective.
- mystraline 7mo ago
  The problem with meritocracy: who decides what "merit" is? The answer is: those who are already in power.
  - mentalgear 7mo ago
    Stop the relativism. In a democracy it's mostly all of us that have a say, in a dictatorship it's one guy and his fascist rank's whim.
    - drysine 7mo ago
      >it's mostly all of us that have a say Do you?
      - wewtyflakes 7mo ago
        I mean, literally so in a democracy, no? You could argue 'we' (whoever that is) do not live in a democracy, but to say that a plurality of voices do not matter in a democracy seems wrong at face-value.
        drysine 7mo ago
        [dead]
- timojaask 7mo ago
  > Reminds me of a report that Russians have no word for "bribe" This is just false. The word is “взятка”. If I were you I would not trust that report you’re referring to.
- dc96 7mo ago
  Why would one of the most popular languages in the world not have a word for "bribe"? Seems a bit condescending, implying Russians can't tell the difference between a "bribe" and customary behavior.
- hax0ron3 7mo ago
  [dead]
- drysine 7mo ago
  >Reminds me of a report that Russians have no word for "bribe" You could've checked that faster than it took you to write your russophobic comment
Telemakhos 7mo ago
How does this square with regimes like Singapore, which is one of the least corrupt nations in the world yet also an authoritarian, one-party system?
- mentalgear 7mo ago
  These are the 'benevolent authoritarian-ship' outliers - very rare and depends on chance that the current person in power truly acts in the interest of the public - but when they are gone there's no legal framework in place that keeps their successors to do whatever they please. EDIT: commenters are still all referring to Singapore which I remind you is the very rare outlier case.
  - abhinai 7mo ago
    Not true. LKY has been gone a while and Singapore GDP has only gone up.
  - stingraycharles 7mo ago
    I guess it’s a good thing that the ruling party has been in power for about 6 decades at this point.
  - bobthepanda 7mo ago
    Part of what makes Singapore interesting is that they have yet to have a leader truly invested in subsuming the power of the system. A big thing of Xi Jinping’s rise to power has been the systematic dismantling of post-Mao checks on power. Singapore has yet to have a leader willing to take over the system, because two of its leaders were the dynasty that created the system. The real test is what happens when someone like that shows up; but even Western democracies face this problem, it’s just that the system has more built in speed bumps to overcome.
  - groundzeros2015 7mo ago
    Rare outliers indicate the root problem is not the structure. All the interesting questions arise from the outliers
- 7mo ago
stingraycharles 7mo ago
I would not say that corruption is a positive trait, but rather that in societies with an authoritarian regime, corruption has a positive impact on getting you what you want. Which, of course, makes sense when there are no rules to follow, and it enables you to get things going. Where this fails is when the person who wants to get things going their way doesn’t have enough money. And that’s why it’s usually paired with inequality as well.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
dotancohen 7mo ago
An interpretation of the title and conclusions of the article is that the government actions or perception, is less of an influence on high-trust / low-trust societies. The far more influential factor is social, between citizens.
morkalork 7mo ago
This reminds me of a quote, purportedly from living in a soviet state: "he who does not steal, steals from his family".
jancsika 7mo ago
> Corruption gets things going and in a society that has no trust it is a positive trait. That's a red herring: > We first demonstrate that perceiving corruption predicts lower generalized trust almost universally across individuals. That couldn't be the case if autocracy meant a "society that has no trust." You're just speculating (or perhaps "anecdozing") while the article is attempting to measure these things. Edit: clarification
- btilly 7mo ago
  Modify "has no trust" to "has no trust in the official system", and the red herring points to one of the key dynamics behind why this happened. This key dynamic is what Russians call blat. My explanation of it is summarized from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg. When we witness corruption, our trust is eroded the distance between how we think that things should work, and how they do work. In a democracy, there are official rules about how things are supposed to work. Those rules are how we expect things to work. Therefore, encountering corruption violates our expectations. And reduces our trust. In an autocracy, nobody expects that the official rules are how things actually work. You don't say that - doing so is dangerous - but everybody knows it. However behind the scenes, people learn to cope. And a key part of coping is a blat network. This is the classic, "I know someone who knows someone who can make this happen..." In other words, people develop personal networks of others that they trust. This trust is not eroded by encountering official corruption - that's expected. This trust is also not eroded by having to grease a few palms as part of getting something through the blat network. In fact it is improved. You expect to have to pay something. The whole point of a blat network is to get something otherwise unavailable, or at a better price than you otherwise could. And so these encounters with corruption increase your trust in the power and effectiveness of your personal network! Now go watch that video. It explains that what Jeffrey Epstein was doing was running a blat network. The availability of sex crimes was social proof that created trust among elites in what Jeffrey Epstein could do. His real money came from fundraising, brokering deals, and so on. For example Leon Black paid Epstein about $158 million for financial advice, such as structuring tax shelters. (Care to bet whether Epstein's connections made the IRS less likely to question those arrangements?) Bill Gates paid him some unknown amount for brokering deals with JP Morgan, meeting Saudi princes, etc. We, the general public, have mostly focused on the sex crimes. But we should also be concerned about the normalization of corruption as "business as usual" among elites. Because politics is like a fish - it rots from the head. Corruption at the top will not forever remain corruption at the top. If left unchecked, it will some day be corruption for all of us.
ACS_Solver 7mo ago
Very well said. I live in Sweden, one of the world's highest-trust societies, but I have experience from a more corrupt environment and my whole family lived most of their lives in a corrupt autocracy. This means that in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an individual not to participate. The corruption isn't something that happens at some level, it's a core part of the economy. If you try to do things by the book, you will just not get any result. You won't get to buy a limited product by waiting your turn. You won't get your kids into a better high school by having them display academic excellence. If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life. I don't want to say it's impossible but I would compare it to living off-grid in a modern Western country. It's possible but it requires a lot of dedication and that lifestyle then determines many aspects of your life.
- btilly 7mo ago
  As I commented elsewhere, the Russian name for this is blat. It isn't just corruption. It is a personal trust network for getting things done, that you can't get done if you follow the official rules. You get what you need through corruption, and your ability to do so strengthens your trust in your personal network. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg for an excellent explanation of it. And also an explanation of why the most important thing that Epstein did (the thing that actually made him most of it money), was run a blat network. Elites who had learned to trust that he could let them have otherwise impossible sexual experiences, were willing to pay him large amounts to broker introductions and financial deals that others couldn't.
  - petsfed 7mo ago
    I was initially confused because blat (блат,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors)) sounds, to my non-slavic-speaking-ear very close to bylad (блядь, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_profanity#Bly%C3%A1d https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_profanity#Bly%C3%A1d'), and I thought "even the Russians wouldn't be that cynically direct about it, right?"
WalterBright 7mo ago
> Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer. There's an awful lot of low level corruption in the form of NGOs who receive government funding with no accountability for what the funds are spent on.
- sysguest 7mo ago
  well that's a different 'kind' of corruption corruption you have to GIVE to get stuff done vs corruption with loophole for RECEIVING money (I'd rather have the latter )
  - WalterBright 7mo ago
    The NGOs find ways to route the received money back to the politicians in the form of campaign donations, or having a politician's friend/relative being an executive at the NGO. The NGOs also subcontract to other NGOs, who take their cut, and eventually just a trickle winds up going to the purpose of giving money to the NGO.
    - gpvos 7mo ago
      The first part sounds like it's US-specific; campaign donations are less of a thing, and more strongly controlled, in Europe. The second could happen here too, though, and probably does.
      - WalterBright 7mo ago
        I was indeed referring to the US. I don't know much about corruption in other countries.
  - zdragnar 7mo ago
    The two aren't really separate, because the grifters who are on the receiving end also often end up being ones "donating" to the corrupt politicians who select their organizations to receive money.
PieTime 7mo ago
My rich friend drove home drunk from a police ball even though his parents gave him an unlimited taxi card, the police stopped him and recognized his family, and then told him to get home safely. My other friend forgot his drivers license at home while being non-white and was arrested/charged and forced to explain why he didn’t bring his license to a judge.
- gpvos 7mo ago
  That sounds like it's in the US? That's a known third-world country, in this respect at least.
  - jkman 7mo ago
    If you don't think this would happen even in an 'idyllic' scandi country or wherever, you're mistaken.
    - stinkbeetle 7mo ago
      No way, the Norwegian Prime Minister certainly was not doing anything corrupt or trading any criminal favors with Epstein, that's all just a vast conspiracy theory.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
wtmt 7mo ago
I’ve known the difference in corruption at different levels between a country like India and a country like the US. India hasn’t had a very long authoritarian regime since its independence. Yet, corruption has existed at every touch point with the government and shows no signs of reduction. In India, getting a driver’s license or getting a passport (for which there’s a “police verification” step) or buying/selling real estate or filing a police complaint or getting some work done in a court of law or even getting the final rites of a deceased person (burial or cremation) done require bribes in most places. Also, paying a bribe means standing in line with the rest of the people who paid bribes. Things don’t move fast just because money exchanged hands. All this is to say that I don’t know what to make of your statement on authoritarian vs. democratic regimes (though you mentioned “western”). The main factor seems to be the culture and what others here have described as low trust vs high trust.
gotwaz 7mo ago
Thats a very nice story. Tell us where Morality comes from and why it hasnt gone extinct?
Aunche 7mo ago
> Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer. Believe it or not, this is how lawmaking is supposed to work in a democracy. No one in a position of power is going to be completely selfless. The Civil Rights Acts were only able to pass because NAACP promised to endorse the Republicans and Southern Democrats who were the deciding votes. Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it. For example, in the first half of the Biden administration, there was a real possibility for a minimum wage increase, but voters saw any compromise to the $15 target as weakness even though they depended the vote of Joe Manchin, a Senator of a poor state that would suffer from economic turmoil with a California level minimum wage. To be clear, it's not fair that the rich and powerful are better equipped to influence lawmaking. However, that's mainly a consequence of the utility of money and power rather than the system being fundamentally broken. Dismissing things like lobbying as corruption may provide comfortable explanation of why you're losing, but only helps the rich and powerful by eroding interest in grassroots lobbying and normalizing actual corruption (e.g. Binance insisting that its $2 billion investment be settled in Trump's stablecoin shortly after CZ was pardoned).
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  > Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it. This is a very succinct description of arguably the biggest problem of our democracy right now. A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt, to inoculate himself from criticism for the very overt acts of corruption he engages in. Many people seem to support him under the argument “they’re all corrupt, at least he’s not pretending to NOT be corrupt.”
  - bigstrat2003 7mo ago
    > A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt... Trump didn't have to convince anyone of that. Voters already believed that, and have for some time. Trump merely had to speak to that widespread, preexisting belief.
m463 7mo ago
This reminds me of that article where a person came from china to the US for a while, and wrote a book about it when he returned. one thing he said was (in my words) - the americans don't refer to a person in charge, they refer to the constitution. so your comment makes sense. In other societies they corrupt a person, in the US they corrupt the law.
Barrin92 7mo ago
>corruption is, rather than a problem, a necessary element of society to keep things going. There's a prof at Johns Hopkins, Yuen Yuen Ang, who wrote a whole book on the topic in China. She dubbed this 'access money'. Corruption that 'greases the wheels' and removes red tape by bureaucracies, which authoritarian states are very prone to, is a net positive. It doesn't erode trust because it stimulates growth and doesn't interfere with the lives of ordinary citizens. It's basically a hack to get things done. The East Asian countries in particular tend to have this at the corporate levels. Chaebols in South Korea and Zaibatsu in Japan tend to be corrupt in that sense but it has if anything an organizing function. In most democratic countries corruption tends to happen at the individual level, think Indian police in some states who are famous for extorting travelers like road bandits. That's significantly more trust eroding and economically harmful. If you don't differentiate what kind of corruption you're talking about you can't really make sense of it.
mycall 7mo ago
How much does what you describe have to do with the continuous compounding of laws? Since 1976, on average 220 new laws are enacted by Congress per year, but this is additive as most laws do not sunset or get repealed. Also, the complexity and length of newer laws have exploded. All of this suggests more control over people and follows the tension between the rule of law and rule by law.
- jongjong 7mo ago
  Yeah it's like coding with CSS. If you keep adding more rules eventually stuff starts breaking and nobody knows how to fix it.
thewhitetulip 7mo ago
Democracies also have an independent media that can name, shame and investigate. In autocracies (outright or electoral), the media is used to bash only those who oppose the supreme leader. That's why when projects are late under opposition its "corruption" or "policy paralysis" But when the same happens under the party that's ruling via electoral autocracy, it's a "delayed gift"
JohnnyLarue 7mo ago
[dead]

by yason 7mo ago

mentalgear 7mo ago

[flagged]

mike_ivanov 7mo ago
Bullshit. We have more words for flavors of bribery than for types of snow.
- drysine 7mo ago
  Do we?
brightball 7mo ago
As a matter of perspective, the push to do so is to replace corrupt officials. Ultimately, if you believe that the officials currently in place were doing their jobs without bias then this looks like corruption. If you believe that the existing officials were compromised by their politics, then this looks like removing corruption. It's all perspective.
mystraline 7mo ago
The problem with meritocracy: who decides what "merit" is? The answer is: those who are already in power.
- mentalgear 7mo ago
  Stop the relativism. In a democracy it's mostly all of us that have a say, in a dictatorship it's one guy and his fascist rank's whim.
  - drysine 7mo ago
    >it's mostly all of us that have a say Do you?
    - wewtyflakes 7mo ago
      I mean, literally so in a democracy, no? You could argue 'we' (whoever that is) do not live in a democracy, but to say that a plurality of voices do not matter in a democracy seems wrong at face-value.
      - drysine 7mo ago
        [dead]
timojaask 7mo ago
> Reminds me of a report that Russians have no word for "bribe" This is just false. The word is “взятка”. If I were you I would not trust that report you’re referring to.
dc96 7mo ago
Why would one of the most popular languages in the world not have a word for "bribe"? Seems a bit condescending, implying Russians can't tell the difference between a "bribe" and customary behavior.
hax0ron3 7mo ago
[dead]
drysine 7mo ago
>Reminds me of a report that Russians have no word for "bribe" You could've checked that faster than it took you to write your russophobic comment

Telemakhos 7mo ago

How does this square with regimes like Singapore, which is one of the least corrupt nations in the world yet also an authoritarian, one-party system?

mentalgear 7mo ago
These are the 'benevolent authoritarian-ship' outliers - very rare and depends on chance that the current person in power truly acts in the interest of the public - but when they are gone there's no legal framework in place that keeps their successors to do whatever they please. EDIT: commenters are still all referring to Singapore which I remind you is the very rare outlier case.
- abhinai 7mo ago
  Not true. LKY has been gone a while and Singapore GDP has only gone up.
- stingraycharles 7mo ago
  I guess it’s a good thing that the ruling party has been in power for about 6 decades at this point.
- bobthepanda 7mo ago
  Part of what makes Singapore interesting is that they have yet to have a leader truly invested in subsuming the power of the system. A big thing of Xi Jinping’s rise to power has been the systematic dismantling of post-Mao checks on power. Singapore has yet to have a leader willing to take over the system, because two of its leaders were the dynasty that created the system. The real test is what happens when someone like that shows up; but even Western democracies face this problem, it’s just that the system has more built in speed bumps to overcome.
- groundzeros2015 7mo ago
  Rare outliers indicate the root problem is not the structure. All the interesting questions arise from the outliers
7mo ago

stingraycharles 7mo ago

I would not say that corruption is a positive trait, but rather that in societies with an authoritarian regime, corruption has a positive impact on getting you what you want. Which, of course, makes sense when there are no rules to follow, and it enables you to get things going. Where this fails is when the person who wants to get things going their way doesn’t have enough money. And that’s why it’s usually paired with inequality as well.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

dotancohen 7mo ago

An interpretation of the title and conclusions of the article is that the government actions or perception, is less of an influence on high-trust / low-trust societies. The far more influential factor is social, between citizens.

morkalork 7mo ago

This reminds me of a quote, purportedly from living in a soviet state: "he who does not steal, steals from his family".

jancsika 7mo ago

> Corruption gets things going and in a society that has no trust it is a positive trait. That's a red herring: > We first demonstrate that perceiving corruption predicts lower generalized trust almost universally across individuals. That couldn't be the case if autocracy meant a "society that has no trust." You're just speculating (or perhaps "anecdozing") while the article is attempting to measure these things. Edit: clarification

btilly 7mo ago
Modify "has no trust" to "has no trust in the official system", and the red herring points to one of the key dynamics behind why this happened. This key dynamic is what Russians call blat. My explanation of it is summarized from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg. When we witness corruption, our trust is eroded the distance between how we think that things should work, and how they do work. In a democracy, there are official rules about how things are supposed to work. Those rules are how we expect things to work. Therefore, encountering corruption violates our expectations. And reduces our trust. In an autocracy, nobody expects that the official rules are how things actually work. You don't say that - doing so is dangerous - but everybody knows it. However behind the scenes, people learn to cope. And a key part of coping is a blat network. This is the classic, "I know someone who knows someone who can make this happen..." In other words, people develop personal networks of others that they trust. This trust is not eroded by encountering official corruption - that's expected. This trust is also not eroded by having to grease a few palms as part of getting something through the blat network. In fact it is improved. You expect to have to pay something. The whole point of a blat network is to get something otherwise unavailable, or at a better price than you otherwise could. And so these encounters with corruption increase your trust in the power and effectiveness of your personal network! Now go watch that video. It explains that what Jeffrey Epstein was doing was running a blat network. The availability of sex crimes was social proof that created trust among elites in what Jeffrey Epstein could do. His real money came from fundraising, brokering deals, and so on. For example Leon Black paid Epstein about $158 million for financial advice, such as structuring tax shelters. (Care to bet whether Epstein's connections made the IRS less likely to question those arrangements?) Bill Gates paid him some unknown amount for brokering deals with JP Morgan, meeting Saudi princes, etc. We, the general public, have mostly focused on the sex crimes. But we should also be concerned about the normalization of corruption as "business as usual" among elites. Because politics is like a fish - it rots from the head. Corruption at the top will not forever remain corruption at the top. If left unchecked, it will some day be corruption for all of us.

ACS_Solver 7mo ago

Very well said. I live in Sweden, one of the world's highest-trust societies, but I have experience from a more corrupt environment and my whole family lived most of their lives in a corrupt autocracy. This means that in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an individual not to participate. The corruption isn't something that happens at some level, it's a core part of the economy. If you try to do things by the book, you will just not get any result. You won't get to buy a limited product by waiting your turn. You won't get your kids into a better high school by having them display academic excellence. If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life. I don't want to say it's impossible but I would compare it to living off-grid in a modern Western country. It's possible but it requires a lot of dedication and that lifestyle then determines many aspects of your life.

btilly 7mo ago
As I commented elsewhere, the Russian name for this is blat. It isn't just corruption. It is a personal trust network for getting things done, that you can't get done if you follow the official rules. You get what you need through corruption, and your ability to do so strengthens your trust in your personal network. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg for an excellent explanation of it. And also an explanation of why the most important thing that Epstein did (the thing that actually made him most of it money), was run a blat network. Elites who had learned to trust that he could let them have otherwise impossible sexual experiences, were willing to pay him large amounts to broker introductions and financial deals that others couldn't.
- petsfed 7mo ago
  I was initially confused because blat (блат,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors)) sounds, to my non-slavic-speaking-ear very close to bylad (блядь, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_profanity#Bly%C3%A1d https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_profanity#Bly%C3%A1d'), and I thought "even the Russians wouldn't be that cynically direct about it, right?"

WalterBright 7mo ago

> Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer. There's an awful lot of low level corruption in the form of NGOs who receive government funding with no accountability for what the funds are spent on.

sysguest 7mo ago
well that's a different 'kind' of corruption corruption you have to GIVE to get stuff done vs corruption with loophole for RECEIVING money (I'd rather have the latter )
- WalterBright 7mo ago
  The NGOs find ways to route the received money back to the politicians in the form of campaign donations, or having a politician's friend/relative being an executive at the NGO. The NGOs also subcontract to other NGOs, who take their cut, and eventually just a trickle winds up going to the purpose of giving money to the NGO.
  - gpvos 7mo ago
    The first part sounds like it's US-specific; campaign donations are less of a thing, and more strongly controlled, in Europe. The second could happen here too, though, and probably does.
    - WalterBright 7mo ago
      I was indeed referring to the US. I don't know much about corruption in other countries.
- zdragnar 7mo ago
  The two aren't really separate, because the grifters who are on the receiving end also often end up being ones "donating" to the corrupt politicians who select their organizations to receive money.

PieTime 7mo ago

My rich friend drove home drunk from a police ball even though his parents gave him an unlimited taxi card, the police stopped him and recognized his family, and then told him to get home safely. My other friend forgot his drivers license at home while being non-white and was arrested/charged and forced to explain why he didn’t bring his license to a judge.

gpvos 7mo ago
That sounds like it's in the US? That's a known third-world country, in this respect at least.
- jkman 7mo ago
  If you don't think this would happen even in an 'idyllic' scandi country or wherever, you're mistaken.
  - stinkbeetle 7mo ago
    No way, the Norwegian Prime Minister certainly was not doing anything corrupt or trading any criminal favors with Epstein, that's all just a vast conspiracy theory.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

wtmt 7mo ago

I’ve known the difference in corruption at different levels between a country like India and a country like the US. India hasn’t had a very long authoritarian regime since its independence. Yet, corruption has existed at every touch point with the government and shows no signs of reduction. In India, getting a driver’s license or getting a passport (for which there’s a “police verification” step) or buying/selling real estate or filing a police complaint or getting some work done in a court of law or even getting the final rites of a deceased person (burial or cremation) done require bribes in most places. Also, paying a bribe means standing in line with the rest of the people who paid bribes. Things don’t move fast just because money exchanged hands. All this is to say that I don’t know what to make of your statement on authoritarian vs. democratic regimes (though you mentioned “western”). The main factor seems to be the culture and what others here have described as low trust vs high trust.

gotwaz 7mo ago

Thats a very nice story. Tell us where Morality comes from and why it hasnt gone extinct?

Aunche 7mo ago

> Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer. Believe it or not, this is how lawmaking is supposed to work in a democracy. No one in a position of power is going to be completely selfless. The Civil Rights Acts were only able to pass because NAACP promised to endorse the Republicans and Southern Democrats who were the deciding votes. Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it. For example, in the first half of the Biden administration, there was a real possibility for a minimum wage increase, but voters saw any compromise to the $15 target as weakness even though they depended the vote of Joe Manchin, a Senator of a poor state that would suffer from economic turmoil with a California level minimum wage. To be clear, it's not fair that the rich and powerful are better equipped to influence lawmaking. However, that's mainly a consequence of the utility of money and power rather than the system being fundamentally broken. Dismissing things like lobbying as corruption may provide comfortable explanation of why you're losing, but only helps the rich and powerful by eroding interest in grassroots lobbying and normalizing actual corruption (e.g. Binance insisting that its $2 billion investment be settled in Trump's stablecoin shortly after CZ was pardoned).

jimbokun 7mo ago
> Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it. This is a very succinct description of arguably the biggest problem of our democracy right now. A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt, to inoculate himself from criticism for the very overt acts of corruption he engages in. Many people seem to support him under the argument “they’re all corrupt, at least he’s not pretending to NOT be corrupt.”
- bigstrat2003 7mo ago
  > A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt... Trump didn't have to convince anyone of that. Voters already believed that, and have for some time. Trump merely had to speak to that widespread, preexisting belief.

m463 7mo ago

This reminds me of that article where a person came from china to the US for a while, and wrote a book about it when he returned. one thing he said was (in my words) - the americans don't refer to a person in charge, they refer to the constitution. so your comment makes sense. In other societies they corrupt a person, in the US they corrupt the law.

Barrin92 7mo ago

>corruption is, rather than a problem, a necessary element of society to keep things going. There's a prof at Johns Hopkins, Yuen Yuen Ang, who wrote a whole book on the topic in China. She dubbed this 'access money'. Corruption that 'greases the wheels' and removes red tape by bureaucracies, which authoritarian states are very prone to, is a net positive. It doesn't erode trust because it stimulates growth and doesn't interfere with the lives of ordinary citizens. It's basically a hack to get things done. The East Asian countries in particular tend to have this at the corporate levels. Chaebols in South Korea and Zaibatsu in Japan tend to be corrupt in that sense but it has if anything an organizing function. In most democratic countries corruption tends to happen at the individual level, think Indian police in some states who are famous for extorting travelers like road bandits. That's significantly more trust eroding and economically harmful. If you don't differentiate what kind of corruption you're talking about you can't really make sense of it.

mycall 7mo ago

How much does what you describe have to do with the continuous compounding of laws? Since 1976, on average 220 new laws are enacted by Congress per year, but this is additive as most laws do not sunset or get repealed. Also, the complexity and length of newer laws have exploded. All of this suggests more control over people and follows the tension between the rule of law and rule by law.

jongjong 7mo ago
Yeah it's like coding with CSS. If you keep adding more rules eventually stuff starts breaking and nobody knows how to fix it.

thewhitetulip 7mo ago

Democracies also have an independent media that can name, shame and investigate. In autocracies (outright or electoral), the media is used to bash only those who oppose the supreme leader. That's why when projects are late under opposition its "corruption" or "policy paralysis" But when the same happens under the party that's ruling via electoral autocracy, it's a "delayed gift"

JohnnyLarue 7mo ago

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