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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

#301

Post by jimbokun »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #114
PaulHoule wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

How do you see Xi's anticorruption campaign? Is it just a club to beat political opponents with, or is there a real problem and he's trying to fix it?

Knowing nothing my guess would be he wants all the benefits of corruption accruing only to himself.

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

#302

Post by jimbokun »

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…

The US is still mostly a Rule of Law country, in the sense that courts enforce the laws as written most of the time.

But which laws are passed by Congress and signed by the President are mostly determined by financial donations more so than public opinion.

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

#303

Post by jimbokun »

nostrademons wrote: post #239
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'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 acco…

Things do work according to the rules here.

But the wealthy write the rules.

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

#304

Post by jkman »

gpvos wrote: post #267
PieTime wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you don't think this would happen even in an 'idyllic' scandi country or wherever, you're mistaken.

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

#305

Post by akdev1l »

order-matters wrote: post #223
akdev1l wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

cheaply as in not meeting standards

without corruption you could do a shitty job once and then you won’t get another contract because you did a shit job

with corruption the quality of the work won’t matter so in the extreme case you can deliver nothing at all and you’ll still keep getting contracts - In my country we call this being “plugged in”

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

#306

Post by dzonga »

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.

this is the uncomfortable truth people are unwilling to accept.

can democratic societies be corrupt, can autocratic societies be not corrupt this is also true.

accept things as they're, not as they ought to be - one of the fundamental lessons one has to learn to operate in this world.

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

#307

Post by 627467 »

The erosion of trust in democracies isn't about the act of corruption, but the nature of the promise. Democracies operate on high-resolution, precise contracts that attempt to surgically separate the Office from the Person. Ironically, democracies try to build machines out of people, while autocracies simply accept that the machine is a person.

Autocracies are low-resolution systems trading on vague promises of 'order' and the explicit assumption of prerogative. In that framework, an official favoring their own isn't 'breaking' the machine; they are exercising it. You can't lose trust in a promise of impartiality that was never made. For the democratic actor, corruption is a breach of contract; for everyone else, it’s just the weather.

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

#308

Post by creato »

ryandrake wrote: post #278
fwipsy wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/groce…

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?

It's pretty tiring seeing so many people push the bounds of acceptable behavior. It's pretty simple: should someone in your chain of management discipline you for setting aside that cheese? If yes, you are engaging in corruption.

That action is basically stochastic theft from the grocery store, because you've altered the pricing of a possibly scarce good.

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

#309

Post by btilly »

ryandrake wrote: post #278
fwipsy wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/groce…

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?

It's a slippery slope.

What rules are you breaking to do your favor? What rules do you expect someone else to break for the return favor? What rules might they later expect you to break? To what extent do you stop seeing the rules of external society as rules that you're supposed to follow?

It starts as favors.

By the time you're stealing from your employer, it's blat.

By the time you're recruiting one friend to submit paperwork to help another friend commit insurance fraud, it's still blat. But also its starting to look like something else.

Once you owe a favor to a Mafia Don, it's called organized crime. But the underlying blat is still recognizable.

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

#310

Post by ses1984 »

miroljub wrote: post #250
ses1984 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“They were the ones promising to act” Something about this doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not a historian but something tells me not everyone else was a-ok with atrocities that existed before nazis. Also, again I’m not a historian, but I believe their promise to act was also tied up in blaming others and hate. “At least they got things done” is very often the seed around which a belief in fascism crystallizes. They d…

My only claim was that things were far from perfect (profoundly broken) before Nazis came to power. They made many terrible things, but they also fixed some of the issues they promised to fix. That's why they were able to grab power. You can read more about the Weimar Republic. If it weren't so fundamentally broken, Nazis would never come to power. Stating this is not Nazi apologia but a warning of what happens if go…

The original context of this thread is the validity of china’s data in this trust survey. Interjecting with positive example of nazi germany is not even correct. There’s no way anyone can argue in good faith that nazi germany was high trust.

The nazis don’t need you to come to their defense.

Nazism is basically ignoring the will of their own people and actively working against them.

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