Comment by asto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asto | Hacker News Reader

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Because India is close to the equator, the environment has a greater carrying capacity than the kinds of first-world, northern nations that the author is used to.

Citation?

The same applies to shelter. In India, a hut made of newspaper is adequate shelter year round. Try that in the Northern US and you'll freeze.

If a newspaper is enough in India, why are so many people dying of being cold year after year? https://www.google.co.in/search?q=cold+wave+india+dead

The years that aren't very cold, there are heat waves that kill. https://www.google.co.in/search?q=heat+wave+india+dead

Yes India's government is corrupt, but not all that much more corrupt than the US government.

In India, if you walk into a govt office for anything, you will end up paying a bribe. Want a driving license? Bribe. Want a building plan approved? Bribe. Want to incorporate a company? Bribe. Maybe we can have HN'ers from different developed countries tell us if the situation is anything like this in their countries. From what I can see, corruption in developed countries is mostly big ticket, not every tom, dick and harry in the country trying to part you from your money every chance they get.

Contrast this to the genocide the US conducted against native Americans who were in the way.

Back when American natives were being killed, widows in India were being burnt alive by their own families in the name of tradition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice)

Sure the garbage smells bad, but it's mostly just a matter of learning not to keep inhaling after you catch a whiff of something rank on the breeze.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN SAYING?

asto wrote: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN SAYING?

My point was about carrying capacity. Hot or cold snaps do not significantly alter the base carrying capacity of the environment w/o infrastructure.

In the US things like parking tickets, DMV fees, etc. are levied with abandon. Why use this approach to generate funds to pay for municipal workers rather than just having them extract bribes? Because the US has the infrastructure to enforce the fees, fines, and penalties. Both constitute minor confiscation of resources and are abetted by the power of the officials involved.

Your point about widows being burned alive agrees with my overall argument. It shows a parity between the two civilizations that ought to give us pause when we start feeling to indignant.

Why are bribes inferior to levying fees, fines, and penalties? Seriously?

The latter involves due process. It also accrues funds to a democratic body instead of to random servants of the state. This removes conflicts of interest, e.g. I'm going to require a billion licences because each licence means I get a bribe.

Empirically, corruption hurts the economy and political system. An IIE paper showed that "a one-standard deviation (2.38 point) improvement in the corruption index is associated with over a 4-percentage-point increase in a country's investment rate and over a 1/2-percentage-point increase in the per capita [GDP] growth rate" [1]. Further, Campos and Giovannoni show in their paper Lobbying, Corruption, and Political Influence that while "lobbying and corruption are substitutes...lobbying seems to be a much more effective instrument for political influence than corruption, even in poorer, less developed countries" [2].

[1] http://www.adelinotorres.com/economia/Os%20efeitos%20da%20co...

[2] http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/bitstream/10419/33990/1/518050...

I have no disagreement with your point. Of course a codified system of fees is preferable to one that is completely ad-hoc and based on bribes.

But police officers and other minor officials (IRS workers, etc.) are given tremendous discretion about which violations to enforce and which to ignore. In that sense, the US system is quite ad-hoc as well.

And since the people who interact most directly with police officers are the poor, abuses of power are less likely to be reported... yet we still hear of them all the time.

I view it as a continuum of institutional evolution, with the US perhaps a small notch or two ahead of India in creating institutions that are resistant to corruption. It's definitely not a night and day distinction.

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