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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Then they should simply charge the higher amount.

This “dance” where they pretend to be your friends when trying to extract that money and cigarettes from you when you are trying to get a service is extremely annoying. Want cigarettes? Put cigarettes on the requirements list.

Not to mention that the informality creates special class of corrupt officials that easily leads to mafia politics. Criminals develop relationships with these people and easily do stuff that they are not supposed to do and the law abiding people stress over the bribes and mood of the staff.

This even goes higher up, as paves the way for higher levels of corruption where things needs to be at scale and yet hush hush, exposing whole nations to political risks(from money laundering to terrorism).

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> the law abiding people stress over the bribes

I think you mean you stress over the bribes. There are many people who are accustomed to handling such minor corruption and yet are not corrupt themselves. They know how to handle it with minimum anxiety or disruption to their lives. Obviously it would be preferred it the corruption wouldn't exist, but I think you are also projecting your anxiety on others.

Secondly, the likely reason they can't charge more is that these prices are likely set by some person or system higher up than them, yet they are taking more on top of that official price. Thus, if the price were raised, it wouldn't be going to those who are doing the graft. Your premise of "just charge higher prices" misunderstands the nature of the prices and the market. Again, I'm not saying I like corrupt systems. I very much dislike them and think they are one of the primary causes preventing many developing countries from as quickly catching up to developed countries. But to fix them, we need to understand them, and saying "just internalize the bribery cost into the official price" misses the reason it exists in the first place.

"The port authority should raise prices without changing pay or (dis)incentive structures for low level officials" seems like a straw-man, and I don't think that's what OP meant.

You can pay the pilots and low-level officials more money and implement "There are lots of other people who want your cushy job -- you will be summarily fired if you are caught soliciting bribes" policies as well as surveillance and reporting systems to enforce them.

This requires political will from the people at the top, and often results in anger from the people at the bottom, so it doesn't usually happen until the bribery problem is out of control.

Argentina is a good example. Maritime cargo hold inspectors famously made a habit of soliciting larger and larger bribes. They became an outlier, and eventually the shipping companies started to notice, and they put pressure on Argentina to clean up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22581590

Totally agree with you that raising the price won’t solve the problem.

I do have to disagree with you on one point: that there are people who are not corrput themselves who function well within the system. Corruption begins with good intentions. Crime begins with bad intentions. Every single act makes the complicit lose the corrupt because what a non-corrupt person would do is fight it.

Are the complicit less bad? Would they rather have it another way? Yes. Yes. Still, they are corroding every time they choose not to fight (even if it comes at great personal cost)

I don't think you can be paying bribes while claiming not to be corrupt yourself. By participating in corruption you are enabling it. In some places there might be no way around that but that's why I don't go to those places.

> Then they should simply charge the higher amount.

The normal cost goes to their boss. The bribe goes to them. The bribe is just another version of tipping culture, except a differently coercive one.

I think once I heard something like "In the west you pay bribes so that the officials don't do their job, in the middle east you pay bribes so that they do their jobs".

I'm familiar with high-bribe environments and used to go through bribery intensive border between Bulgaria-Turkey.

It's a breeze for the regulars, they know why their document is not processed or why the bus is being kept and know the channel, and the expected bribes so they easily pay and go through.

The problem is, when you are not a regular you simply get frustrated because you can't just ask how much since there are anti-corruption measure in place that need to be avoided. You need o go somewhere or give it to someone seemingly unrelated.

It can be somewhat parallel to tipping culture but in tipping they do their job an expect a gratitude payment, which doesn't slow down or block the process. The bribery culture has it's own dark side since you need to be coerced into doing it.

Also, the Turkey-Bulgaria border often gets busted for running large scale duty free alcohol and cigarettes contraband. That's when they get bribed for not doing their job(of preventing contraband), the "pay to get things done" bribery mostly died off because of the digitalisation. Don't search my car, don't inspect my bus in exchange of cigarettes bribery still lives though.

You misunderstand the system. The charge goes to the organisation.

Then the individual guards and officials then make their own fortune using the position they were given. Think of them more as entrepreneurs or self-employed.

This system of handing out unpaid or poorly paid government positions has existed throughout the world, britain in 1800 worked like this - judges were not paid, they charged defendants whatever price they wanted.

In Tsarist Russia the local officials working for the state" were charging the locals for their services whatever they felt like charging them. That way the state did not have to deal with paying them salaries, it was up to officials to 'make themselves usefull to thw community'

What we call corruption today is just how the world used to work before - it was not structured and not everything had a fixed price.

I know that tax to the government and cigarettes to the officer are different but I think in 2021 no one should deal with that, we no longer do a lot of things that were normal in the olden days.

And those who feel to operate like that should maybe should be more open about the payments so we can skip the negotiation part. A carton of cigarettes is not a big deal but trying deal with the official that tries to coerce you into that payment is. It makes things slow and unpredictable.

Oh and I strongly disagree with the "entrepreneur" analogy, the people who get into these lucrative positions are people close to the politically dominant class. They often "donate" some of that money to their church/mosque/party and take it easy on the people of their clan when making life hard to the outsiders.

A recent case is the case of Reza Zarrab, the guy who laundered Iranian money through Turkey and get caught. He has become a billionaire and was very well connected to the Turkish political class. Erdogan himself pulled a lot of strings with Trump. Very high profile case with a lot of US and Turkish public figures being involved, you should Google it.(Spoiler: Rudolph Giuliani was on his defence team)

Apparently he had an issue with a customs officer called Teoman who refused bribes so he got Teoman fired. Those informal organisations are more like cabals than corporations. It's not about entrepreneurship but loyalty to the higher ups. It does create a business but that business is reserved to the people in power and the bribe takers are simply employees.

Zarrab also gave a master class in bribery. His motto was "You pay prostitutes afterwards but public officials beforehand", apparently. Good to know.

Oops, the correct advice was “You tip your prostitute and your public officials beforehand”.

> Then they should simply charge the higher amount.

Then, to make things go smoothly, you will have to pay the higher amount as well as a bribe.

> This even goes higher up, as paves the way for higher levels of corruption where things needs to be at scale and yet hush hush, exposing whole nations to political risks(from money laundering to terrorism).

I think you have it the opposite way around. Where there is an effective government that makes sure that laws are written and enforced fairly, and wealth is distributed somewhat evenly, corruption disappears.

Except that the US has worse wealth inequality than Egypt as measured by the Gini index...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in...

Unless you are saying that US has more corruption and a less effective government than Egypt?

In my 50 years I've never encountered bribery in the USA, and I've lived all over the country. Yet, as you point out, the USA has greater wealth inequality than Egypt. So, apparently it is not wealth inequality that leads to corruption like bribery. I honestly don't know why Egypt has bribery but the USA doesn't. Maybe it is just cultural? A lot of the USA culture is derived from Europe and especially the UK. How prevalent is bribery in Western Europe?

A country where everyone is equally poor is going to have more corruption than a country with high inequality between the middle class people and the billionaire oligarchs.

I'm not saying everyone in Egypt is living in poverty, while no one in the US is. But the poverty rate in Egypt is something like 30%, vs 10% in the USA.

Having said that, the US has tipping, so there's that.

To me US 'tipping culture' is very much the same in experience as bribes like these in non-western countries.

I think that basing the definition in bribe on what feels uncomfortable to us personally not a good way to define it. I'm from the Netherlands, and I have heard it said that Dutch corruption exists as much as anywhere, the bribes are just always 0 euro, to ease our consciences. I wish I had a reference or two, but maybe these things are understudied.

I've always viewed tips as a way to let customers decide the merit pay for employees. Does NL have the uber star rating tied to tips? It was a way to make the star rating meaningful. It used to be everyone gave five unless it was terrible service, so uber made you put money where your rating was.

Edit: I remember the public transit being quite good so maybe NL doesn't have uber? I also remember waiters not being very easy to find to ask for anything.

There's Uber, but indeed, I am satisfied with public transport and have never used the likes of Uber.

It's not that I never tip at a restaurant (however, seldomly in NL), it's just that in the US you'll get bills with a percentage already 'included', and it 'is understood' that you must tip _something_, in a way (to me) very similar to bribes elsewhere.

Percentage included only happens for large parties (8 or more). Normally you don’t have to tip. It is entirely voluntary (though strongly encouraged since it is helping the poorest members of society). Think of it like a voluntary socialist tax to help the poor.

>To me US 'tipping culture' is very much the same in experience as bribes like these in non-western countries.

Uh, no. Not in any sense at all are the two similar. I can't even begin to imagine how you come up with that analogy.

When was the last time you tipped a government official? When was the last time you knew that unless you tipped a government official you wouldn't get your task done, even though your documents were in order?

Tipping in the US is overwhelmingly to directly customer-facing staff in private companies, and it is done after the transaction has been completed.

Bribery/facilitation payment is always done before the fact, and is almost uniformly done with governmental (or quasi-governmental) officials.

Like I said, personal experience isn't going to get us very far in establishing what bribing is. To me it is certainly very similar.

That's fine but my post isn't about personal experience; it's a list of ways in which the two things are different in a concrete, practical sense based on their common meanings.

Could you expand why you think they are similar rather than just suggesting that the matter is subjective?

In the course of going about ones business, ill-specified amounts need to be paid extra if expedient service is to be expected. This is the local custom.

I also find tipping culture similar to bribing. In the sense that it adds to the take home income of the worker receiving the tip/bribe.

But you don’t have to tip. Other than maybe dirty looks absolutely nothing will happen if you don’t tip. The ones being tipped are totally powerless. They are society’s poor. It is closer to a voluntary socialist tax to help the poor than any kind of bribery to officials in a place of power.

You must not be familiar with tipping. Tipping always happens to people with no power. Bribery happens to people with power. Nothing bad will happen to me if I never tip (other than perhaps bad karma and some dirty looks). Very bad things can happen to me if I done give bribes. Tipping happens after the service and payment are completed. Bribing happens beforehand. The two are so entirely different on almost every level (especially the power dynamics).

It’s worth noting that bribery comes in many forms, and not all cultures consider it a moral failing even where it is nominally illegal. “Facilitation payments” exist in the grey area between bribes-that-are-illegal and bribes-that-are-business-as-usual.

I've bribed people twice in the US. Once, when a family member desperately needed to use the bathroom and a gas station attendant was insisting theirs was for employees only. I gave him twenty bucks and he let us use it. Another time to get a table setup for our group at a bar where they said they couldn't seat us was very similar - "Could you seat us if I gave you 60 bucks?" Turns out they could in that case.

Granted, I hope these wouldn't qualify as any kind of criminal wrongdoing, and are pretty minor, but there is at least some bribery happening here!

One time I was an airport, and I didnt know that curbside baggage handler staff expected tips.

There was no sign indicating that. And they wear airport staff uniforms.

After checking in. I was asked for a tip but I wasn't able to give one because I had no change in cash. I was given a very angry look but I really had no idea about the tip.

When I arrived to my destination my suitcase's wheels were damaged.

Your mistake was using the curbside baggage handlers.

The people getting fleeced are not from Egypt. You have to look at the wealth inequality between the customs officials and the passengers, not the income difference between the customs officials and their bosses.

I don't think they would charge the same amount from everyone. I'm sure that their bribe varies depending on their customer and how much they can pay. If they deem someone to be more valuable, it would be unlikely for them to settle down for less. And I don't think they would be able to write down their criteria for bribe in an actual legal document and make it public.

That's correct. Instead of offering classes of services ("basic", "premium", etc.) to allow customers of different price sensitivities to self-select, they work with you (in a sense) to figure out your price sensitivity and charge dynamically based on that.

This makes sense because it would be very complicated to try to formalise and market the classes of service, compared to just hashing it out as people with unique relationships to each other.

As much as I love living in one of the least corrupt places in the world, I have to admit that drawing up formal contracts for interpersonal relationships is sort of the weird way to do things. I like it and I think it has many benefits, but when I try to look at it from 10,000 feet it does seem odd from a human perspective.

> This makes sense because it would be very complicated to try to formalise and market the classes of service

Haha, no. For the vast majority of cases you can definitely formalize most things.

Especially the already formalized services like passage through a canal.

You're 100% spot on that this type of environment breeds criminality and corruption. It is undesirable.

But it is unfortunately the way of life in a lot of under-developed countries (nothing to do with Islamic countries as another comment pointed out elsewhere). Feeling uncomfortable around this behaviour is also a very typical Western outlook on this. Having grown up in the middle east, bartering and the "give and take" is just going with the flow. Its endemic.

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