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Comment by yeureka | Hacker News Reader

I too hate corruption. It's the main reason why the south of Europe is doing so badly.

If corruption was lower where I'm from, Portugal, we could easily double our GDP.

Corruption makes people miserable and not only the ones forced to pay the bribes.

It's like an unwritten and arbitrary set of rules that turns simple transactions into negotiations.

This not only saps energy and time but it is also deeply unfair as you are raised in a set of official written rules and moral guidelines that in practice are not observed are useless and can downright hurt you if you follow them naively.

I think corruption is one of the reasons why Southern European countries are so economically conservative and risk averse. It is much more difficult to have a business in these environments.

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Italian here. It's not just corruption here but almost every social interaction is built as an exchange of favours. From having a job to not getting screwed from the auto shop, you live off a network of people owing you and you get in their circles by owing them back. It's a very powerful system because everyone understands the honour it's based on, you can't track it because it's immaterial and it's so widespread that you get huge pressure to cave in and become part of the system.

>everyone understands the honour it's based on

That's the terrible thing about corruption. Sometimes it's not based in selfishness, but in honor and generosity.

It's just that old ideas about being honorable, a good provider, putting family and friends first and all that, are actually pretty terrible in modern bureaucracies.

So is it the modern bureaucracies that are terrible?

Or the "old ideas"?

It's the mismatch. Honor and reputation work for small high-trust societies where everyone knows each other, but a nation state (not to mention a global economy) requires more robust enforcement mechanisms.

On honor: It is that you can't really kick someone out of a nation state. In a smaller society, when you are dishonored, you leave the group. In a nation, you can't really do that, so we have made up ways to do so in a half way, namely prison. Honor doesn't really work in a nation state. Brett McKay has a lot to say about honor in the modern world starting here: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2012/10/01/manly-honor-part-i-...

They took away my family's right to vote in Pakistan. I think you can come up with plenty of ways to kick people out of a nation state short of making them stateless (which I guess isn't kosher after WWII) I suppose another good example would be the Rohingya in Myanmar

Moderately amusing story.

I was born and raised in the USA, but my parents emigrated from Italy.

About 20 years ago, my brother applied to grad school @ MIT (physics department).

Somehow, my father got it in his mind that he would "help out" by contacting the US Congressman in our district (whom he knew somewhat well) so that the Congressman could contact the physics department and facilitate my brother's acceptance.

Predictably, my brother blew a head-gasket. He tried explaining that:

* he would feel incredible shame if he was accepted due to outside meddling.

* the chances of this working to my brother's advantage were approximately zero.

* it might even _reduce_ the likelihood of acceptance.

The funniest part was that my father was bewildered by our reaction. His attitude was _"I don't understand you people. This is how you get things done!"_

I hate to put the blame on to any "one" reason for Southern Europe doing badly, but I came across an article that probably gave a better reason why there was so much difference between North and South Europe, and the theory it presents is religious difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. Protestant (read the bible) & Catholic (follow the pope). This gave the north literary rise, and literary history, and advanced them above their southern neighbors.

Corruption could be fallout of illiteracy, or maybe, lack of corruption could be a fallout of advancing literacy.

Sounds like an interesting read, do you have link to the article?

The article was probably based on this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...

My introduction to this was:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/the-chosen-few-a-ne...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/jewish-literacy-as-the-r...

If that is the case, Southern European corruption should reduce in the future, because now Catholics are literate too.

India still has terrible public education, so it may take them longer to catch up.

> India still has terrible public education, so it may take them longer to catch up.

India is a _very_ big country; as big as all of Europe, if not bigger. There are parts of India that are highly educated; in fact, the southern Indian state of Kerala has nearly 100% literacy. And corruption is plentiful there too.

India also has to dismantle the social systems and institutions set up by the British, which were designed to make people at the top rich, instead of running for the benefit of society.

Dismantling this is hard work, and you cannot simply destroy a bureaucracy without having a replacement ready (or chaos). WWII was good for Europe in some ways, because it massively destroyed the aristocracy and a lot of bureaucracy along with it. It was effectively a reboot of society, backed by a lot of cheap funding.

Yes, a lot of change cannot be done without massive upheaval - this is the dilemma we face in Africa.

It could go back even further than that - Rome ran on patronage, and maybe the southern states didn't fall as far as the northern ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber#The_Protestant_Ethic...

I don't think that it is fair to compare corruption in Portugal (and perhaps in any other Southern European countries) with the kind of corruption described in the article.

Yes, you can find corruption over there and especially a lot of influence and favour trading BUT at least people are aware that it is both criminal and wrong, not a way of life or "the way things work".

EDIT: typo

>It's like an unwritten and arbitrary set of rules that turns simple transactions into negotiations.

Generators without internal resistance are fine, but don't short them, if they are high energy.

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