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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

#311

Post by geodel »

BrenBarn wrote: post #290
ACS_Solver wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I'd add tipping system for various services, but specially restaurants etc in definition of corruption too. Here blame pass around between employees, owners, restaurant associations, govt officials making/ passing laws etc. But end result is customer keep paying extra charges or being labeled as worst customers.

I love how media is in this game , printing endless articles how customers are really supposed to pay tips because poor server. And even when customers are revolting against tipping culture it is going from 25% to 22% as a way of speaking truth to power.

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

#312

Post by WalterBright »

gpvos wrote: post #272
WalterBright wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was indeed referring to the US. I don't know much about corruption in other countries.

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

#313

Post by greedo »

t-3 wrote: post #287
greedo wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that you're underestimating the power of authoritarianism. For Iran, I don't think the government was in any danger prior to the war. It was capable of exerting control through the state apparatus quite easily. And look at North Korea, you think that the people under that government are supportive? That's nonsense on stilts.

Also, that collapse you refer to can take an awful long time under authoritarian control.

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

#314

Post by ray023 »

Of course, it does, because democracy is FAKE, and the corruption exposes this very fact. It's never the people (Demos) who actually control its fake freedoms that are getting taken away that gives the elites to control nations. Zionists and others control so-called democracies.

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

#316

Post by gkoz »

btilly wrote: post #218
ACS_Solver wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 explan…

What a blast from the past, this word. Exactly right. It was a spectrum from a sort of mutual aid to regular corruption to outright mafia.

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

#317

Post by torginus »

jimbokun wrote: post #293
torginus wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

They always have. I would guess the majority of people employed and salaries paid on a given project basically goes to waste. Just today I had an hour-long meeting about an impact of a bug, which was clear as day with a simple fix, but would've involved so much red tape to fix (for no good reason), that the couple minute fix-deploy-test-merge cycle would've taken at least a week of effort spread across people.

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

#318

Post by bentt »

I've often thought that in the USA we could use a type of crime that's called "Betrayal of the Public Trust". It is reserved specifically for public servants and elected officials. The idea is that if you choose to do that job, it is contingent on the public's trust. If you betray that trust it is important to recognize that specifically. This should include harsher sentencing.

This should be a deterrent to those who would pursue power for its opportunities in unethical behavior. It would also be a way for society to recognize the seriousness of this breach.

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

#319

Post by m463 »

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…

This reminds me of that article where a person came from china to the US for a while, and wrote a book about it when he returned.

one thing he said was (in my words) - the americans don't refer to a person in charge, they refer to the constitution.

so your comment makes sense. In other societies they corrupt a person, in the US they corrupt the law.

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

#320

Post by ACS_Solver »

btilly wrote: post #297
fwipsy wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyth…

My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that it is easy to forget that others might not get the context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish live, but not remembering to remind people that water is wet. That said, there were contextual clues. If you go back, I said, "You get what you need through corruption..." The next reply was agreeing and…

> My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that it is easy to forget that others might not get the context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish live, but not remembering to remind people that water is wet.

Yes. It's fascinating, HN is in most ways a bubble with a particular kind of leadership, but sometimes these cultural differences shine through.

To me, it's completely obvious that in the case of a plumber working through blat, he's not just legitimately doing extra work (assuming the law allows that in the first place). Of course it means the plumber is working on your pipes while he's supposed to be doing his actual job, or maybe he actually does it outside the hours but when he needs to replace some part for you, he steals it from his work. But apparently to people who grew up in a different environment, what comes to mind is legitimate side business.

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