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yason
ACS_Solver
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.
gmd63
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.
tines
> 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.
totetsu
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...
btilly
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.
ACS_Solver
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.
petsfed
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?"
torginus
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.
gkoz
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.
awesome_dude
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")
hunterpayne
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.
BrenBarn
> 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.
geodel
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.
LtWorf
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.
seivan
[dead]
drysine
>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.
Telemakhos
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?
zipy124
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.
oersted
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.
mentalgear
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.
collabs
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?
Gravityloss
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.
jltsiren
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.
Shitty-kitty
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.
newyankee
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.
pjc50
This is why so much planning gets decided in judicial review.
Aloha
To my knowledge, while authoritarian it's not a totalitarian state, and Singapore has fairly effective means of redress (aka, rule of law).
mentalgear
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.
bobthepanda
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.
groundzeros2015
Rare outliers indicate the root problem is not the structure. All the interesting questions arise from the outliers
stingraycharles
I guess it’s a good thing that the ruling party has been in power for about 6 decades at this point.
abhinai
Not true. LKY has been gone a while and Singapore GDP has only gone up.
stingraycharles
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.
undefined
Barrin92
>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.
jancsika
> 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
btilly
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.
wtmt
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.
PieTime
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.
morkalork
This reminds me of a quote, purportedly from living in a soviet state: "he who does not steal, steals from his family".
dzink
You have to understand how gears shift from there. Trust is essential for business transactions and specifically for long term investments. You can’t make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust (a lot of money on a leap means if you don’t trust the other side or the government to keep conditions stable, you won’t see a return).
Now if you are in a high trust society, you may have a lot of leveraged businesses or governments who have gotten loans or permission to do something based on past trust history. If the trust degrades systematically Investors may want returns faster, or interest rates go up, or partnerships don’t happen. That’s why low trust places don’t grow as fast - trust is the oil for growth engines and lack of it is sand for the same.
Corruption also does a lot of small-profit-for-the-corrupt that leads to massive damage to the overall society via second and third order effects. (example: someone stealing copper cables that stop electricity to entire cities for a while).
aleph_minus_one
> You can’t make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust
The Soviet Union did manage to get massive leaps in some areas (in particular related to armament, but not only) such as
- armament/weapons
- space technology
- mathematics
- physics
> (a lot of money on a leap means if you don’t trust the other side or the government to keep conditions stable, you won’t see a return).
I guess you can immediately see how the Soviet Union "solved" this problem by the fact that you simply couldn't gain a lot of money from your innovation.
DoughnutHole
The Soviet Union was able to innovate in the areas they chose to sink resources into but innovation was clearly not as widespread as evidenced by their decades of stagnation from the 60s onwards.
They were still innovating in military technology in the 80s but analysis since their collapse analysis that they were at least 20% of GDP on defence, if not as high as 40%.
The West managed to match and surpass Soviet military and scientific advances without sacrificing consumer goods or the economic wellbeing of their people.
pastage
I am very sure the west sacrificed a lot of wellbeing because of the vast amount of money spent on war. Peace time was great.
throwaway27448
Innovation is a term inherently tied to products sold at markets in product cycles that change over time. I think you're looking for the term invention.
bequanna
I'm not trying to downplay their accomplishments, but how much of their scientific advances from the 40s-60s were due to capturing ex-Nazi tech (and scientists) or stealing from the US via their incredible intelligence efforts?
derektank
Your examples do kind of reinforce the point being made.
Mathematics and (theoretical) physics are capital-light research sectors. Weapons platforms and space technology were state managed (I.e. didn’t require private sector capital financing).
jimbokun
For a while before the US and other democracies left them in the dust.
Mathematics and Physics maybe but not in a way that benefited the broader society overall.
lokar
For business it’s almost a simple as adding another factor to your model: the odds of expropriation by the leader and his cronies.
It does not take a very high number to make most capital investments look really bad.
And you compare that (investing in something new), to instead using the capital to bribe your way into the “system”.
GZGavinZhao
Did you meant to write "You *can't* make massive leaps in technology or medicine" instead of *can*?
andai
I have an unusual perspective here.
In my country the politicians are openly very corrupt. (Well, possibly yours too ;)
Recently there has been a lot of improvement to the infrastructure. I realized that what has happened is, a lot of EU funds have been made available for development, and people are lining up to skim a little bit off the top.
How you say, the incentives are aligned, yeah?
I find myself in the odd situation where for each dollar that gets embezzled, a little bit of actual construction happens. That seems like a force you'd want to work with, rather than against.
I mean yeah ideally we'd get rid of corruption, but haha good luck with that. At least now they're fixing the roads.
speeder
I am from Brazil, and there is a famous politician there that has the non-official slogan of "Steals but Does". He is Paulo Maluf. "Everyone" knows he is corrupt. But people vote for him anyway, because he get things done, and he doesn't engage in certain kinds of corruption.
That is the problem, how you get corruption to go the way you want?
Lots of politicians see Paulo Maluf, and think they can imitate him, that they will be beloved by the public and steal money somehow and line their own pockets, except those are too self-serving or too incompetent to pull that off properly, so they steal in ways that go against the public.
So for example in one city where I lived, one mayor stole the money from the kids lunch, resulting in hungry kids. Another mayor stole ludicrous amounts of money from garbage collection services, the result is that the city ended with debts in the billions while being a tiny city (it has 100k people, yet has debts bigger than cities with millions of people).
Paulo Maluf meanwhile built lots of useful infrastructure that is still in use. (also hilariously he used to brag a lot using the phrase "Maluf that did it!", one time some comedic journalists went to a bridge opening, and asked him who did the bridge, he replied: "Maluf didn't do this bridge. But he did the two roads the bridge are connecting, so there is no bridge without Maluf!")
GuB-42
In a sense, he is not unlike a high ranked executive or business owners. These people usually demand high pay for their work because of how important their decisions are for the well-being of the company.
Same idea here except that it happens under the table. Elected officials usually get a fixed pay, and often, it is not that high compared to the importance of their work. What Paulo Maluf is proposing is essentially "I am going to pay myself well (through corruption), but I will do what's best for the city".
mothballed
I would vote for an infrastructure kleptocrat any day over someone that will actually enforce the insane zoning and code law we have here. A big problem in USA is you can only get many building or infrastructure things done maybe if you have millions to "influence" politicians. The opportunity to have a politician rob me of 10,20% of the construction costs and meanwhile actually be able to build a condo or something on my own property would be amazing.
whstl
The copy part sounds a lot like Cargo Culting.
Copying the visible behavior but not doing the actual part that matters.
Also incredibly common in corporate.
akdev1l
I am not sure the incentives are aligned.
those people fixing the roads are incentivized to do the work cheaply so they can skim more “off the top”
And you still need to fight corruption to some level or it will come to a point where there’s more skimming than work being done
mentalgear
Exactly, sounds inherently unsafe and the work is only done superficially to keep more EU funds coming (like in Hungary).
order-matters
>those people fixing the roads are incentivized to do the work cheaply
this incentive exists with or without corruption
consp
Depends on how it happens and what your goal is, it starts with a little bit off the top, and ends with it being the prime goal. Somewhere on that gliding scale people get hurt because a bridge collapses because the money went into someone's pockets instead of construction.
NoToP
I like to express this as "if corruption is a price we all must pay we should at least get value for money."
terminalshort
At some point the process to prevent corruption costs more than the actual corruption. The process to award the contract for the Obamacare website wasn't corrupt, but it cost $700 million and the app didn't even work. In a corrupt system that contract would have gone to a company owned by some official's cousin, and he would have bid $100 million knowing he could pocket 50, but it would have got done because he knows the last thing he needs is an investigation. That's kind of how it works in China.
rgupta1833
[dead]
nyeah
Yeah, exactly. One example of a low-trust society was the US in the decade after 1929.
trollbridge
One of the "innovations" in the bank runs of 1929 was that a farmer or business owner would lose all their savings in the bank, because of the bank run.
However, the loans they owed to that bank were still good, and would get bought by an "investor" for pennies on the dollar. They no longer had their bank account to make their normal loan payments from, yet the full repayments were still due, despite the original bank that made the loan going under and closing its doors.
So many farmers ended up having to sell or foreclose on their farms and then attempt to rent them back from the new owners.
hunterpayne
I'm sure that happened at least once, but most of the time it didn't. This is where the concept of the penny auction came from. Those were far more common. Basically locals prevented outsiders from bidding in foreclosure auctions by either tricking or physically preventing them from getting to the farm (where the actual auction was held). Then the original owner bought the farm back for a few pennies as there were no other bidders.
danny_codes
> You can’t make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust.
Incorrect. You can’t do it without cooperation. You can cooperate without trust.
kelseyfrog
Is this some sort of mathematical model that doesn't play out in reality?
pyrolistical
There is a mathematical model where it does. In game theory it is called tit for tat
tlogan
Excellent insight. Trust is key for capitalism. And for functioning democracy. When trust is lost, whether in the system or in your fellow citizens, everything begins to suffer.
I think of society as an extended family. If you do not trust your spouse, many things in your home simply will not work.
terminalshort
Your example isn't corruption. That's just crime. But it does do massive damage.
vlovich123
I’m confused. Corruption isn’t crime? I know white collar crime was controversial 100 years ago, but are we back to arguing whether corruption is crime or not?
mb7733
Corruption is crime but not all crime is corruption. Stealing copper isn't corruption.
aleph_minus_one
> Corruption isn’t crime?
Societies have very different opinions which kinds of corruption are perfectly fine, and which kinds are criminal.
retep_kram
It looks like a tautology to me. Like: "Corruption erodes social trust in places where social trust exist and is key for the political system."
PunchyHamster
Kinda; authoritarism runs on bribes and nepotism, of course corruption would have lesser effect here, it's expected
scythmic_waves
It's not a tautology because it's not guaranteed. There are plenty of plausible sounding claims that fail to be true. That's why science is needed: to provide _empirical_ evidence for/against a claim.
sigbottle
Not to be an "uhm actually" guy but this goes into a lot of interesting philosophy in the first half of the 20th century. You would probably agree that "a fish is a fish" is a tautology, but for more complicated things it gets murkier and murkier. Separating out what are the tautologies from not was a big effort. Then Quine came along, and a big portion of people migrated away from the distinction
scythmic_waves
I dabble in "um actually"s myself (especially given that my original comment was one), so no worries :)
I don't disagree with your comment exactly. But I primarily wanted to push back on a common response to scientific works. Something to the effect of "Well obviously, everyone knew that!".
Except they didn't because they (presumably) didn't actually investigate. And even after the science, they still don't _know it_ know it. But post-scientific inquiry, they have a much stronger claim to the knowledge than they did before. So the type of dismissal in the root comment is seriously missing the point.
undefined
lm28469
I think culture and education play much bigger roles than anything else, all the sources I find show Germany and France having similar level of corruption (on top of being geographically and economically close) but completely different level of "social trust".
China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tell
PaulHoule
The corruption numbers break down into: (1) They didn't ask the question in China, (2) They asked somebody if they paid a bribe or if taking a bribe is every justifiable, and (3) "Expert estimates of the extent to which the executive, legislative, judiciary, and bureaucracy engage in bribery and theft, and the making and implementation of laws are susceptible to corruption"
For (2) China doesn't look too different from the U.S., for (3) experts think it has gotten much worse since the time of Mao but I'd say China is on the honest side of the "global South".
Note that lay perceptions of corruption are widespread in the US
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51398-most-americans-see-c...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/185759/widespread-government-co...
https://www.occrp.org/en/news/survey-reveals-corruption-as-t...
though unlike India I think very few Americans have paid a bribe to a cop. See also
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...
bnjms
> though unlike India I think very few Americans have paid a bribe to a cop.
No one, left or right, thinks there is street level corruption. Not the kind accessible to someone in a traffic stop. I have experienced it in Mexico and think that kind of corruption would still be worse because I cannot imagine how to recover from it. I have hope that a few high profile arrests of c level fall his may turn the tide. If not then there are extrajudicial methods open to American culture.
AnimalMuppet
How do you see Xi's anticorruption campaign? Is it just a club to beat political opponents with, or is there a real problem and he's trying to fix it?
jimbokun
Wow Americans really dislike Americans! (Pew link)
bdauvergne
It's the institutional part which is lacking in France. Look at the budget of the ministry of justice in France per capita and in Germany. Germany spend twice as much and has twice as much judges per capita than France (and everything which goes with it like clerks).
My company took the biggest telecom company in France to court for a violation of our license on a soft, license was GPLv2, we won, but it took 12 years.
Justice is a very poor and slow institution in France. For the same countries the budget of police forces per capita are nearly the same for example.
joe_mamba
Also Germany spends more than France on defence while having a lot less to show for, with France having nuclear weapons, nuclear subs, aircraft carriers and a much more capable military overall with less money. Germany is the poster child of government waste. If I were a taxpayer there I'd want my money back and/or bureaucrats going to jail.
rob74
> China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tell
There are a few reasons for that that I can imagine:
- China is one of very few autocracies that has managed to significantly improve the standard of living of most of its population.
- The public trials and (sometimes) executions of allegedly corrupt individuals might help improve the perception of corruption.
- The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence people to declare a higher level of social trust than they actually have, even if the poll is supposedly "confidential" and "only for scientific purposes".
ses1984
>The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence people to declare a higher level of social trust than they actually have.
This 100%.
Political imprisonment and reeducation camps are antithetical to any definition of a high trust society that I would subscribe to.
bluGill
China was getting better for a long time. XI is changing that. Change is slow though and he is not rushing corruption though it seems to be increasing. He has purged some corrupt people as well making things slightly better in the short term - but he values loyalty over competence and so his short term changes are for less corruption but long term increase it.
That is China is a complex country and books (which are not written and many cannot be for decades yet) are needed to understand this, not a short comment box. [This applies to every other country anyone here mentions]
boringg
Social trust is high because there are pretty heavy handed control measures over the population with havy costs. Thats more of a fear based society than trust. Government can giveth and government can taketh.
ses1984
We are probably meant to assume ceteris paribus and only vary the dimension of corruption.
I think you’re right that culture plays a key role. For example if small bribes are customary, that doesn’t erode trust, that’s just the way things are.
eru
> the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tell
What are you comparing with? I don't think PR China has more social trust than Singapore or Japan or Korea?
jjk166
I think modern democracies and autocracies are really just proxies for societies where wealth begets power and where power begets wealth, respectively.
A rich person buying their way into power (either through gaining a formal position or influence) robs the people of that society of their power, which is a limited resource. There is no upside to it, if it were good for the people at large there would be no need for the corruption.
Conversely, a powerful person enriching themself can be a good thing. A crony being put in charge of a state owned corporation, for example, doesn't really take anything away from the common person. It's not like you were in line to be the CEO of a random oil company. So long as your material condition is improving, the rising tide is lifting your boat, who cares if the tide is also lifting someone else's bigger boat. This sort of corruption aligns the interests of the powerful with the economic well being of the nation - the better things are run, the more comfortable the leaders will be - and it's certainly preferable to other ways they could potentially abuse their power. Who wants to be lead by someone so incompetent that they can't find a way to skim a little off the top?
We in democratic society also don't really mind too much if a person achieves tremendous wealth so long as they don't dilute our power. Whether they be startup founders, business moguls, movie stars, rock stars, reality tv stars, socialites spending daddy's money, so long as they stay out of politics and avoid accusations of heinous crimes we not only put up with them, we idolize them. That's not to say that the Kardashians are morally equivalent to the current CEO of Gazprom in terms of how they gained their fortune, but none of us are under the illusion that their wealth is the consequence of hard work providing a much needed good or service to society at large, and if they leverage their status to make even more money that's not going to erode our social trust in any meaningful way.
eszed
That's a really interesting point of view, which puts things in terms I hadn't thought of before.
Where it breaks down is the stage where the cronies being put in charge aren't competent, and their only qualification is their proximity to power. Then (too much of?) the tide gets diverted, and most of the boats stop rising.
I can think of no examples where a society that permits leadership-by-crony did not reach that end-state.
imadierich
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captainkrtek
Was talking about this with some colleagues who are from Ukraine, Russia, and other countries.
In the US, it seems corruption is only allowed at the top. If you tried to bribe your way out of a traffic ticket as a regular person, you'd get in big trouble, then meanwhile the president pardons wealthy fraudsters [1].
Meanwhile, in countries like Russia, everyone can get in on the action. A colleague of mine told me if he were to get drafted to the war, he knew exactly how much to pay and who to pay off locally to get his name off the list. It's equal opportunity corruption.
[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/28/nikola-founder-trevor-milt...
wraptile
I'm Lithuanian familiar with soviet type of corruption and post soviet Lithuania which did a lot to remove corruption (also live in asia rn) and your assessment is somewhat correct but it's a terrible system.
The availability of corruption is a huge grease for economic activity and weirdly - order - but soviet type of corruption has a massive flaw that bad corruption bets (big impact, high publicity) would be mostly unpunished. In asia however it's quite interesting how the face saving and family culture corrects for that a bit as bad corruption bets will backfire despite lack of legal framework for cleanup.
Unfortunately it's _not_ equal opportunity corruption as low economic classes are left out and suffer the most, the cruelty of these systems are really hard to put in the words of a single comment. This also creates a massive overhead for corruption beaurocracy where entire positions are found not on actual product or activity but corruption "middle managers".
So despite your friends take this is not a good system on it's own and merely a relief for terrible autocratic rule. Autocrats actually actively allow corruption as this relief is what keeps them in power precisely because people with some power get a relief and poor class bears the slave worker burden.
nostrademons
I've had Indian coworkers remark similarly. The way they put it was "In India, corruption is democratized. Everybody gets in on the act, and everybody can profit a little bit. In the U.S, corruption is reserved for the very top; only they can profit, and everybody else just suffers. Personally, I prefer the Indian system."
Was kinda eye-opening as a native-born U.S. citizen. I'd always just assumed things worked according to the rules here, but then after he said it, I started seeing corruption at the top all the time.
jimbokun
Things do work according to the rules here.
But the wealthy write the rules.
jimbokun
The US is still mostly a Rule of Law country, in the sense that courts enforce the laws as written most of the time.
But which laws are passed by Congress and signed by the President are mostly determined by financial donations more so than public opinion.
keybored
With enough money you can define what corruption means.
testing22321
Campaign contributions are called bribery in every country on earth bar one
cushychicken
It's equal opportunity corruption.
...and look how nice it sounds it live in Russia.
bryanrasmussen
This does sort of feel like the kind of thing I might think and wonder about and then do a lot of work doing a study and some research and writing up an article and in the end everyone says "yeah, no duh!"
catlifeonmars
I can’t speak to this area of research, but studies for obvious things are still quite important. Maximal surprise is not a goal of science, nor is it an effective way to advance knowledge in a field.
PepperdineG
I think of the recent study with raccoons how they like to solve puzzles. That was something well-known but not actually scientifically demonstrated and measured until now.
lo_zamoyski
The expectation that science must necessarily "surprise" us is a terrible habit. It creates an unhealthy lust for novelty, a trivialization of what it means to "know" or to "understand" by conflating it with familiarity, and it can impede understanding, because the person in question will deny the straightforward and hunt for the "surprise" which becomes a criterion for truth. It can also feed into an incoherent categorical skepticism of human rational powers and tantalize superstitious, gnostic appetites.
Science (broadly understood) looks for explanation and for verification. The point is to understand. Many interesting things may be found by analysis of what is known.
Stranger43
And completely understandable once you understand the narratives of both system.
An autocrat is supposed to be "Powerful" beyond all else and typically aren't required to be accountable to anyone so as long as the narrative of "Powerfully competent" holds corruption is merely an part of the narrative.
In democracies the leadership is very much meant to be by and off the people and held accountable under the same legal standard they enforce on everyone else, and when that leadership start to act with the impunity of an "entrenched" aristocracy and stop following the rules the narrative breaks.
And lets not forget that the original feudal aristocracy held their position almost entirely by the mechanism of unchallengeable property rights in an zero sum economy* and we begin to understand why the accumulation of property/wealth into fewer and fewer hands is a almost unmanageable threat to the narratives of western democracy.
*We are returning to an zero sum economy as the planet have essentially run out of unowned/unused resources and that means that modern western economic solutions(grow grow grow) is simply not available anymore.
dotcoma
Corruption erodes social trust where social trust exists.
bparsons
Something a lot of people don't understand about operating within a corrupt system -- the person paying the bribe is usually the one being controlled.
Yes, those who pay receive special benefits, but it is against the background threat of reprisal if you cease paying.
Hey, that's a nice software company, it would be a shame if something happened to it. By the way, my son is raising money for his new crypto venture. You should think about investing.
markus_zhang
IMO corruption is just a symptom. Everything goes back to one source point: lack of well-educated citizens who can push back without hesitation. Note that the two conditions: well-educated and can push back without hesitation. Missing any of them and the foundation cracks.
Also I wouldn't bother comparing corruption between democracies and authoritarians. I have lived under both and the only thing I see is the common human nature represented in different ways. And I see "lack of well-educated citizens who can push back without hesitation" everywhere.
I guess that's why we are in a world that keeps competing for incompetence.
bethekidyouwant
In Mexico, you either pay the bribe or go to jail on trumped up charges. I don’t see what education level has to do with it.
AngryData
In the US you just go to jail on trumped up charges unless you appear wealthy enough to afford a full time lawyer.
markus_zhang
That's why there are two pieces. You also need to push back. Collectively pushing back, not just individually. That's the only way.
amatecha
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theultdev
Well yeah. In a democracy you have a constitution with the government on what to trust them on. Inalienable rights that are agreed upon that they will not violate. With an autocracy there was no agreement and therefore no trust to begin with.
So yes, you'll be more pissed if someone violates the contract with you vs never having one in the first place.
mwigdahl
I think this research really suffers by not acknowledging that there are different types and scopes of corruption, and these different types impact societies in considerably different ways.
The "four types of corruption" breakdown by Yuen Yuen Ang I think is really informative here, with its two-axis breakdown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#:~:text=Petty%20the...).
Amalgamating all corruption into a single corruption index doesn't distinguish between these types, and it seems reasonable that different "flavors" of corruption impact social trust in different ways.
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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.