Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies
frontiersin.org567 points by PaulHoule 8 hours ago
567 points by PaulHoule 8 hours 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.
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.
Access to corruption is never widely understood and accessible to every person, otherwise it would be written into law and stated plainly for everyone to see. Corruption is a form of economic eugenics that breeds fraudsters and cheaters who can buy into the in-group via know-how, money or aesthetics while slowing the growth of a law abiding populace that competes honestly on merit but doesn't fit the unwritten rules of admission. Any participation in that system is a spiraling force that makes the world worse, and it's always a choice.
In the US we're being led by a career fraudster who was a Wharton grad only because he had a family friend who was an admissions officer, and according to his sister, he paid someone to take his SATs for him. We have not been serious about the massive consequences of white collar fraud and corruption and we are now beginning to understand the butterfly effects.
> 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 think increasingly this describes how things work in the US, if we broaden our definition of "corruption" a bit to include things like corporations stealing your data, charging hidden fees, etc.
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 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.
Right. And oh my do I hate blat.
It's a difficult concept to translate to English because it's not synonymous with corruption or bribes. A one-time bribe transaction isn't blat. You want a school to accept your kid so you "gift" the school some supplies, that's not blat, it's a one-time thing and the school principal doesn't owe you any additional favors. Blat is more like a social network of people trading favors, and each individual transaction within your blat network may involve different things. It could be money, it could be access to a product (that you still have to pay for), it could be time or labor.
Maybe you know a plumber and he will come look at plumbing problems for you and your family, for free or for a low price. But you work at a grocery store and the plumber can always buy cheese because you set some aside for him. That's a blat relationship. And then the blat network grows - one day you mention you'd like to see a theater pay and it turns out the plumber's wife works in a theater and can help you get tickets, he'll set you up. Your husband is an engineer though so he can help tutor their child in mathematics.
None of those examples you gave sound like corruption to me, with the possible exception of tickets. It seems to me that the problem is when people who are in a position of power and responsibility abuse their power for personal ends. Plumbing or tutoring or cheese are privately held goods and surely the possessors of those goods can dispose of them how they want?
Or perhaps in all of these examples the plumber/grocer/engineer is entrusted with responsibility from the government to ration a scarce resource?
Yea, I guess I don't get it either. I know someone who can eat at a local restaurant for free whenever he wants because he knows the owner. In return, he helps the owner maintain his car and does little odd handyman jobs around the owner's house for him. Is this blat? Is it corruption? Or is it just friends doing each other favors?
They are all corruption, or corruption adjacent.
The plumber is working for a company. He's supposed to be working on an official job. But he's doing the work slowly because he's actually working on your plumbing problem.
You are working for the grocery store. You are stealing cheese from the store system that is supposed to allocate it, and making it available it to the plumber as payment for your plumber being corrupt on your behalf.
Again, the wife "who can help you get tickets" is stealing access to them. That's corruption.
The engineer who is tutoring, is paying for that act of corruption. This may or may not happen when the engineer is officially supposed to being doing something else as part of their job. If so, that's possible because people learn to look the other way for you, so that you'll look the other way for them.
And in a society where everything works this way, what do you think happens to overall economic productivity? Exactly! Which creates scarcity. Scarcity that makes the ability to get things through the blat network even more valuable!
None of that was specified. As I said earlier, the problem is not with quid pro quo; it's in the stealing which you've now specified as additional context. I could just as easily specify another context where each of these actions are legitimate. (Perhaps free tickets are part of the theater worker's perks.)
If I said "I baked a cake for my mother," then you could say "BUT YOU STOLE THE FLOUR!" It doesn't prove anything.
Well in the Soviet case, plumbing and cheese are most certainly not privately held resources. Doing such work as a plumber means you're essentially acting as self-employed or a business, which is illegal. The cheese is probably produced on a collective farm and sold at a state-owned store.
But surely the cheese case would not be okay even in a Western capitalist context where the store is privately owned. Just replace it with a more scarce product. A store employee isn't allowed to tell customers the store is out of iPhones while keeping a dozen stashed for preferred buyers.
In Western capitalist context, An apple employee can't do that because they would be stealing from Apple. If they are reselling phones that belong to them, they can dispose of them however they like.
I think the Soviet context is key. Because the state is rationing these items, it creates a black market based on personal connections. In Western society nobody cares because (ideally) the market is competitive and you can just buy from someone else.
Yes, an Apple employee doing that would be stealing from Apple. But in the capitalist context, we also have entirely legal business models that I would argue are equivalent to corruption ethically. A business that chooses to sell its products or services only to a select group of customers (entirely legal) and then picks those customers not exclusively based on their finances but based on what else they can provide. Such as access to certain people, different favors, etc. That is IMO ethically questionable.
But the Soviet everyday corruption variety of retail employees reserving cheese for someone who can return favors, that particular thing is particular to a socialist economy with a scarcity of relatively basic goods.
> the problem is when people who are in a position of power and responsibility abuse their power for personal ends
Is that not the definition of corruption?
Seems like a big part of it is an extensive barter network since the straightforward exchange of cash for services has broken down, so you need to know the right people with skills or access to, and something of value to offer them in return.
I don't know about difficult to translate, sounds a lot like being a "Good Old Boy"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/good_old_boy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_boy_network#United_States
Of course, it has several connotations depending on exact context.
I was initially confused because blat (блат,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'), and I thought "even the Russians wouldn't be that cynically direct about it, right?"
They may sound somewhat similar, but apparently have unrelated origins. блат is borrowed from Yiddish, while блядь has a Slavic root.
That said, they do sound less similar to someone who has learned a Slavic language. We learn to distinguish pairs of sounds that differ in our language. English doesn't have a lot of words with a "ya" sound, and so to us "я"and "а" are easy to confuse. It is easy to confuse "d" and "t". But the easier to hear distinction is a hard sign т versus the soft sign on дь. But hard versus soft isn't even a concept in English, so you're not listening for it.
I can confirm those words do not in fact sound very close. They're not etymologically related either, and to a fluent Russian speaker they don't sound particularly similar.
It's interesting that you contrast Sweden and Russia, considering while I have not lived and worked in Russia, I've worked with Swedes quite a bit and my experience with them is that they don't really emphasize red tape that much - in the context of development, they don't really mind if you bend the rules if it's for a good cause - what I mean is there's a general attitude of pursuing sensible outcomes over blindly following processes.
They're also not big on oversight and I got what it looked like to me a surprising amount of autonomy and responsibilty in a very short amount of time, that I felt out of depth for a while, but got accustomed to it. A very laissez faire way of work.
I felt much of the system was informal, and based on the expectation of not abusing trust. Which was very refreshing, as most companies in my experience exist in a state of bureaucratic gridlock - you need to push the change to repo X, but Y needs to sign off on it, and it depends on changes by person Z, who's held up by similar issues etc.
It's a very emotionally draining and unproductive way of working, and is usually overseen by bosses who create these processes, because they don't trust their employees, or to get a feeling of power and control, or they simply don't understand how and what their subordinates do, so they kind of try to force things into these standard flows.
Which also doesn't work, but it accountably doesn't work. Even if a days' changes take a week, and still end up lacking, you can point to that Task A is blocked by deliverable B, which is at a low priority at team Foo, so lets have a meeting with that teams manager to make sure to prioritize that in the next sprint etc etc etc.
This is how most places turn into that meme picture where there's one guy digging a hole and 5 people oversee him.
One interesting effect of LLMs getting so good at generating code, all of the process related things you mention take up a greater and greater percentage of the overall time to develop and deploy a feature, making them even more salient.
I didn't mention Russia, and I've never had the misfortune of living there - though I speak the language and am well familiar with the capture.
The Swedish term for how you describe work is "frihet under ansvar" - translated, "freedom under responsibility". That's a common approach at workplaces where you're doing qualified work, like engineering, and the meaning is that you're given a lot of flexibility and freedom in how you do your work as long as you reach the expected result and you take responsibility if things don't work out. That's good, and yes companies here are very informal. We don't even culturally like things like managers instructing employees on what to do, it's all phrased very casually.
In context of government work or the public sector, I'd say we take rules and procedures seriously, which is one of my favorite things about the country. To me, that makes interactions much more predictable than in countries with a "people before systems" culture.
One thing that I want to add - Westerners have experience of this sort of corruption, every day.
Not at a governmental level, and not powered by cash, but it is seen when working for companies.
Managers are highly corruptible - it's got next to nothing to do with the output of a given worker, instead it's about their ability to "kiss up" (something framed as "soft skills")
>in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an individual not to participate
Russia is considered a corrupt country by the West, but I have never bribed anyone and never felt that a bribe is expected.
>better high school by having them display academic excellence
Worked just fine for me.
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?
It doesn't because their premise falls apart in democracies too. Civil servants in democracies are not elected and they have the same 'stopping power'. A planning officer in the UK could just as easily decide to arbritrarily block plans they disagree with as in an authoratian country.
That's not true, in a democracy you tend to have methods of appeal that actually work, and their threat keeps the wheels of bureaucracy greased.
This is because, in principle, everything comes down to the fundamental threat that the people can remove the current government, and the government does have full control over the unelected civil servants. If they keep ignoring appeals, they'll eventually get dethroned.
There's a nice symmetry between this and the fact that the law is ultimately guaranteed by the governments monopoly on violence. They can dethrone you too if you don't comply.
When a democracy works, there can be a very effective balance between the people's leverage towards the government and the governments leverage towards the people.
In an authoritarian regime the same forces are present but they are not balanced in the same way. The people can still rise up and dethrone the ruler through violence, but that is so much harder, and it is mostly offset by the governments greater power of violence. So they can get away with so much more.
The US elected government has no control over the unelected civil servants as congress over the past 150 years did everything they could to prevent the spoils system.
Elected officials have significant influence they can bring to bear on specific decisions, general operations, and in many cases personnel decisions. That’s true at the level of individual house members and can be more true for other offices.
The rule of law and checks and balances also means these elected officeholders don’t have arbitrary control, which has a lot of upsides (and produced a professional and effective federal workforce) as well as some limits.
I swear we have a problem where we quantize to caricatures rather than recognizing tuned balance, and control theorists would probably anticipate this means things will start to swing a bit wildly.
Executive power over the civil service is an ant driving an elephant. You can say it's a good thing and it's intentional, but the fact of the matter is that the executive appoint a fraction of a percent of the positions and those positions have nominal personnel powers that they can't really use without fear of getting sued.
I think this is completely wrong. For a democracy to form, substantially everyone must have bought in. That’s the upstream, not the threat of removal. Authoritarian “regimes” are constantly under threat of removal.
This is one thing many forget, mostly due to drinking our own koolaid about the inherent superiority of liberal democracy. Authoritarian regimes almost by definition have high public support, because they couldn't function at all if even a relatively small proportion of society went against them. The people who want to overthrow them are either out of the country or insignificant. Dictatorship is impossible without populism.
This doesn't make any sense to me. There are and have been numerous authoritarian regimes that lack "high public support", now and in the past. The entire idea for most authoritarian regimes is to slowly minimize the power of those who oppose them. And then, they spend a huge amount of resources looking for dissent (SD/Gestapo, Stasi, etc.) and trying to control the societal narrative.
Any government that lacks public support collapses.
Democratic governments can operate without a plurality of support for the current government, because the population generally supports and is invested in the system of government. When democratic governments fail, there is usually very little danger of violence or economic and societal instability, because there is trust in those systems. Corruption and malfeasance harms trust in the systems of governance which democracies depend upon.
Authoritarian governments depend on confidence in the government to continue functioning. The system of government isn't necessarily trusted, the workers of government aren't necessarily trusted, but the leaders are in charge and doing things. Media manipulation and effective propaganda is certainly an important tool for these governments, but pointing out that it exists doesn't mean that it doesn't work! Propaganda totally does work, by almost all measures. Russia, China, Cuba, Iran all have high domestic support for the government.
Authoritarian governments also tend to be very stable - people know what to expect. Democracies change periodically. The stability and familiarity are key to the trust that authoritarian governments maintain. The protests in Iran prior to the current conflict are a good example of what happens when a government fails to maintain the trust of the people - the arrival of war saved the current regime from falling apart at the seams when Khomeini died of cancer in a few months and a squabble for the leadership broke out amid a collapsing economy.
I fundamentally disagree. While there may be outlier cases, the core of a democracy is the separation of powers: the judiciary, the executive, and the legislative branches. If an agent within one branch violates the rules, you have the legal recourse to appeal to the others. In an authoritarian state, there is only one pillar of power - meaning there is zero recourse for citizens.
Furthermore, I’m tired of the false equivalence some people in this thread draw between the level of corruption in democracies and authoritarian regimes. They are simply not on the same scale - if you ever experienced both you would know that.
Democracies are different from each other. There are many ways you can build a society from the same basic principles.
One key difference is the extent the authorities have discretionary powers. Can they do whatever the consider necessary to do their jobs (until the courts tell otherwise), or do they only have the powers explicitly given by the law? Common law systems tend to favor discretionary powers, but they vary on how eager the courts are to keep the officials in check. Civil law systems can be anywhere on the spectrum, but it's usually a legislative choice made in advance rather than a judicial choice made after the fact.
My guess is there is some kind of momentum with these things. If everybody demands bribes, then by not demanding bribes yourself when you are in a position to do so, you are effectively pissing away your take but remember you still need to pay bribes to everyone else because they don't care you didn't take bribes.
On the flip side, if nobody else requires bribes but you do, you will surely stick out like a sore thumb. If I don't get paid bribes and I am an influential powerful person, why should I pay you any bribes? Especially for something that is legitimate and a part of your duties?
I am not a historian but the difference is between a society with a "rule of law" and "law of the jungle". Probably high democracy correlates with rule of law, but they are not the same thing.
I don’t think this is true. 20th century authoritarians made great effort to leverage the law and use legal systems.
Rule of law doesn’t address the problem of bad laws (from bad governance).
Civil Servants in India (with traces to British era) are considered the invisible rulers of the country. Getting selected is like becoming a local lord.
Resepect for the rule of law is whats important. In Singapore you can sue the government, same as in the U.S Try to do that in China and the only thing that's going to happen, is you being sent a a reducation camp.
More easily because in a democratic society there is absolutely no risk of having something like that come out and the need for the autocrat to save face and jealously assert the civil servant acted outside of the will of the autocrat thus behead the arbitrary civil servant to cheering crowds according to popular demand.
At worst the person gets fired and is prohibited from public sector jobs at that tier of government afterwards for a period of time while the story is fresh in peoples minds, in the rare case the plutocratic owned media let's such a story come out of its mass media products about the not-paid-for bureaucratic elements of government in hopes of reducing polarization that comes from over-promoting one of the arbitrarily different parties as a means of providing the commoners what Orwell called "Two Minutes Hate" or a means of obtaining cathartic release from the tensions that making them believe they are somehow co-authors of the government to keep them engaged as willing participants.
The culture and trust of the people makes the system work or fail, not the system itself.
A planning officer, who happens to share an uncommon surname with the local MP, did just that with an application of mine recently. No site visit, no photos, no respect to the law, just NO.
That provides an easy solution: complain to your MP. At length. And then ask if the planning officer happens to be a relative, as though it has just occurred to you.
And then you might consider talking to the local paper to see if it would make a story. Also the crapper tabloids might even pay for the story.
To my knowledge, while authoritarian it's not a totalitarian state, and Singapore has fairly effective means of redress (aka, rule of law).
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.
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.
Rare outliers indicate the root problem is not the structure. All the interesting questions arise from the outliers
I guess it’s a good thing that the ruling party has been in power for about 6 decades at this point.
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.
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.
> 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 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).
> 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.”
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.
That sounds like it's in the US? That's a known third-world country, in this respect at least.
> 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
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.
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.
Thats a very nice story. Tell us where Morality comes from and why it hasnt gone extinct?
> 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.
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 )
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.
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.
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.
This reminds me of a quote, purportedly from living in a soviet state: "he who does not steal, steals from his family".
Reminds me of a report that Russians have no word for "bribe" - it's just an expected custom to give an official something 'extra' if you want anything to go forward even in the 'official' process.
That's where the US is heading with the administration's great replacement of federal officials. A kleptocracy down to its lowest ranks. As the saying goes: First the Meritocracy goes, then the Freedom goes.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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
Bullshit. We have more words for flavors of bribery than for types of snow.
The problem with meritocracy: who decides what "merit" is?
The answer is: those who are already in power.
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.
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).
> 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.
For a while before the US and other democracies left them in the dust.
Mathematics and Physics maybe but not in a way that benefited the broader society overall.
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.
Innovation is a term inherently tied to products sold at markets in product cycles that change over time. I think you're looking for the term invention.
An invention is a new device, method, or way of doing something that did not exist before. Innovation is anything that significantly improves real world processes or products. I believe the literature uses term "innovation systems" regardless of type of economies.
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.
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.
According to this [https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapo...], the US has already spent more than five trillion dollars on nuclear weapons.
I'm not trying to downplay their accomplishments, but how much of their scientific advances from the 40s-60s were due to capturing ex-Nazi tech (and scientists) or stealing from the US via their incredible intelligence efforts?
Depends on the sector.
They definitely supported a lot of their rocket science from found documentation in Peenemünde et. al. (The personnel OTOH did its best not to fall into Soviet hands, and most of them ended in America, even though some didn't make it and were captured by the Soviets.)
They had genuine excellency in mathematics and theoretical physics. First, those specializations didn't require much expensive or advanced equipment back then. Second, by their very nature, they were freer from ideological bullshit than other specializations, and that alone attracted many of the best and brightest there.
(I can confirm that even in late-stage Communist Czechoslovakia, very hard sciences were considered an intellectual haven for non-conformists. The ideologues didn't understand them and did not consider them subversive per se.)
On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never recovered to a respectable science again, not even after Lysenko lost his power.
Until today, you will find ex-Soviet textbooks of maths and physics all over the net, and people actually download them and use them to study. That does not apply in most other domains.
> On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never recovered to a respectable science again, not even after Lysenko lost his power.
This holds for "pure" biology. On the other hand, for medicine, in the East Block phage therapy was intensively developed (which in the West was barely done; instead in the Western countries there was an intense development of antibiotics).
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phage_therapy&old...
"In the Soviet Union, extensive research and development soon began in this field. [...] Isolated from Western advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Soviet scientists continued to develop already successful phage therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field hospitals. During World War II, the Soviet Union used bacteriophages to treat soldiers infected with various bacterial diseases, such as dysentery and gangrene. Soviet researchers continued to develop and to refine their treatments and to publish their research and results. However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world."
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. As a simple example of practical biology in USSR, the Eastern Bloc basically invented modern doping programs.
I'd rather call this research medical science, and with some exceptions (the Doctor's Plot during the last year of Stalin's paranoid rule), medical science tended to be less policed than biology, because even the top dogs of the Party knew that they could fall ill and require top treatment.
Unlike with Lysenko, where shortages of food for the regular population never demonstrated themselves on the nomenklatura's own dinner tables, there was some feedback mechanism that could not be ignored.
But I agree that the exact border between biology and medical science is murky.
Your examples do kind of reinforce the point being made.
Mathematics and (theoretical) physics are capital-light research sectors. Weapons platforms and space technology were state managed (I.e. didn’t require private sector capital financing).
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”.
Did you meant to write "You *can't* make massive leaps in technology or medicine" instead of *can*?
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.
I am from Brazil, and there is a famous politician there that has the non-official slogan of "Steals but Does". He is Paulo Maluf. "Everyone" knows he is corrupt. But people vote for him anyway, because he get things done, and he doesn't engage in certain kinds of corruption.
That is the problem, how you get corruption to go the way you want?
Lots of politicians see Paulo Maluf, and think they can imitate him, that they will be beloved by the public and steal money somehow and line their own pockets, except those are too self-serving or too incompetent to pull that off properly, so they steal in ways that go against the public.
So for example in one city where I lived, one mayor stole the money from the kids lunch, resulting in hungry kids. Another mayor stole ludicrous amounts of money from garbage collection services, the result is that the city ended with debts in the billions while being a tiny city (it has 100k people, yet has debts bigger than cities with millions of people).
Paulo Maluf meanwhile built lots of useful infrastructure that is still in use. (also hilariously he used to brag a lot using the phrase "Maluf that did it!", one time some comedic journalists went to a bridge opening, and asked him who did the bridge, he replied: "Maluf didn't do this bridge. But he did the two roads the bridge are connecting, so there is no bridge without Maluf!")
In a sense, he is not unlike a high ranked executive or business owners. These people usually demand high pay for their work because of how important their decisions are for the well-being of the company.
Same idea here except that it happens under the table. Elected officials usually get a fixed pay, and often, it is not that high compared to the importance of their work. What Paulo Maluf is proposing is essentially "I am going to pay myself well (through corruption), but I will do what's best for the city".
The copy part sounds a lot like Cargo Culting.
Copying the visible behavior but not doing the actual part that matters.
Also incredibly common in corporate.
I would vote for an infrastructure kleptocrat any day over someone that will actually enforce the insane zoning and code law we have here. A big problem in USA is you can only get many building or infrastructure things done maybe if you have millions to "influence" politicians. The opportunity to have a politician rob me of 10,20% of the construction costs and meanwhile actually be able to build a condo or something on my own property would be amazing.
You might reconsider when your richer neighbor paid the politician to block you or build an asphalt plant next to your new condo. It's a slippery slope. Or how about when the fire department starts asking for a little something to keep your condo "safe"
Costing money to block me rather than $0 is an improvement.
I have no fire department where I live, nor really any effective police. We don't have public infrastructure nor public roads or anything like that. People here do not use public services and our taxes aren't high enough to pay for them, they are almost $0. We do have zoning and codes, but that's sustainable only because it's funded by enforcement fines, otherwise you're on your own.
Where are you?
Rural southwest USA
You don't have public roads? in the USA? Even if rural? Ah, maybe those roads are maintained by the state? Even so - those are public, no?
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
>those people fixing the roads are incentivized to do the work cheaply
this incentive exists with or without corruption
Exactly, sounds inherently unsafe and the work is only done superficially to keep more EU funds coming (like in Hungary).
At some point the process to prevent corruption costs more than the actual corruption. The process to award the contract for the Obamacare website wasn't corrupt, but it cost $700 million and the app didn't even work. In a corrupt system that contract would have gone to a company owned by some official's cousin, and he would have bid $100 million knowing he could pocket 50, but it would have got done because he knows the last thing he needs is an investigation. That's kind of how it works in China.
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.
Your example isn't corruption. That's just crime. But it does do massive damage.
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?
> Corruption isn’t crime?
Societies have very different opinions which kinds of corruption are perfectly fine, and which kinds are criminal.
> 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.
Yeah, exactly. One example of a low-trust society was the US in the decade after 1929.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> In China, its considered a joke career.
Is there a source for this or is more of a vibes thing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Funny that you take London as an example of Western Europe's low-trust environment, entirely ignoring the fact that 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.
> But business wise, western Europe is still relatively high trust.
Maybe because the population actually working and doing business is still Western European? But that won't last long if current trends and policies continue.
> [...] 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.
> 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.
The page I linked shows 53,8% white in 2021. Even if you count the majority of whites as West Europeans (and not East Europeans), they were under 50% in 2021, probably even less today.
If you have more accurate and up to date data, please share.
But that misses the point. I don't say London is not high-trust because of the non-Western population. I say London is not a western city anymore because of its population.
London is a western city, because of its location and culture.
London has been a city of traders and other foreigners since at least the days of the Romans.
> London is a western city, because of its location and culture.
The dominant culture of the local population is not "Western" anymore.
> London has been a city of traders and other foreigners since at least the days of the Romans.
Is it?
Let's look at the official data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_London
Percentage of white population in London over the years:
- 1961 - 97,7%
- 1966 - 95,5%
- 1971 - 92,6%
- 1981 - 86,6%
- 1991 - 79,8%
- 2001 - 71,15%
- 2011 - 59,79%
- 2021 - 53,8%
It's clear that, up until very recently, London was a city of traders and other foreigners living there among the highly homogenous local population.
When a person immigrates, they enrich the social structure of the land they immigrate to.
When a population immigrates, they change the social structure of the land they immigrate to to be similar to the culture they came from. This is why London, New York, and other cities are becoming exactly the types of places that the Welcome Refugees people thought they were saving people from. Turns out that places aren't rotten, the people populating them are.
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.)
> 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.
It looks like a tautology to me. Like: "Corruption erodes social trust in places where social trust exist and is key for the political system."
I think culture and education play much bigger roles than anything else, all the sources I find show Germany and France having similar level of corruption (on top of being geographically and economically close) but completely different level of "social trust".
China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tell
The corruption numbers break down into: (1) They didn't ask the question in China, (2) They asked somebody if they paid a bribe or if taking a bribe is every justifiable, and (3) "Expert estimates of the extent to which the executive, legislative, judiciary, and bureaucracy engage in bribery and theft, and the making and implementation of laws are susceptible to corruption"
For (2) China doesn't look too different from the U.S., for (3) experts think it has gotten much worse since the time of Mao but I'd say China is on the honest side of the "global South".
Note that lay perceptions of corruption are widespread in the US
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51398-most-americans-see-c...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/185759/widespread-government-co...
https://www.occrp.org/en/news/survey-reveals-corruption-as-t...
though unlike India I think very few Americans have paid a bribe to a cop. See also
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...
It's the institutional part which is lacking in France. Look at the budget of the ministry of justice in France per capita and in Germany. Germany spend twice as much and has twice as much judges per capita than France (and everything which goes with it like clerks).
My company took the biggest telecom company in France to court for a violation of our license on a soft, license was GPLv2, we won, but it took 12 years.
Justice is a very poor and slow institution in France. For the same countries the budget of police forces per capita are nearly the same for example.
Also Germany spends more than France on defence while having a lot less to show for, with France having nuclear weapons, nuclear subs, aircraft carriers and a much more capable military overall with less money. Germany is the poster child of government waste. If I were a taxpayer there I'd want my money back and/or bureaucrats going to jail.
> China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tell
There are a few reasons for that that I can imagine:
- China is one of very few autocracies that has managed to significantly improve the standard of living of most of its population.
- The public trials and (sometimes) executions of allegedly corrupt individuals might help improve the perception of corruption.
- The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence people to declare a higher level of social trust than they actually have, even if the poll is supposedly "confidential" and "only for scientific purposes".
>The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence people to declare a higher level of social trust than they actually have.
This 100%.
Political imprisonment and reeducation camps are antithetical to any definition of a high trust society that I would subscribe to.
China was getting better for a long time. XI is changing that. Change is slow though and he is not rushing corruption though it seems to be increasing. He has purged some corrupt people as well making things slightly better in the short term - but he values loyalty over competence and so his short term changes are for less corruption but long term increase it.
That is China is a complex country and books (which are not written and many cannot be for decades yet) are needed to understand this, not a short comment box. [This applies to every other country anyone here mentions]
Social trust is high because there are pretty heavy handed control measures over the population with havy costs. Thats more of a fear based society than trust. Government can giveth and government can taketh.
1. Fear of a capricious state can cause survival-motivated compliance which can appear as "trust" in coarse measurements. Meaning, you simply do fewer of those things that would provide opportunities for distrust in contexts where that could happen.
2. In a relatively severe, but consistent regime, the high penalties for violating trust in everyday cases (crime) act as a deterrent.
3. Fear may cause people to be selective and mindful about their social associations based on stronger proofs of trustworthiness. You might tell a Hitler joke to someone you have used more energy/caution to "vet", but avoid being too casual in environments of undetermined trustworthiness.
We are probably meant to assume ceteris paribus and only vary the dimension of corruption.
I think you’re right that culture plays a key role. For example if small bribes are customary, that doesn’t erode trust, that’s just the way things are.
Kinda; authoritarism runs on bribes and nepotism, of course corruption would have lesser effect here, it's expected
It's not a tautology because it's not guaranteed. There are plenty of plausible sounding claims that fail to be true. That's why science is needed: to provide _empirical_ evidence for/against a claim.
Was talking about this with some colleagues who are from Ukraine, Russia, and other countries.
In the US, it seems corruption is only allowed at the top. If you tried to bribe your way out of a traffic ticket as a regular person, you'd get in big trouble, then meanwhile the president pardons wealthy fraudsters [1].
Meanwhile, in countries like Russia, everyone can get in on the action. A colleague of mine told me if he were to get drafted to the war, he knew exactly how much to pay and who to pay off locally to get his name off the list. It's equal opportunity corruption.
[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/28/nikola-founder-trevor-milt...
I'm Lithuanian familiar with soviet type of corruption and post soviet Lithuania which did a lot to remove corruption (also live in asia rn) and your assessment is somewhat correct but it's a terrible system.
The availability of corruption is a huge grease for economic activity and weirdly - order - but soviet type of corruption has a massive flaw that bad corruption bets (big impact, high publicity) would be mostly unpunished. In asia however it's quite interesting how the face saving and family culture corrects for that a bit as bad corruption bets will backfire despite lack of legal framework for cleanup.
Unfortunately it's _not_ equal opportunity corruption as low economic classes are left out and suffer the most, the cruelty of these systems are really hard to put in the words of a single comment. This also creates a massive overhead for corruption beaurocracy where entire positions are found not on actual product or activity but corruption "middle managers".
So despite your friends take this is not a good system on it's own and merely a relief for terrible autocratic rule. Autocrats actually actively allow corruption as this relief is what keeps them in power precisely because people with some power get a relief and poor class bears the slave worker burden.
I've had Indian coworkers remark similarly. The way they put it was "In India, corruption is democratized. Everybody gets in on the act, and everybody can profit a little bit. In the U.S, corruption is reserved for the very top; only they can profit, and everybody else just suffers. Personally, I prefer the Indian system."
Was kinda eye-opening as a native-born U.S. citizen. I'd always just assumed things worked according to the rules here, but then after he said it, I started seeing corruption at the top all the time.
It's equal opportunity corruption.
...and look how nice it sounds it live in Russia.
I think modern democracies and autocracies are really just proxies for societies where wealth begets power and where power begets wealth, respectively.
A rich person buying their way into power (either through gaining a formal position or influence) robs the people of that society of their power, which is a limited resource. There is no upside to it, if it were good for the people at large there would be no need for the corruption.
Conversely, a powerful person enriching themself can be a good thing. A crony being put in charge of a state owned corporation, for example, doesn't really take anything away from the common person. It's not like you were in line to be the CEO of a random oil company. So long as your material condition is improving, the rising tide is lifting your boat, who cares if the tide is also lifting someone else's bigger boat. This sort of corruption aligns the interests of the powerful with the economic well being of the nation - the better things are run, the more comfortable the leaders will be - and it's certainly preferable to other ways they could potentially abuse their power. Who wants to be lead by someone so incompetent that they can't find a way to skim a little off the top?
We in democratic society also don't really mind too much if a person achieves tremendous wealth so long as they don't dilute our power. Whether they be startup founders, business moguls, movie stars, rock stars, reality tv stars, socialites spending daddy's money, so long as they stay out of politics and avoid accusations of heinous crimes we not only put up with them, we idolize them. That's not to say that the Kardashians are morally equivalent to the current CEO of Gazprom in terms of how they gained their fortune, but none of us are under the illusion that their wealth is the consequence of hard work providing a much needed good or service to society at large, and if they leverage their status to make even more money that's not going to erode our social trust in any meaningful way.
That's a really interesting point of view, which puts things in terms I hadn't thought of before.
Where it breaks down is the stage where the cronies being put in charge aren't competent, and their only qualification is their proximity to power. Then (too much of?) the tide gets diverted, and most of the boats stop rising.
I can think of no examples where a society that permits leadership-by-crony did not reach that end-state.
And completely understandable once you understand the narratives of both system.
An autocrat is supposed to be "Powerful" beyond all else and typically aren't required to be accountable to anyone so as long as the narrative of "Powerfully competent" holds corruption is merely an part of the narrative.
In democracies the leadership is very much meant to be by and off the people and held accountable under the same legal standard they enforce on everyone else, and when that leadership start to act with the impunity of an "entrenched" aristocracy and stop following the rules the narrative breaks.
And lets not forget that the original feudal aristocracy held their position almost entirely by the mechanism of unchallengeable property rights in an zero sum economy* and we begin to understand why the accumulation of property/wealth into fewer and fewer hands is a almost unmanageable threat to the narratives of western democracy.
*We are returning to an zero sum economy as the planet have essentially run out of unowned/unused resources and that means that modern western economic solutions(grow grow grow) is simply not available anymore.
This does sort of feel like the kind of thing I might think and wonder about and then do a lot of work doing a study and some research and writing up an article and in the end everyone says "yeah, no duh!"
I can’t speak to this area of research, but studies for obvious things are still quite important. Maximal surprise is not a goal of science, nor is it an effective way to advance knowledge in a field.
I think of the recent study with raccoons how they like to solve puzzles. That was something well-known but not actually scientifically demonstrated and measured until now.
The expectation that science must necessarily "surprise" us is a terrible habit. It creates an unhealthy lust for novelty, a trivialization of what it means to "know" or to "understand" by conflating it with familiarity, and it can impede understanding, because the person in question will deny the straightforward and hunt for the "surprise" which becomes a criterion for truth. It can also feed into an incoherent categorical skepticism of human rational powers and tantalize superstitious, gnostic appetites.
Science (broadly understood) looks for explanation and for verification. The point is to understand. Many interesting things may be found by analysis of what is known.
Corruption erodes social trust where social trust exists.
I think this research really suffers by not acknowledging that there are different types and scopes of corruption, and these different types impact societies in considerably different ways.
The "four types of corruption" breakdown by Yuen Yuen Ang I think is really informative here, with its two-axis breakdown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#:~:text=Petty%20the...).
Amalgamating all corruption into a single corruption index doesn't distinguish between these types, and it seems reasonable that different "flavors" of corruption impact social trust in different ways.
In a good autocracy, and a good democracy, people will trust the system will push out the corruption as the right people become privy to it. In a bad autocracy, the people had no power to make the decision and therefore can't even hold each other liable. In a bad democracy, people view their fellow denizen at fault. It all boils down to who holds the power, because then people know who to blame and give less trust to when things go south.
IMO corruption is just a symptom. Everything goes back to one source point: lack of well-educated citizens who can push back without hesitation. Note that the two conditions: well-educated and can push back without hesitation. Missing any of them and the foundation cracks.
Also I wouldn't bother comparing corruption between democracies and authoritarians. I have lived under both and the only thing I see is the common human nature represented in different ways. And I see "lack of well-educated citizens who can push back without hesitation" everywhere.
I guess that's why we are in a world that keeps competing for incompetence.
In Mexico, you either pay the bribe or go to jail on trumped up charges. I don’t see what education level has to do with it.
That's why there are two pieces. You also need to push back. Collectively pushing back, not just individually. That's the only way.
Is there a reason not to simplify this to: corruption erodes social trust more in high-trust societies than in societies where trust is already degraded? Meaning: is the type of government actually the controlling factor, or just code for high vs. low trust societies?
Of course. If there's no trust, you can't erode it (pointing finger to his temple meme jpg).
Of course. Because in a dictatorship your social trust is based only on other things than the govt while in a democracy your social trust is in the govt as well.
In a democracy, corruption is seen as the moral exception (if not impossibility), when it happens it's a bigger wound than in autocracy where the baseline is lower.
This resonates strongly from an African perspective. In countries like Kenya, corruption is almost an open secret — people expect it, budget for it, and navigate around it. Paradoxically that "normalized" corruption causes less acute trust erosion because nobody trusted the system deeply to begin with. In democracies the social contract is explicit — you voted, you participated, you expected accountability. Betraying that feels personal. The delta between expectation and reality is where trust dies. The real question isn't which system suffers more — it's which system has better recovery mechanisms when trust breaks down.
>accompanied by efforts to rebuild and maintain social trust: swift, visible accountability when corruption is discovered
This is essential - too often what we see is persecution of whistle-blowers instead ( with the wrong-headed logic that it's the revealing of wrong doing that's somehow the problem, rather than the wrong doing itself ).
Well yeah social trust is worse in autocracies, you'd imagine that corruption would be lower on the list of problems you perceive having when 1) you don't have a good press to report on them 2) you can be sent to jail basically wherever
like people in democracies do not know how good they have it!
So following this through, does it mean that autocracy is the preferred government for a country that sleepwalked past the tipping point where corruption is entrenched because the institutions that could uproot it are themselves deeply corrupt?
No, it just means that in autocracy everyone assumes institutions are corrupt, so no trust is broken. If you don't have trust, it cant be broken.
Perhaps ironically, there are still institutions that to some extent rely on social trust in autocracies. For example, black market is an institution. As is "bribe economy" – the general understanding that getting X done generally costs you around Y, where Y is not arbitrary. Then there's the whole thing about criminal organizations that typically rely on social cohesion and upholding all kinds of rules.
This resonates strongly from an African perspective. In countries like Kenya, corruption is almost an open secret.people expect it, budget for it, and navigate around it. Paradoxically that "normalized" corruption causes less acute trust erosion because nobody trusted the system deeply to begin with. In democracies the social contract is explicit The real question isn't which system suffers more, but it's which system has better recovery mechanisms when trust breaks down.
What corruption does to communism and democracy in Russia in years 1985 to 1999 is well documented in latest Adam Curtis documentary series Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_1985%E2%80%931999:_Trau...
Everyone works for their community, and rewarding those who contribute the most by consensus is trust, regardless of gender, race, skill, or inheritance. The opposite is corruption.
Something a lot of people don't understand about operating within a corrupt system -- the person paying the bribe is usually the one being controlled.
Yes, those who pay receive special benefits, but it is against the background threat of reprisal if you cease paying.
Hey, that's a nice software company, it would be a shame if something happened to it. By the way, my son is raising money for his new crypto venture. You should think about investing.
People generally are saying the same thing, the more trust exists the more you got to lose.
However, it's not that simple there's a different kind of trust that comes with these types of social structures and they usually trust that as long as they keep their head down nothing will change. You can obviously draw parallels with conservatives here, but in reality people more often than not just want to live their life.
Democracies tend to be a lot more active politically and promote transparency so there is trust that your government is being transparent and that your vote matters. Of course if you find out that your political activism and votes don't accomplish anything due to corruption you check out and start disliking your government. Autocracies don't have political movements to begin with (exceptions apply) so it is way less impactful. There's way more comparisons to be made, but in general they roughly boil down to the same thing.
Yeah just look at ycombinator, they are all infected with bots
The top is always corrupt. When the bottom realizes this, then the poison has spread.
The Dictator's Handbook explained this in 2011: corruption in autocracies is the governance model — it's how you pay a small winning coalition to keep you in power . So citizens aren't surprised by it, they're just not in the coalition. The paper's contribution is putting a multilevel regression on what Bueno de Mesquita already drew as a diagram.
thanks
The good news is, we found a clever workaround for the corruption problems in government. The bad news...
Well obviously.
> From V-Dem, we use two measures of democratic quality: the Regimes of the World (RoW) classification and the Liberal Democracy Index. The RoW (Lührmann et al., 2018) is a categorical measure distinguishing closed autocracies (no multiparty elections), electoral autocracies (multiparty elections that are not free and fair), electoral democracies (free elections but limited liberal protections), and liberal democracies (free elections with strong liberal protections).
by "democracy" they of course mean liberalism
Yes. In this sense the cold war never ended.
The country I live in consistently ranks as rather non-corrupt but I would disagree with this assessment since I know that our biggest party (where I was a member for some years) is slavishly loyal to one of our main 'stock market owner families', and would consider a lot of legal practices and regulations highly corrupt. Clearly this is also outside of the scope of this study.
They classify Germany and the UK as democracies. That's precious. Germany has sanctioned its own journalists as has the UK. I don't remember the number of ordinary citizens arrested in Germany for social media posts but I know the UK number was 12000 per year.
Now let's look at the US:
Tucker Carlson is under the gun for allegedly being a Russian or is it Iranian agent. But the US is a democracy.
https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-foreign-agent-charge...
Do you have a source for the 12k arrested in the UK?
I'm asking because all I could find was a list on Twitter that didn't cite any sources itself and also had very implausible numbers (including he 12k/year for the UK). Implausible based on the lived reality of friends of mine living in e.g. the UK or Germany.
Corruption is rife in the West. Wealth managers wine and dine with governments and essentially order policies that nobody voted for that continue to be developed regardless of which party won the elections. Same faces meet with new cohorts of politicians and continue to get their way whilst security services supposed to protect democracy hide their heads in the sand.
See things like Digital ID, censorship, surveillance - nobody voted for this, but certain wealth managers want this to happen and so it takes priority over issues that actually people would want to be resolved (housing, healthcare to name a few).
I am in Germany. Apparently very democratic place. However nothing happens what people voted for. There is always few groups advertising affordable living in Munich. Never happened. Every year the rent climbs to new never seen high. The system very obviously does not work as advertised. The conspiracist in me however thinks, that the system works as intended.
That's not what you voted for. Homeowners, on the other hand, did vote for it. In most countries they're the majority, and they're better at mobilizing politically. Autocracies are probably less likely to have the same issue because the leaders are petrified of a revolt from the lower classes. In a democracy, the majority (homeowners) will vote away your money.
> There is always few groups advertising affordable living in Munich. Never happened. Every year the rent climbs to new never seen high.
Well your population grows trough migration, your land does not and your construction doesn't match either in a long term inflationary environment with every incentive pointing in the continuation of that path.
See also Canada, Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Australia, etc, etc
The purpose of a system is what it does.
"As intended" is something that doesn't exist at all.
I have been thinking about this more and more the past few points, to the point where I feel like I have to run for office as a social duty. (USA) There are so few politicians who give more than lip service to stopping corruption.
Our districts are embarrassing. People tolerating the blatant corruption by the Trump administration is something I don't understand. They will get upset about Epstein, but don't care about the corruption. (See for example the recent Jared Kushner contracts for one of many examples) Congress campaigns funded by PACs.
Phrases of interest: "Conflict of interest". "Shame". It is wild how people still vote for corrupted politicians, which is almost all of them. My parents are the prototype. If you take money from corporate-funded interests, you still have a conflict of interest, even if you aren't caught acting in the favor of those corporations.
Problem is a lot of people engage in textbook expressive responding when it comes to corruption. Everybody doesn’t like it allegedly, but a lot of people are willing to look the other way if they agree with the policy being carried out and, more importantly, politically aligned with the person engaging in the corruption.
The bar they set is incredibly high unless it involves a politician they don’t support, then a rumor is enough for them to go “yeah I knew it.”
and this is a good thing.
Corruption makes things more democratic in an autocracy by providing a mechanism of soft power by people not directly in the autocratic office.
Corruption makes things less democratic in a pure democracy by granting more soft power to some individuals' 1/N office ( N= population size).
> Corruption makes things more democratic in an autocracy...
Technically, maybe yes? But autocrats tend to use "de facto authorized" corruption as a carrot for their loyal supporters, and "arrested for corruption" as the corresponding stick. Which leads to outcomes little different from an absolute dictatorship.
Except the autocrat now has a convenient scapegoat for problems affecting the populace - corrupt officials - and a nice narrative for explaining the sudden removals of officials whose loyalties or performance were not to the autocrat's liking.
yeah, no shit.
[dead]
[dead]
BS data is BS. On what basis have they classified each country as a democracy or an autocracy?
Edit: this article is an example of a circular research. Create a narrative branding target entities - in this case countries - with a positive or negative characteristic. For some reason the Scandinavians revel in this.
Another example of compromised organisations are the various US govt funded "think tanks" which publish annual reports which are then used to classify whoever they want with whatever they want. Which then the US regime uses as a pretext for unprovoked attacks.
The West is an example of systemic corruption at the highest levels, surpassed only their citizens collective ignorance and hypocrisy.
Speaking of "the West" is dumb, ignorant, and worst of all, not really helpful or insightful. Just as speaking of "the East" or "Asia". It just doesn't make sense to make these broad generalized statements about various multiple self-governing countries spanning hundreds of millions of people and thousands of square kilometers.
What a perfect example to demonstrate the "collective ignorance and hypocrisy of western people" they were mentioning. There is a dichotomy in "Corruption", it is weaponized as a tool of neocolonialism in the continued subjugation of the global south and systematically downplayed and re-framed in the west.
The west is just a shorthand for countries within the global north that are part of the international liberal order. This is all well established terminology, including "western imperialism" and "western hegemony". Its not our fault you are hearing these words for the very first time.
Corruption in democracies is misinformation and a conspiracy theory nowadays.
The word democracy is so overused, the US is a plutocracy for instance.
Coffee is a roasted bean with hot water taking its essence.
What you're saying is that with the shift to autocracy, all these trust problems will become manageable?
once you know the way to solve problems is to pay off the people with power you start to trust people again, because things are working the way you were told they would.
or in other words: people in power are corrupt, but they usually are corrupt equally for everybody.