Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

frontiersin.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 414 posts

Re: Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

#21

Post by lm28469 »

retep_kram wrote: post #2

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

https://ourworldindata.org/corruption

https://ourworldindata.org/trust

Re: Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

#22

Post by cucumber3732842 »

dzink wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

#23

Post by SanjayMehta »

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.

Re: Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

#24

Post by GZGavinZhao »

dzink wrote: post #19

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…

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

Re: Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

#25

Post by PepperdineG »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #11
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #6

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.

Re: Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

#26

Post by the__alchemist »

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.

Re: Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

#28

Post by Forgeties79 »

the__alchemist wrote: post #26

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…

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.”

Re: Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

#29

Post by PunchyHamster »

retep_kram wrote: post #2

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."

Kinda; authoritarism runs on bribes and nepotism, of course corruption would have lesser effect here, it's expected

Re: Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

#30

Post by rob74 »

lm28469 wrote: post #21
retep_kram wrote: post #2

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 https://ourworldindata.org/c…

> 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".

Post reply on HN