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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

#341

Post by pixl97 »

thatcat wrote: post #328
btilly wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are all corruption, or corruption adjacent. The plumber is working for a company. He's supposed to be working on an official job. But he's doing the work slowly because he's actually working on your plumbing problem. You are working for the grocery store. You are stealing cheese from the store system that is supposed to allocate it, and making it available it to the plumber as payment for your plumber being corr…

Would you say the scarcity is what starts the corruption? Like you can't get a plumber so you have to use your personal network or there aren't enough tickets so you have to obtain one through your personal network, etc?

It's probably better to look at a system wide level than any one shortage. For example is there no plumbers because school loans to learn apprenticeship were robbed by the rich, and the actual plumbers aren't able to get more licenses because of the graft they' have to pay for an additional one.

It's never just one thing.

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

#342

Post by fwipsy »

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…

Yes, the context was talking about what we would call corruption, but given that I read the comment as trying to explain things to a western reader, I think it's worth calling out the unstated assumption that makes this actually bad rather than just friends swapping favors.

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

#343

Post by pyrolistical »

fwipsy wrote: post #259
ACS_Solver wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. And oh my do I hate blat. It's a difficult concept to translate to English because it's not synonymous with corruption or bribes. A one-time bribe transaction isn't blat. You want a school to accept your kid so you "gift" the school some supplies, that's not blat, it's a one-time thing and the school principal doesn't owe you any additional favors. Blat is more like a social network of people trading favors, a…

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…

Corruption like almost all things fall on a spectrum.

Those are examples of soft corruption

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

#344

Post by hunterpayne »

trollbridge wrote: post #112
nyeah wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. One example of a low-trust society was the US in the decade after 1929.

One of the "innovations" in the bank runs of 1929 was that a farmer or business owner would lose all their savings in the bank, because of the bank run. However, the loans they owed to that bank were still good, and would get bought by an "investor" for pennies on the dollar. They no longer had their bank account to make their normal loan payments from, yet the full repayments were still due, despite the original ban…

I'm sure that happened at least once, but most of the time it didn't. This is where the concept of the penny auction came from. Those were far more common. Basically locals prevented outsiders from bidding in foreclosure auctions by either tricking or physically preventing them from getting to the farm (where the actual auction was held). Then the original owner bought the farm back for a few pennies as there were no other bidders.

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

#345

Post by groundzeros2015 »

hunterpayne wrote: post #333
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this is true. 20th century authoritarians made great effort to leverage the law and use legal systems. Rule of law doesn’t address the problem of bad laws (from bad governance).

Don't confuse having courts with rule of law. Read up in the thread, someone mentioned how important separation of powers is. I can't stress how true this idea is. In authoritarian regimes, courts are under the control of the dictator, not a separate branch who will overrule even their own political party (as just happened in the US and regularly happens all over the west).

The claim here was rule of law. Separation of powers is not equivalent.

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

#346

Post by SanjayMehta »

fer wrote: post #94
SanjayMehta wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One sided sanctions on journalists for publishing is a sign of autocracy, something you'd expect Idi Amin to do, but then it's Germany, I guess the Austrian influence still exists after 90 years.

>everything I don't like is Nazi Calling autocracy the sanctioning someone for being on the literal payroll of RT, state media of a hostile country where extrajudicial executions of journalists were commonplace before Roscomnadzor was given near absolute powers over media is, again, a very hard sell.

I disagree. As an amused third party I see no difference between Europe, the US, China, Russia.

It's just that Europe and the US use more words to justify their censorship. Hypocrisy par supreme.

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

#347

Post by ACS_Solver »

scj wrote: post #337
btilly wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could you elaborate (hopefully with real examples) of what it's like to be in the out group with few connections (or perhaps no connections) in regards to a particular good / service?

Then you get worse good and services. Lower quality or longer wait, or don't get it at all depending on the good. The effect isn't that different from being poor in a capitalist economy. In a capitalist economy, it's mostly money that determines what you can buy. In the Soviet blat-heavy economy, money didn't matter as much connections.

It was perfectly possible to have a decent salary but nothing to spend it on because the better items just aren't available. Maybe there's some delicacy you enjoy, or a special item you want like a cassette player and you could afford those if the store actually had them, but they don't. In that situation, your ability to buy more desirable items depended more on your connections or perseverance in doing things "the hard way" like queuing for hours to buy bananas, or recycling enough kilograms of paper to buy a book.

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

#348

Post by hunterpayne »

hedora wrote: post #66
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (expen…

As the US transitions into a high corruption / low trust environment, business investment disappears. Trump tried to solicit bribes from anthropic, retaliated by violating the DoW contracts when they didn’t pay, and then somehow forced Dario to publicly apologize for bringing the matter to light. Do you really think this is how the US will win at AI? Look at the car industry, where the corruption and coercion started…

"Do you really think this is how the US will win at AI"

Define "win at AI". Because this kind of idea seems more at home in some fact free political discussion. Many models are already open. Anyone who can get GPUs can run them. Its hard (for anyone) to win in a nationalistic sense when that's the case. That being said, I really don't like Dario but I still don't want him to be exhorted by the government.

PS take your meds, the numbers you present are clearly a fabrication.

PPS Interest rates are the most important factor influencing the amount of industrial investment in the US...always have been.

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

#349

Post by pyrolistical »

mb7733 wrote: post #120
vlovich123 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused. Corruption isn’t crime? I know white collar crime was controversial 100 years ago, but are we back to arguing whether corruption is crime or not?

Corruption is crime but not all crime is corruption. Stealing copper isn't corruption.

Not all corruption is crime, but prob ought to be put into the laws to become crimes

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

#350

Post by pyrolistical »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #134
danny_codes wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

There is a mathematical model where it does. In game theory it is called tit for tat
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