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Comment by yason | Hacker News Reader

It's well known that in authoritarian regimes (which autocracies generally are) corruption is, rather than a problem, a necessary element of society to keep things going.

Anyone with the slightest amount of official power, like a government officer, has the ability to prevent things going forward on his part. In this kind of society, most people are poor and it would be considered stupid to not demand a small (or large) bribe from the citizen in order to unlock the process. Everyone does it, more with outsiders and to a lesser extent with one's circle of acquaintances (because the social fabric between known parties is the other way to unlock things). Corruption surely is one thing that really trickles down from the top.

So, things like like obediently waiting in the queue for your turn or complaining about the officer won't help unlike in high-trust societies. If you try that in a low-trust society there will be additional documents, stamps, acknowledges, or signatures you need, and keep needing, in order to complete your request until you get the drift and bring a little something. Corruption gets things going and in a society that has no trust it is a positive trait.

In Western democracies this sounds unimaginable because there's a stronger sense that right things will work out right just because of the rules. Western corruption happens on a different level: a regular western citizen has no benefit from giving bribes and he would object to the police or government officials from demanding one. Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer.

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Very well said. I live in Sweden, one of the world's highest-trust societies, but I have experience from a more corrupt environment and my whole family lived most of their lives in a corrupt autocracy.

This means that in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an individual not to participate. The corruption isn't something that happens at some level, it's a core part of the economy. If you try to do things by the book, you will just not get any result. You won't get to buy a limited product by waiting your turn. You won't get your kids into a better high school by having them display academic excellence. If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life. I don't want to say it's impossible but I would compare it to living off-grid in a modern Western country. It's possible but it requires a lot of dedication and that lifestyle then determines many aspects of your life.

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 explanation of why the most important thing that Epstein did (the thing that actually made him most of it money), was run a blat network. Elites who had learned to trust that he could let them have otherwise impossible sexual experiences, were willing to pay him large amounts to broker introductions and financial deals that others couldn't.

I was initially confused because blat (блат,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors)) sounds, to my non-slavic-speaking-ear very close to bylad (блядь, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_profanity#Bly%C3%A1d'), and I thought "even the Russians wouldn't be that cynically direct about it, right?"

I can confirm those words do not in fact sound very close. They're not etymologically related either, and to a fluent Russian speaker they don't sound particularly similar.

They may sound somewhat similar, but apparently have unrelated origins. блат is borrowed from Yiddish, while блядь has a Slavic root.

That said, they do sound less similar to someone who has learned a Slavic language. We learn to distinguish pairs of sounds that differ in our language. English doesn't have a lot of words with a "ya" sound, and so to us "я"and "а" are easy to confuse. It is easy to confuse "d" and "t". But the easier to hear distinction is a hard sign т versus the soft sign on дь. But hard versus soft isn't even a concept in English, so you're not listening for it.

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, and each individual transaction within your blat network may involve different things. It could be money, it could be access to a product (that you still have to pay for), it could be time or labor.

Maybe you know a plumber and he will come look at plumbing problems for you and your family, for free or for a low price. But you work at a grocery store and the plumber can always buy cheese because you set some aside for him. That's a blat relationship. And then the blat network grows - one day you mention you'd like to see a theater pay and it turns out the plumber's wife works in a theater and can help you get tickets, he'll set you up. Your husband is an engineer though so he can help tutor their child in mathematics.

None of those examples you gave sound like corruption to me, with the possible exception of tickets. It seems to me that the problem is when people who are in a position of power and responsibility abuse their power for personal ends. Plumbing or tutoring or cheese are privately held goods and surely the possessors of those goods can dispose of them how they want?

Or perhaps in all of these examples the plumber/grocer/engineer is entrusted with responsibility from the government to ration a scarce resource?

Well in the Soviet case, plumbing and cheese are most certainly not privately held resources. Doing such work as a plumber means you're essentially acting as self-employed or a business, which is illegal. The cheese is probably produced on a collective farm and sold at a state-owned store.

But surely the cheese case would not be okay even in a Western capitalist context where the store is privately owned. Just replace it with a more scarce product. A store employee isn't allowed to tell customers the store is out of iPhones while keeping a dozen stashed for preferred buyers.

For a Western context, perhaps "tickets to a highly sought after event"

In Western capitalist context, An apple employee can't do that because they would be stealing from Apple. If they are reselling phones that belong to them, they can dispose of them however they like.

I think the Soviet context is key. Because the state is rationing these items, it creates a black market based on personal connections. In Western society nobody cares because (ideally) the market is competitive and you can just buy from someone else.

Yes, an Apple employee doing that would be stealing from Apple. But in the capitalist context, we also have entirely legal business models that I would argue are equivalent to corruption ethically. A business that chooses to sell its products or services only to a select group of customers (entirely legal) and then picks those customers not exclusively based on their finances but based on what else they can provide. Such as access to certain people, different favors, etc. That is IMO ethically questionable.

But the Soviet everyday corruption variety of retail employees reserving cheese for someone who can return favors, that particular thing is particular to a socialist economy with a scarcity of relatively basic goods.

They are all corruption, or corruption adjacent.

The plumber is working for a company. He's supposed to be working on an official job. But he's doing the work slowly because he's actually working on your plumbing problem.

You are working for the grocery store. You are stealing cheese from the store system that is supposed to allocate it, and making it available it to the plumber as payment for your plumber being corrupt on your behalf.

Again, the wife "who can help you get tickets" is stealing access to them. That's corruption.

The engineer who is tutoring, is paying for that act of corruption. This may or may not happen when the engineer is officially supposed to being doing something else as part of their job. If so, that's possible because people learn to look the other way for you, so that you'll look the other way for them.

And in a society where everything works this way, what do you think happens to overall economic productivity? Exactly! Which creates scarcity. Scarcity that makes the ability to get things through the blat network even more valuable!

None of that was specified. As I said earlier, the problem is not with quid pro quo; it's in the stealing which you've now specified as additional context. I could just as easily specify another context where each of these actions are legitimate. (Perhaps free tickets are part of the theater worker's perks.)

If I said "I baked a cake for my mother," then you could say "BUT YOU STOLE THE FLOUR!" It doesn't prove anything.

My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that it is easy to forget that others might not get the context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish live, but not remembering to remind people that water is wet.

That said, there were contextual clues. If you go back, I said, "You get what you need through corruption..." The next reply was agreeing and expanding on that. This strongly suggests that each step in the description involves corruption in some way.

That said, hopefully you're now clear that these blat networks involve pervasive corruption.

When a community that is used to blat networks moves to a different country, the blat network doesn't go away. Throughout US history, it has been common to see blat networks in immigrant communities turn into straight up organized crime. The most famous example being the rise of the Mafia. But it is hardly an isolated example.

> My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that it is easy to forget that others might not get the context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish live, but not remembering to remind people that water is wet.

Yes. It's fascinating, HN is in most ways a bubble with a particular kind of leadership, but sometimes these cultural differences shine through.

To me, it's completely obvious that in the case of a plumber working through blat, he's not just legitimately doing extra work (assuming the law allows that in the first place). Of course it means the plumber is working on your pipes while he's supposed to be doing his actual job, or maybe he actually does it outside the hours but when he needs to replace some part for you, he steals it from his work. But apparently to people who grew up in a different environment, what comes to mind is legitimate side business.

Could you elaborate (hopefully with real examples) of what it's like to be in the out group with few connections (or perhaps no connections) in regards to a particular good / service?

Then you get worse good and services. Lower quality or longer wait, or don't get it at all depending on the good. The effect isn't that different from being poor in a capitalist economy. In a capitalist economy, it's mostly money that determines what you can buy. In the Soviet blat-heavy economy, money didn't matter as much connections.

It was perfectly possible to have a decent salary but nothing to spend it on because the better items just aren't available. Maybe there's some delicacy you enjoy, or a special item you want like a cassette player and you could afford those if the store actually had them, but they don't. In that situation, your ability to buy more desirable items depended more on your connections or perseverance in doing things "the hard way" like queuing for hours to buy bananas, or recycling enough kilograms of paper to buy a book.

Yes, the context was talking about what we would call corruption, but given that I read the comment as trying to explain things to a western reader, I think it's worth calling out the unstated assumption that makes this actually bad rather than just friends swapping favors.

Would you say the scarcity is what starts the corruption?

Like you can't get a plumber so you have to use your personal network or there aren't enough tickets so you have to obtain one through your personal network, etc?

It's probably better to look at a system wide level than any one shortage. For example is there no plumbers because school loans to learn apprenticeship were robbed by the rich, and the actual plumbers aren't able to get more licenses because of the graft they' have to pay for an additional one.

It's never just one thing.

This kind of corrruption goes as far back as we can find records.

I think that the real question is not how the corruption started. But, rather, how in some places rule of law came to be established instead.

That said, I don't have a good answer to that question either.

Yea, I guess I don't get it either. I know someone who can eat at a local restaurant for free whenever he wants because he knows the owner. In return, he helps the owner maintain his car and does little odd handyman jobs around the owner's house for him. Is this blat? Is it corruption? Or is it just friends doing each other favors?

It's pretty tiring seeing so many people push the bounds of acceptable behavior. It's pretty simple: should someone in your chain of management discipline you for setting aside that cheese? If yes, you are engaging in corruption.

That action is basically stochastic theft from the grocery store, because you've altered the pricing of a possibly scarce good.

It's a slippery slope.

What rules are you breaking to do your favor? What rules do you expect someone else to break for the return favor? What rules might they later expect you to break? To what extent do you stop seeing the rules of external society as rules that you're supposed to follow?

It starts as favors.

By the time you're stealing from your employer, it's blat.

By the time you're recruiting one friend to submit paperwork to help another friend commit insurance fraud, it's still blat. But also its starting to look like something else.

Once you owe a favor to a Mafia Don, it's called organized crime. But the underlying blat is still recognizable.

We call that restaurant thing "mate's rates" here. There is a symbiotic relationship there, a trace of barter and also keeps work off the tax books.

From the sound of it (I have never heard of blat before this post), the important distinction is that the owner is on board with it. If he could eat for free because he knew a server who would give him the employee discount, it would be blat. If he worked as a mechanic and took parts from his employer to repair his friend's car, it would be blat.

> the problem is when people who are in a position of power and responsibility abuse their power for personal ends

Is that not the definition of corruption?

Corruption like almost all things fall on a spectrum.

Those are examples of soft corruption

I'm not the person you were replying to, but they gave you some "toy" examples; let me give you some real ones.

My grandmother was ill. My grandfather, her husband, was sufficiently well connected that she got good medical coverage. Then he died. And so we lost our connections to the good doctors, to the good healthcare she was getting, and her care got significantly worse.

We have a family member with some property that's in a weird state, paperwork-wise. We were working on it, because another family member had a friend in the bureaucracy - think, the local tax office - who could have helped us sort it out on paper. Then he died. So now, we have to do things by the book, which is incredibly difficult without having a friend there to cut through the red tape.

It's not about getting the plumber to prioritize your work, or getting the nice slice of cheese. It's about making sure grandma's osteoporosis gets treated, it's about not losing your house.

I don't know about difficult to translate, sounds a lot like being a "Good Old Boy"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/good_old_boy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_boy_network#United_States

Of course, it has several connotations depending on exact context.

Seems like a big part of it is an extensive barter network since the straightforward exchange of cash for services has broken down, so you need to know the right people with skills or access to, and something of value to offer them in return.

This basically describes how boards of directors and other power structures at that level work. Just with much more expensive assets and favors.

> It's a difficult concept to translate to English

> Blat is more like a social network of people trading favors

It's like Vito Corleone in Godfather but applied to an entire society.

  And oh my do I hate blat.

CYKA BLAT!

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.

It's interesting that you contrast Sweden and Russia, considering while I have not lived and worked in Russia, I've worked with Swedes quite a bit and my experience with them is that they don't really emphasize red tape that much - in the context of development, they don't really mind if you bend the rules if it's for a good cause - what I mean is there's a general attitude of pursuing sensible outcomes over blindly following processes.

They're also not big on oversight and I got what it looked like to me a surprising amount of autonomy and responsibilty in a very short amount of time, that I felt out of depth for a while, but got accustomed to it. A very laissez faire way of work.

I felt much of the system was informal, and based on the expectation of not abusing trust. Which was very refreshing, as most companies in my experience exist in a state of bureaucratic gridlock - you need to push the change to repo X, but Y needs to sign off on it, and it depends on changes by person Z, who's held up by similar issues etc.

It's a very emotionally draining and unproductive way of working, and is usually overseen by bosses who create these processes, because they don't trust their employees, or to get a feeling of power and control, or they simply don't understand how and what their subordinates do, so they kind of try to force things into these standard flows.

Which also doesn't work, but it accountably doesn't work. Even if a days' changes take a week, and still end up lacking, you can point to that Task A is blocked by deliverable B, which is at a low priority at team Foo, so lets have a meeting with that teams manager to make sure to prioritize that in the next sprint etc etc etc.

This is how most places turn into that meme picture where there's one guy digging a hole and 5 people oversee him.

I didn't mention Russia, and I've never had the misfortune of living there - though I speak the language and am well familiar with the capture.

The Swedish term for how you describe work is "frihet under ansvar" - translated, "freedom under responsibility". That's a common approach at workplaces where you're doing qualified work, like engineering, and the meaning is that you're given a lot of flexibility and freedom in how you do your work as long as you reach the expected result and you take responsibility if things don't work out. That's good, and yes companies here are very informal. We don't even culturally like things like managers instructing employees on what to do, it's all phrased very casually.

In context of government work or the public sector, I'd say we take rules and procedures seriously, which is one of my favorite things about the country. To me, that makes interactions much more predictable than in countries with a "people before systems" culture.

One interesting effect of LLMs getting so good at generating code, all of the process related things you mention take up a greater and greater percentage of the overall time to develop and deploy a feature, making them even more salient.

They always have. I would guess the majority of people employed and salaries paid on a given project basically goes to waste. Just today I had an hour-long meeting about an impact of a bug, which was clear as day with a simple fix, but would've involved so much red tape to fix (for no good reason), that the couple minute fix-deploy-test-merge cycle would've taken at least a week of effort spread across people.

What a blast from the past, this word. Exactly right. It was a spectrum from a sort of mutual aid to regular corruption to outright mafia.

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. Corruption is a form of economic eugenics that breeds fraudsters and cheaters who can buy into the in-group via know-how, money or aesthetics while slowing the growth of a law abiding populace that competes honestly on merit but doesn't fit the unwritten rules of admission. Any participation in that system is a spiraling force that makes the world worse, and it's always a choice.

In the US we're being led by a career fraudster who was a Wharton grad only because he had a family friend who was an admissions officer, and according to his sister, he paid someone to take his SATs for him. We have not been serious about the massive consequences of white collar fraud and corruption and we are now beginning to understand the butterfly effects.

> 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 "inaccessible" to some because some people are poor and can't afford the bribes.

Just because you understand the government is corrupt doesn't mean you understand the corruption

But the corruption is still available to you, and you use it as a part of daily life. Not all corruption but some.

Yes, exactly. I went on holiday to Cairo a few years ago. Small bribes (bashish) is 100% normal there.

My tour guide was this bright 22 year old who dreamed of going to the UK to be an uber driver, so he could make enough money to get married. I told him if he went to the UK, he needed to know to never bribe officials, ever. He made the most adorably confused face - like his brain was blue screening. He had no conception of how a society could function without bribes. “But … how does anything get done?”

Greece is kind of the worst-of-both-worlds for this. Nothing works properly, but you also can't pay someone to make it work. In a country with good honest corruption you pay someone else to wait in line for you at the post office while the folks behind the counter smoke, chat to each other, and ignore you. In Greece you can't do that, you have to wait while they smoke, chat to each other, and ignore you. The friend of mine I was visiting also did the brain blue-screen when I asked who you paid to wait in line for you.

On the upside, a country that undergoes the transition from highly corrupt to well functioning inevitably goes through the stage you describe. My native country was going through that as I was growing up, starting with the Soviet "corruption is just how everything works" to being a fairly well functioning European society now.

Somewhere in between, there was definitely what you described. I've heard people with the remarkable complaint "there isn't even anyone to bribe". Of course if a society gets stuck too long at this stage, it turns into a different problem altogether.

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

Selective enforcement of widely broken laws is one of the primary sources of control in an autocracy.

Xi Jinping has disciplined millions of officials as part of his anti-corruption campaign. That cannot be some corrupt way to silence dissidents while being popular with an allegedly corruption-omniscient citizenry.

I can't speak to China, but having spent most of the past decade in India and Sri Lanka I can say the problem there is that nobody is willing to unilaterally disarm. Everybody agrees that bakshish is deadweight loss and inefficient, but if Person A stops doing it and Person B doesn't, Person B gets more of whatever the finite resource in question is (slots in a school, permits, gasoline, whatever).

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

Trump also made a great contribution to corruption around the world, by pausing enforcement of anti-corruption laws with the EO "Pausing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Enforcement" https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/paus...

>in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an individual not to participate

Russia is considered a corrupt country by the West, but I have never bribed anyone and never felt that a bribe is expected.

>better high school by having them display academic excellence

Worked just fine for me.

One thing that I want to add - Westerners have experience of this sort of corruption, every day.

Not at a governmental level, and not powered by cash, but it is seen when working for companies.

Managers are highly corruptible - it's got next to nothing to do with the output of a given worker, instead it's about their ability to "kiss up" (something framed as "soft skills")

If the managers are not taking bribes or favors for better treatment that isn't corruption...its just bad management. Those aren't he same thing even though you might have the same emotional reaction to them.

> If the managers are not taking bribes or favors for better treatment that isn't corruption

You have a very narrow definition of corruption here. A manager using his management powers to intentionally make his life easier at the cost of the company is corrupt regardless how he does that. He could do that via bribes, but also could do things like hire a lot of deadweight people to bloat his org and raise his own salary without making the company more productive, that is also corruption since he hurt the company to benefit himself.

That isn't "bad management" since it was done intentionally, he knew what he did was bad for the company and good for himself. Corrupt management often masquerades as bad management to avoid getting sued, but it is still corruption.

> If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life.

I think increasingly this describes how things work in the US, if we broaden our definition of "corruption" a bit to include things like corporations stealing your data, charging hidden fees, etc.

I'd add tipping system for various services, but specially restaurants etc in definition of corruption too. Here blame pass around between employees, owners, restaurant associations, govt officials making/ passing laws etc. But end result is customer keep paying extra charges or being labeled as worst customers.

I love how media is in this game , printing endless articles how customers are really supposed to pay tips because poor server. And even when customers are revolting against tipping culture it is going from 25% to 22% as a way of speaking truth to power.

I'd say sweden is quite corrupt but the population is very blind to it.

See for example how an horrible pink "sculpture" could cost over 8 million euros.

How does this square with regimes like Singapore, which is one of the least corrupt nations in the world yet also an authoritarian, one-party system?

These are the 'benevolent authoritarian-ship' outliers - very rare and depends on chance that the current person in power truly acts in the interest of the public - but when they are gone there's no legal framework in place that keeps their successors to do whatever they please.

EDIT: commenters are still all referring to Singapore which I remind you is the very rare outlier case.

Not true. LKY has been gone a while and Singapore GDP has only gone up.

I guess it’s a good thing that the ruling party has been in power for about 6 decades at this point.

Part of what makes Singapore interesting is that they have yet to have a leader truly invested in subsuming the power of the system. A big thing of Xi Jinping’s rise to power has been the systematic dismantling of post-Mao checks on power.

Singapore has yet to have a leader willing to take over the system, because two of its leaders were the dynasty that created the system. The real test is what happens when someone like that shows up; but even Western democracies face this problem, it’s just that the system has more built in speed bumps to overcome.

Rare outliers indicate the root problem is not the structure. All the interesting questions arise from the outliers

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.

My guess is there is some kind of momentum with these things. If everybody demands bribes, then by not demanding bribes yourself when you are in a position to do so, you are effectively pissing away your take but remember you still need to pay bribes to everyone else because they don't care you didn't take bribes.

On the flip side, if nobody else requires bribes but you do, you will surely stick out like a sore thumb. If I don't get paid bribes and I am an influential powerful person, why should I pay you any bribes? Especially for something that is legitimate and a part of your duties?

A planning officer, who happens to share an uncommon surname with the local MP, did just that with an application of mine recently. No site visit, no photos, no respect to the law, just NO.

That provides an easy solution: complain to your MP. At length. And then ask if the planning officer happens to be a relative, as though it has just occurred to you.

And then you might consider talking to the local paper to see if it would make a story. Also the crapper tabloids might even pay for the story.

I fundamentally disagree. While there may be outlier cases, the core of a democracy is the separation of powers: the judiciary, the executive, and the legislative branches. If an agent within one branch violates the rules, you have the legal recourse to appeal to the others. In an authoritarian state, there is only one pillar of power - meaning there is zero recourse for citizens.

Furthermore, I’m tired of the false equivalence some people in this thread draw between the level of corruption in democracies and authoritarian regimes. They are simply not on the same scale - if you ever experienced both you would know that.

I am not a historian but the difference is between a society with a "rule of law" and "law of the jungle". Probably high democracy correlates with rule of law, but they are not the same thing.

I don’t think this is true. 20th century authoritarians made great effort to leverage the law and use legal systems.

Rule of law doesn’t address the problem of bad laws (from bad governance).

Don't confuse having courts with rule of law. Read up in the thread, someone mentioned how important separation of powers is. I can't stress how true this idea is. In authoritarian regimes, courts are under the control of the dictator, not a separate branch who will overrule even their own political party (as just happened in the US and regularly happens all over the west).

The claim here was rule of law. Separation of powers is not equivalent.

That's not true, in a democracy you tend to have methods of appeal that actually work, and their threat keeps the wheels of bureaucracy greased.

This is because, in principle, everything comes down to the fundamental threat that the people can remove the current government, and the government does have full control over the unelected civil servants. If they keep ignoring appeals, they'll eventually get dethroned.

There's a nice symmetry between this and the fact that the law is ultimately guaranteed by the governments monopoly on violence. They can dethrone you too if you don't comply.

When a democracy works, there can be a very effective balance between the people's leverage towards the government and the governments leverage towards the people.

In an authoritarian regime the same forces are present but they are not balanced in the same way. The people can still rise up and dethrone the ruler through violence, but that is so much harder, and it is mostly offset by the governments greater power of violence. So they can get away with so much more.

I think this is completely wrong. For a democracy to form, substantially everyone must have bought in. That’s the upstream, not the threat of removal. Authoritarian “regimes” are constantly under threat of removal.

This is one thing many forget, mostly due to drinking our own koolaid about the inherent superiority of liberal democracy. Authoritarian regimes almost by definition have high public support, because they couldn't function at all if even a relatively small proportion of society went against them. The people who want to overthrow them are either out of the country or insignificant. Dictatorship is impossible without populism.

This doesn't make any sense to me. There are and have been numerous authoritarian regimes that lack "high public support", now and in the past. The entire idea for most authoritarian regimes is to slowly minimize the power of those who oppose them. And then, they spend a huge amount of resources looking for dissent (SD/Gestapo, Stasi, etc.) and trying to control the societal narrative.

Any government that lacks public support collapses.

Democratic governments can operate without a plurality of support for the current government, because the population generally supports and is invested in the system of government. When democratic governments fail, there is usually very little danger of violence or economic and societal instability, because there is trust in those systems. Corruption and malfeasance harms trust in the systems of governance which democracies depend upon.

Authoritarian governments depend on confidence in the government to continue functioning. The system of government isn't necessarily trusted, the workers of government aren't necessarily trusted, but the leaders are in charge and doing things. Media manipulation and effective propaganda is certainly an important tool for these governments, but pointing out that it exists doesn't mean that it doesn't work! Propaganda totally does work, by almost all measures. Russia, China, Cuba, Iran all have high domestic support for the government.

Authoritarian governments also tend to be very stable - people know what to expect. Democracies change periodically. The stability and familiarity are key to the trust that authoritarian governments maintain. The protests in Iran prior to the current conflict are a good example of what happens when a government fails to maintain the trust of the people - the arrival of war saved the current regime from falling apart at the seams when Khomeini died of cancer in a few months and a squabble for the leadership broke out amid a collapsing economy.

I think that you're underestimating the power of authoritarianism. For Iran, I don't think the government was in any danger prior to the war. It was capable of exerting control through the state apparatus quite easily. And look at North Korea, you think that the people under that government are supportive? That's nonsense on stilts.

Also, that collapse you refer to can take an awful long time under authoritarian control.

I feel like this discussion is more about westerners who don't understand the actual effects of political repression. A reminder, Nicolae Ceaușescu had a 90+% approval rating just a week before he was put on trial and deleted in less than a day. Measuring approval ratings in authoritarian regimes is an almost impossible task if you care at all about accuracy.

The US elected government has no control over the unelected civil servants as congress over the past 150 years did everything they could to prevent the spoils system.

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 effective federal workforce) as well as some limits.

I swear we have a problem where we quantize to caricatures rather than recognizing tuned balance, and control theorists would probably anticipate this means things will start to swing a bit wildly.

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.

This is why so much planning gets decided in judicial review.

Resepect for the rule of law is whats important. In Singapore you can sue the government, same as in the U.S Try to do that in China and the only thing that's going to happen, is you being sent a a reducation camp.

More easily because in a democratic society there is absolutely no risk of having something like that come out and the need for the autocrat to save face and jealously assert the civil servant acted outside of the will of the autocrat thus behead the arbitrary civil servant to cheering crowds according to popular demand.

At worst the person gets fired and is prohibited from public sector jobs at that tier of government afterwards for a period of time while the story is fresh in peoples minds, in the rare case the plutocratic owned media let's such a story come out of its mass media products about the not-paid-for bureaucratic elements of government in hopes of reducing polarization that comes from over-promoting one of the arbitrarily different parties as a means of providing the commoners what Orwell called "Two Minutes Hate" or a means of obtaining cathartic release from the tensions that making them believe they are somehow co-authors of the government to keep them engaged as willing participants.

"providing the commoners what Orwell called "Two Minutes Hate" or a means of obtaining cathartic release from the tensions that making them believe they are somehow co-authors of the government to keep them engaged as willing participants."

This explains the current state of US mass media so well...

The culture and trust of the people makes the system work or fail, not the system itself.

Civil Servants in India (with traces to British era) are considered the invisible rulers of the country. Getting selected is like becoming a local lord.

Democracies are different from each other. There are many ways you can build a society from the same basic principles.

One key difference is the extent the authorities have discretionary powers. Can they do whatever the consider necessary to do their jobs (until the courts tell otherwise), or do they only have the powers explicitly given by the law? Common law systems tend to favor discretionary powers, but they vary on how eager the courts are to keep the officials in check. Civil law systems can be anywhere on the spectrum, but it's usually a legislative choice made in advance rather than a judicial choice made after the fact.

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".

To my knowledge, while authoritarian it's not a totalitarian state, and Singapore has fairly effective means of redress (aka, rule of law).

I would not say that corruption is a positive trait, but rather that in societies with an authoritarian regime, corruption has a positive impact on getting you what you want. Which, of course, makes sense when there are no rules to follow, and it enables you to get things going.

Where this fails is when the person who wants to get things going their way doesn’t have enough money. And that’s why it’s usually paired with inequality as well.

>corruption is, rather than a problem, a necessary element of society to keep things going.

There's a prof at Johns Hopkins, Yuen Yuen Ang, who wrote a whole book on the topic in China. She dubbed this 'access money'. Corruption that 'greases the wheels' and removes red tape by bureaucracies, which authoritarian states are very prone to, is a net positive. It doesn't erode trust because it stimulates growth and doesn't interfere with the lives of ordinary citizens. It's basically a hack to get things done.

The East Asian countries in particular tend to have this at the corporate levels. Chaebols in South Korea and Zaibatsu in Japan tend to be corrupt in that sense but it has if anything an organizing function.

In most democratic countries corruption tends to happen at the individual level, think Indian police in some states who are famous for extorting travelers like road bandits. That's significantly more trust eroding and economically harmful. If you don't differentiate what kind of corruption you're talking about you can't really make sense of it.

> Corruption gets things going and in a society that has no trust it is a positive trait.

That's a red herring:

> We first demonstrate that perceiving corruption predicts lower generalized trust almost universally across individuals.

That couldn't be the case if autocracy meant a "society that has no trust." You're just speculating (or perhaps "anecdozing") while the article is attempting to measure these things.

Edit: clarification

Modify "has no trust" to "has no trust in the official system", and the red herring points to one of the key dynamics behind why this happened.

This key dynamic is what Russians call blat. My explanation of it is summarized from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg.

When we witness corruption, our trust is eroded the distance between how we think that things should work, and how they do work.

In a democracy, there are official rules about how things are supposed to work. Those rules are how we expect things to work. Therefore, encountering corruption violates our expectations. And reduces our trust.

In an autocracy, nobody expects that the official rules are how things actually work. You don't say that - doing so is dangerous - but everybody knows it.

However behind the scenes, people learn to cope. And a key part of coping is a blat network. This is the classic, "I know someone who knows someone who can make this happen..." In other words, people develop personal networks of others that they trust.

This trust is not eroded by encountering official corruption - that's expected.

This trust is also not eroded by having to grease a few palms as part of getting something through the blat network. In fact it is improved. You expect to have to pay something. The whole point of a blat network is to get something otherwise unavailable, or at a better price than you otherwise could. And so these encounters with corruption increase your trust in the power and effectiveness of your personal network!

Now go watch that video. It explains that what Jeffrey Epstein was doing was running a blat network. The availability of sex crimes was social proof that created trust among elites in what Jeffrey Epstein could do. His real money came from fundraising, brokering deals, and so on. For example Leon Black paid Epstein about $158 million for financial advice, such as structuring tax shelters. (Care to bet whether Epstein's connections made the IRS less likely to question those arrangements?) Bill Gates paid him some unknown amount for brokering deals with JP Morgan, meeting Saudi princes, etc.

We, the general public, have mostly focused on the sex crimes. But we should also be concerned about the normalization of corruption as "business as usual" among elites. Because politics is like a fish - it rots from the head. Corruption at the top will not forever remain corruption at the top. If left unchecked, it will some day be corruption for all of us.

I’ve known the difference in corruption at different levels between a country like India and a country like the US.

India hasn’t had a very long authoritarian regime since its independence. Yet, corruption has existed at every touch point with the government and shows no signs of reduction. In India, getting a driver’s license or getting a passport (for which there’s a “police verification” step) or buying/selling real estate or filing a police complaint or getting some work done in a court of law or even getting the final rites of a deceased person (burial or cremation) done require bribes in most places.

Also, paying a bribe means standing in line with the rest of the people who paid bribes. Things don’t move fast just because money exchanged hands.

All this is to say that I don’t know what to make of your statement on authoritarian vs. democratic regimes (though you mentioned “western”). The main factor seems to be the culture and what others here have described as low trust vs high trust.

My rich friend drove home drunk from a police ball even though his parents gave him an unlimited taxi card, the police stopped him and recognized his family, and then told him to get home safely.

My other friend forgot his drivers license at home while being non-white and was arrested/charged and forced to explain why he didn’t bring his license to a judge.

That sounds like it's in the US? That's a known third-world country, in this respect at least.

If you don't think this would happen even in an 'idyllic' scandi country or wherever, you're mistaken.

No way, the Norwegian Prime Minister certainly was not doing anything corrupt or trading any criminal favors with Epstein, that's all just a vast conspiracy theory.

This reminds me of a quote, purportedly from living in a soviet state: "he who does not steal, steals from his family".

How much does what you describe have to do with the continuous compounding of laws? Since 1976, on average 220 new laws are enacted by Congress per year, but this is additive as most laws do not sunset or get repealed. Also, the complexity and length of newer laws have exploded. All of this suggests more control over people and follows the tension between the rule of law and rule by law.

Yeah it's like coding with CSS. If you keep adding more rules eventually stuff starts breaking and nobody knows how to fix it.

> Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer.

There's an awful lot of low level corruption in the form of NGOs who receive government funding with no accountability for what the funds are spent on.

well that's a different 'kind' of corruption

corruption you have to GIVE to get stuff done

vs corruption with loophole for RECEIVING money

(I'd rather have the latter )

The NGOs find ways to route the received money back to the politicians in the form of campaign donations, or having a politician's friend/relative being an executive at the NGO.

The NGOs also subcontract to other NGOs, who take their cut, and eventually just a trickle winds up going to the purpose of giving money to the NGO.

The first part sounds like it's US-specific; campaign donations are less of a thing, and more strongly controlled, in Europe. The second could happen here too, though, and probably does.

I was indeed referring to the US. I don't know much about corruption in other countries.

The two aren't really separate, because the grifters who are on the receiving end also often end up being ones "donating" to the corrupt politicians who select their organizations to receive money.

Not just state NGOs. Remember the UN has plenty of NGOS such as the WHO, UNHCR, UNESCO and so on. No accountability in them either.

This reminds me of that article where a person came from china to the US for a while, and wrote a book about it when he returned.

one thing he said was (in my words) - the americans don't refer to a person in charge, they refer to the constitution.

so your comment makes sense. In other societies they corrupt a person, in the US they corrupt the law.

An interpretation of the title and conclusions of the article is that the government actions or perception, is less of an influence on high-trust / low-trust societies. The far more influential factor is social, between citizens.

Thats a very nice story. Tell us where Morality comes from and why it hasnt gone extinct?

> Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer.

Believe it or not, this is how lawmaking is supposed to work in a democracy. No one in a position of power is going to be completely selfless. The Civil Rights Acts were only able to pass because NAACP promised to endorse the Republicans and Southern Democrats who were the deciding votes. Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it. For example, in the first half of the Biden administration, there was a real possibility for a minimum wage increase, but voters saw any compromise to the $15 target as weakness even though they depended the vote of Joe Manchin, a Senator of a poor state that would suffer from economic turmoil with a California level minimum wage.

To be clear, it's not fair that the rich and powerful are better equipped to influence lawmaking. However, that's mainly a consequence of the utility of money and power rather than the system being fundamentally broken. Dismissing things like lobbying as corruption may provide comfortable explanation of why you're losing, but only helps the rich and powerful by eroding interest in grassroots lobbying and normalizing actual corruption (e.g. Binance insisting that its $2 billion investment be settled in Trump's stablecoin shortly after CZ was pardoned).

> Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it.

This is a very succinct description of arguably the biggest problem of our democracy right now.

A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt, to inoculate himself from criticism for the very overt acts of corruption he engages in.

Many people seem to support him under the argument “they’re all corrupt, at least he’s not pretending to NOT be corrupt.”

> A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt...

Trump didn't have to convince anyone of that. Voters already believed that, and have for some time. Trump merely had to speak to that widespread, preexisting belief.

Democracies also have an independent media that can name, shame and investigate.

In autocracies (outright or electoral), the media is used to bash only those who oppose the supreme leader.

That's why when projects are late under opposition its "corruption" or "policy paralysis"

But when the same happens under the party that's ruling via electoral autocracy, it's a "delayed gift"

[flagged]

As a matter of perspective, the push to do so is to replace corrupt officials.

Ultimately, if you believe that the officials currently in place were doing their jobs without bias then this looks like corruption. If you believe that the existing officials were compromised by their politics, then this looks like removing corruption.

It's all perspective.

The problem with meritocracy: who decides what "merit" is?

The answer is: those who are already in power.

Stop the relativism. In a democracy it's mostly all of us that have a say, in a dictatorship it's one guy and his fascist rank's whim.

>it's mostly all of us that have a say

Do you?

I mean, literally so in a democracy, no? You could argue 'we' (whoever that is) do not live in a democracy, but to say that a plurality of voices do not matter in a democracy seems wrong at face-value.

> Reminds me of a report that Russians have no word for "bribe"

This is just false. The word is “взятка”.

If I were you I would not trust that report you’re referring to.

Why would one of the most popular languages in the world not have a word for "bribe"? Seems a bit condescending, implying Russians can't tell the difference between a "bribe" and customary behavior.

Bullshit. We have more words for flavors of bribery than for types of snow.

Do we?

>Reminds me of a report that Russians have no word for "bribe"

You could've checked that faster than it took you to write your russophobic comment

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