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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

#391

Post by SanjayMehta »

fer wrote: post #72
SanjayMehta wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They classify Germany and the UK as democracies. That's precious. Germany has sanctioned its own journalists as has the UK. I don't remember the number of ordinary citizens arrested in Germany for social media posts but I know the UK number was 12000 per year. Now let's look at the US: Tucker Carlson is under the gun for allegedly being a Russian or is it Iranian agent. But the US is a democracy. https://www.newsweek…

> Germany has sanctioned its own journalists If we're talking about the same case, the EU sanctioned him, the man is at least dual citizen, and received Russian funds via his media company in Turkey, then proceeded to say it was all because it was about his coverage of Gaza. All of that is in the EU sanctions page, but "democratic" media coverage focused and pinned it on the Gaza bit. If you're talking about Thomas R…

The guy with the Turkish name is not a dual citizen.

https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-not-so-mysterious-di...

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

#392

Post by titzer »

hunterpayne wrote: post #338
titzer wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this [ https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapo... ], the US has already spent more than five trillion dollars on nuclear weapons.

Over 85 years and that's an inflation adjusted number. We give away more money each year (USAID/soft power efforts) than we spent on average on nuclear weapons. And neither of those items are of much significance on the US federal budget. Currently, social safety net programs are half of the federal budget and the total military budget is about 1/6th of the budget for reference (that's 2/3rd total between those two p…

CBO estimates $95 billion/year maintaining and modernization nuclear weapons for the next 10 years: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61362

Total USAID budget: $50 billion in 2023, $19 billion in 2026. https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/agency-for-international-...

> And neither of those items are of much significance on the US federal budget.

$95 billion / year is $620 per US taxpayer.

> social safety net programs are half of the federal budget

I suppose you are referring to the big 3: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those are programs that people pay for. In the same way that retirement savings, pensions, and private health insurance is something that people pay for.

But whatever, every dollar wasted to blow up people in another country can be excused because the federal budget includes programs that provide services to people in this country...or something. It is extremely revealing how some people are completely unbothered by some spending and are extremely bothered by other spending. The nuclear weapons don't bother you, but spending a bit of money to help alleviate famine for people in destitute countries is just unacceptable.

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

#393

Post by enoint »

deepsun wrote: post #209
pastage wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not true. We spent more taxpayers' money on 2008 banks bailout than on every and any war (+ space race) combined. Also, investing into military tech prevents war on your territory, which is, well, highly disruptive.

Wasn’t the bottom line a net gain?

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

#394

Post by tines »

gmd63 wrote: post #368
tines wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Access to corruption is never widely understood and accessible to every person, otherwise it would be written into law and stated plainly for everyone to see. This is an uninformed non-sequitur. In China or Mexico for example, it's well known that to get certain things done you have to bribe local officials. The central government is against corruption by policy, but nevertheless corruption is endemic. It's only "i…

I'm interested to hear your informed thoughts on why corruption charges still exist in China if everyone there knows how corruption is happening.

Oblivious comment. “If everyone knows the mob is committing crimes, why aren’t they arrested? Checkmate.”

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

#395

Post by wwweston »

wagwang wrote: post #276
wwweston wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elected officials have significant influence they can bring to bear on specific decisions, general operations, and in many cases personnel decisions. That’s true at the level of individual house members and can be more true for other offices. The rule of law and checks and balances also means these elected officeholders don’t have arbitrary control, which has a lot of upsides (and produced a professional and effectiv…

Executive power over the civil service is an ant driving an elephant. You can say it's a good thing and it's intentional, but the fact of the matter is that the executive appoint a fraction of a percent of the positions and those positions have nominal personnel powers that they can't really use without fear of getting sued.

It's almost like positions are created and managed by law as well as leadership, and even leadership is supposed to follow law.

Fractional direct appointments are the usual case in any large organization. If you're the chief executive, you don't hire individual department workers, you might not even pick individual department management, you probably pick other "C-level" staff and have them manage management personnel most of the time.

It's more like a captain of a ship than "an ant driving an elephant." Every avenue you have to direct the ship depends on a network of knowledge and relationships supporting steering and operational systems. You don't DIY turning the tanker, you team-turn the tanker because you've learned how to work with a team.

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

#396

Post by triceratops »

eru wrote: post #355
triceratops wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's my point. You can define "society" in any way you like to say there's "high social trust". It's a meaningless, hollow boast.

No, it's not. Eg Soviet Russia never had high social trust, no matter how you slice it.

And it never boasted of having high social trust either.

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

#397

Post by dmytrish »

dzonga wrote: post #306
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.

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.

That does not mean that "things as they are" is "how it's ought to be".

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

#398

Post by munksbeer »

miroljub wrote: post #384
ses1984 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn’t but in the context of the comments immediately above yours, >Eg Nazi Germany still benefited from a high-ish level of social trust, despite numerous atrocities. >What's the benefit of social trust when a society can commit such atrocities? Then you come in with > It's not like atrocities started with Nazis Your comment pretty much directly says the nazis weren’t that bad and in context looks like you’re ag…

Ok, let me clarify. Nazis were one of the worst regimes we had in Europe, but the German regime before them was also bad. Bad enough that many saw Nazis as a viable alternative. In desperate times, people make desperate choices. This is more or less a historical consensus, which I pointed out. If we want to prevent a Nazi-like regime from coming to power again, we need to avoid mistakes made by the Weimar Republic. U…

> Unfortunately, I see a global trend of governments making the same mistakes again

What are those?

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

#399

Post by ElevenLathe »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #242
btilly wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

This is 100% how working people everywhere survive. I'm a middle aged person who grew up lower-middle class in an unassuming town in the US midwest, and this is how everything got done. Our kitchen was remodeled by the guy my Dad knew from the bar, who was introduced to him by their mutual bookie. He later did some work on our basement (a tree root was growing in) and needed a backhoe. The husband of my Mom's coworker had one and was looking for a place to park it for a few months, so we could use it but had to keep it parked in our yard afterward for a while. My Dad was a bureaucrat and helped all these people file for the government program he was a representative for. My Mom watched other kids for free when needed so that they would watch me if she needed. I missed the deadline for applying for drivers' ed one summer and, rather than wait, she called up somebody she knew at the schoolboard and they were able to get me in. The owner of the corner store across the street from our house also had an unpaid sideline in connecting people in the neighborhood who could help each other. Nobody would think of taking their car to a professional mechanic until they'd asked around to a few neighbors, who would never accept any money. We knew what kind of beer our garbage men liked to drink so, when we went to throw away something that was on the borderline of whether or not the city should let you (e.g. throwing away a mattress on a day that isn't one of the scheduled "large items" days), we set out a 12 pack of it (and a case at Christmas time, just to keep good relations). At a certain point in my childhood, the programming of pirated DirecTV cards became a vital currency in this web -- my Dad bought a card reader/writer for our family PC and I went to work trawling through sketchy IRC channels to get the latest images to flash onto them. Sometimes I would get paid a nominal amount, but it felt good just to be useful.

This wasn't the global south, and we weren't even especially poor (though some in our neighborhood were). We were prosperous citizens in the core of an empire at the peak of its uncontested power. This is just how a community works, and has since the beginning of time. The extremely marketized nature of modern upper middle class life is the aberration in human history, and presumably will not last forever.

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

#400

Post by miroljub »

munksbeer wrote: post #398
miroljub wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, let me clarify. Nazis were one of the worst regimes we had in Europe, but the German regime before them was also bad. Bad enough that many saw Nazis as a viable alternative. In desperate times, people make desperate choices. This is more or less a historical consensus, which I pointed out. If we want to prevent a Nazi-like regime from coming to power again, we need to avoid mistakes made by the Weimar Republic. U…

> Unfortunately, I see a global trend of governments making the same mistakes again What are those?

Ignoring the wishes of the majority. Forcing own ideology upon everyone. Neglecting the well-being of the productively working people.
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