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Comment by fwipsy | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

> 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

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