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Comment by bradhilton | Hacker News Reader

> The level of democracy enjoyed by the average citizen around the world in 2021 has regressed to 1989 levels

Sounds ominously like the iron curtain is falling back into place, this time more dispersed, not just concentrated in the Soviet bloc.

> 70 percent of the global population lives under dictatorships, according to VDem’s data. That’s a rise of 20 percent over the past decade.

That's pretty disconcerting. Without knowing more about their methodology I'm not sure how this compares to the Cold War era, but it is worrisome to say the least.

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It lines up with the Corruption Perception Index: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Map_of_c...

Judging from this map alone, one would logically conclude that Homo Sapiens is a pretty corrupt species.

The average human being lives in a corrupt dictatorship.

I'm not sure it makes sense to judge homo sapiens as corrupt, given that they lived much differently the past 10,000 years than their first 300,000 years. I can easily imagine social groups were more egalitarian and less corrupt for most of human prehistory.

The larger the group, the more corrupted power seekers will climb close to the top, and do the more damage (since they affect more people).

Maybe we can say that the human brain partly isn't well suited for living in large societies, for these reasons

Germany is GREEN on that map?! (Was this map commissioned by Germans?)

To be fair I can't tell if large German corporations and politicians are corrupt or instead lack direction, are criminal, or incompetent and are funded by mandatory spending by the government. See Brandenburg, Dieselgate, Gazprom Germania for the tip of the iceberg.

Alternatively it could just be that you are more aware of what corruption is going on in Germany because the press is not regularly rounded up and shot when they expose the wrong ringleader.

This is a corruption perception index not a press freedom index

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