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Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

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

#131

Post by danny_codes »

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…

> 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.

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

#132

Post by throw-away-9876 »

miroljub wrote: post #108
eru wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#133

Post by derektank »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #113
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…

> 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…

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).

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

#134

Post by kelseyfrog »

danny_codes wrote: post #131
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…

> 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.

Is this some sort of mathematical model that doesn't play out in reality?

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

#136

Post by miroljub »

eru wrote: post #126
miroljub wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> [...] 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.

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

#137

Post by pastage »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #129
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 milit…

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.

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

#138

Post by iammjm »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #23

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…

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.

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

#140

Post by mwigdahl »

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.

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