Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by wraptile » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

captainkrtek wrote: post #183

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…

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.

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

#212

Post by lyu07282 » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

iammjm wrote: post #138

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.

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.

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

#213

Post by onraglanroad » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

walthamstow wrote: post #164

zipy124 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#214

Post by Shitty-kitty » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

zipy124 wrote: post #147

Telemakhos wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#215

Post by peyton » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

oersted wrote: post #190

zipy124 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. The…

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.

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

#216

Post by mentalgear » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

mystraline wrote: post #153

mentalgear wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

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

#217

Post by btilly » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #174

yason wrote: post #130

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 lar…

> 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. Edi…

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.

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

#218

Post by btilly » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

ACS_Solver wrote: post #204

yason wrote: post #130

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 lar…

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…

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.

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

#219

Post by inglor_cz » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

ses1984 wrote: post #49

eru wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter too much what you subscribe to. Eg Nazi Germany still benefited from a high-ish level of social trust, despite numerous atrocities.

That’s actually the example I was thinking of. You can’t honestly say that a country where citizens inform on each other and put each other in forced labor camps based on rumor is a society where trust is high. > The Deutscherblick ("German Look") was a tense, habitual glance over the shoulder used by citizens in Nazi-era Germany before speaking about sensitive topics like food rations, Hitler jokes, or the war’s pro…

Not just labor camps. People would regularly get beheaded for anti-regime remarks. Nazi justice was keen on capital punishment for relatively minor crimes.

Nazi Germany was full of dedicated informers who would even earn money or other privileges for denouncing someone. It had about as much trust between strangers as Iran under the Revolutionary Guards might have today.

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

#220

Post by WalterBright » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

yason wrote: post #130

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 lar…

> 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.