https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

The Asian countries that do match the west for low levels of corruption (Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore) largely have a very obvious trait in common - wealth. The least corrupt countries are all among the world's wealthiest, and the most corrupt all among its poorest - regardless of how "individualistic" the country is.

The poorer a country is the more necessary are the advantages to be gained by gaming the system. The weaker a country's institutions the easier it is to get away with corruption - hence the worst offenders being failed states like Syria and Lybia. It's honestly fairly simple even without considering culture.

If anything a more collective society is more susceptible to corruption (and I say this as proponent of big government). The reason China hands out death sentences for corruption is that an individual at the top of the governmental organisations in China can do an enormous amount of damage since the government directly controls the apparatus of the economy and has a huge stake in every major company. No governmental official in the west has as much control over the societal purse as a high ranking official of the CCP.

Try winning even a local government seat without being buddy-buddy with local "employers", media, and other unofficial power brokers. That's not democracy.

- Do you have to personally slip a DMV official several times the actual required fee whenever you get your license renewed to get them to even look at the application?

- Do you have to directly bribe police officers to get them to respond to your complaint? If you were pulled over for a traffic offence would your assumed way out of it be to personally slip something to the police officer?

- Do truckers have to routinely bribe state officials when crossing state lines?

- Do local officials routinely illegally procure land via the government purse for their own personal use?

- Are government officials ever bribed to declare someone dead to allow someone to erroneously claim the totally-not-dead person's property?

These are all pretty much regular occurrences in India - a country that is basically middling in terms of corruption on a global scale. And don't worry, they have all of the high level local and national legislative corruption that the US has as well, with the bonus of a civil service and judiciary that are corrupt from the top down to their roots.

Outside the west corruption isn't just government officials making bad choices to satisfy their doners and special interests (as bad and dysfunctional as that is). In most developing countries it's a fact of day-to-day life - if you are on the lower rungs of the social ladder you have to personally engage in corruption in order to survive. Getting a home, a business licence, governmental documentation etc etc pretty much always come down to either who you know or who you bribe. And if you're higher up you might be lucky enough to benefit from it.

Who do I gotta donate to? Which ZIP code do I gotta live in? Which special "membership plan"/recurring bribe do I have to pay to get access to decent social services?

America in particular has institutionalized corruption so that it no longer resembles the bespoke form practiced in developing countries. Media portrayals plays a big role in this. After all, what is corruption but allowing market forces to rule over human rights, justice, and essential public services?

The West is corrupt, but in a different way. Politician can be bought for certain projects, people who control the flow of money can be encouraged to let it flow more one way than the other, etc. But trying to bribe a policeman can land you in serious trouble. It's better to pay a $50 fine than try to bribe them with $30 off the books. In other words, in Western society, middle-class corruption is perhaps not really worth it (on average). The stakes have to be much higher than that.

Developing countries have more widespread corruption, in that it is part of everyday life. If you want your passport renewed, you have to bribe the clerk, otherwise it will take 1 year. If a policeman stops you, they may well be looking for a bribe and you can make things go much more smoothly by acquiescing.

I'd argue that low-level corruption is more immediately annoying to everyday life, but it is the high level corruption that is the real pervasive worldwide issue. In the same way that pickpockets are annoying, but a single corrupt government can plunder the public finances and run the country into ruin.

No, but rich companies can use "We are a job creator" to get permission to ignore taxes for terms that are effectively "indefinitely". We all end up paying more for the top-end bribes. You just don't see it.

- Do you have to directly bribe police officers to get them to respond to your complaint? If you were pulled over for a traffic offence would your assumed way out of it be to personally slip something to the police officer?

If you don't have property of any serious concern, the police do not care. Nor are they required to fill out a police report. What ends up happening are the middle and upper classes with houses get the respect (no bribes), and the lower monetary classes get laughed at.

- Do truckers have to routinely bribe state officials when crossing state lines?

- Do local officials routinely illegally procure land via the government purse for their own personal use?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2021/10/25/...

So yeah, it's called Asset Forfeiture, and is how you get abuses like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...

Why need bribes when cops legalized blatant theft?

- Bloomberg spent almost $1 billion dollars in his presidential campaign and barely got any delegates

- Google constantly gets blocked from rolling out Google Fiber, despite being richer than all the telecom companies combined

- Facebook really wants to outsource moderation decision making, so they can point their finger at something when it comes to unpopular moderation decisions. To do so, they created an independent oversight board that cost them $130 million, which is more than their total spending on lobbying. If they could outright buy political influence, they would have Congress make rules instead, which would not only give them more distance, but would have the added benefit (for Facebook) of creating regulatory capture.

- Abortion rights got rolled back despite being overwhelmingly championed by billionaires. For example, Warren Buffet has donated over $1 billion to pro-choice charities, and Mackenzie Bezos has donated $300 million.

Of course, there are plenty of examples of large-scale outright corruption in American politics, but you're naive if you believe that it would be any better than in countries where you can bribe police officers.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Maybe it’s the verb “buy” that you are railing against? Well of course. You can’t buy 2,000 units of political influence for 200MUSD. You got me there. You have to take your chances in the short term. But you could on average get a nice return on your investment in the long run.

> Abortion rights got rolled back despite being overwhelmingly championed by billionaires. For example, Warren Buffet has donated over $1 billion to pro-choice charities, and Mackenzie Bezos has donated $300 million.

There are rich people who are in favor of anti-abortion.

> Of course, there are plenty of examples of large-scale outright corruption in American politics, but you're naive if you believe that it would be any better than in countries where you can bribe police officers.

How about you look at the comment that I was replying to. Rejecting federal-level political corruption as “not endemic” since it’s not petty bribery is ludicrous.

IMO, the biggest problem is that people are increasing confusing politics for entertainment, so you get a lot of noise that doesn't translate into policy. I view vague disdain towards things like lobbying as one such example of such noise. It's always, "a corporation got something that I don't like. Must be legalized bribery!" There is never any discussion to the myriad regulations of lobbying or even have any clue how it operates. People don't even realize that lobbying money is primarily an operating expense that pays for the work of lobbyists.

I found one section in the paper you shared interesting:

> A possible objection to populistic democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy...

> But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that—collectively—ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect.

This was written before the massive wave of populism. We got Trump and his attempt of protectionism. The UK got Brexit. Both were overall opposed by the rich as the largest corporations are multinational. Neither achieved the goals that the populists were hoping for. Later, we got the stimulus checks and student loan changes, but both of these were easily hijacked by lobbyists thanks to the economic ignorance of the the population. Small business owners managed to convince people that PPP forgiveness money would go towards keeping people on payroll. Universities and lenders are delighted that forgiveness and income-based repayment will increase the willingness to pay for tuition, which would make them more dependent on private loans.

> There are rich people who are in favor of anti-abortion.

Not really. You have rich people who are against abortion as the means to achieve an end. An example of this is Trump coincidentally becoming against abortion when has he was preparing for his presidential campaign. You don't see any billionaires as dedicated as Buffet is to pro-choice.

> How about you look at the comment that I was replying to. Rejecting federal-level political corruption as “not endemic” since it’s not petty bribery is ludicrous.

The comment was saying that corruption isn't endemic in America... because it's not particularly endemic. There isn't a fundamental difference between petty and federal corruption. If you can pay a police officer to forgive a traffic infraction, a billionaire can easily pay the entire police department to look the other way when they hire thugs to block a polling station.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

> In this model, the difference between politics and almonds is that if you spend $2 on almonds, you get $2 worth of almonds. In politics, if you spend $2 on Bernie Sanders, you get nothing, unless millions of other people also spend their $2 on him. People are great at spending money on direct consumption goods, and terrible at spending money on coordination problems.

Okay, so develop that train of thought just a tiny bit more inside that fermented brain of yours. Coordinating problems are a lot easier if you are “the ten percent”, “the five percent” or “the one percent” depending on how you wanna slice it: you have more resources and you are fewer people. But if you are the rest? Massively more difficult. First of all, who do you trust? People have fallen in and out of trust with Sanders these last six years many times. Is he just a puppet of the Dems? Is he “controlled opposition”? What if a Sanders run just amounts to “raising awareness” that a lot of Americans are struggling (“duh”, they said) as he capitulates to his “good friend” Biden/Clinton/etc.?

And what about all the other supposedly grassroots organizations and things that sprouted in his wake? Were they legitimate or just astroturfs? Were they perhaps legitimate and then got coopted?

Is federal-level electoral politics even a viable path for the “99%”? Or will such efforts always get thwarted by team red and team blue? Does it help at all to get 100 candidates almost-elected?

And what if a few of them do get elected? Will they just adapt to the machine (i.e. become “corrupted”)? What’s the critical mass of progressive or whatever else candidates that need to be elected at the same time in order for that not to happen?

- - -

The supposed fact that more money is spent on almonds is not in itself evidence of any damn thing, and this high-IQ idiot knows that his clickbait headline proves nothing. You don’t spend more on a problem then you need to.

- - -

Just an aside but it’s curious that “Scott” didn’t find data on something useless like ice cream. Almond is good food, and you need food to live. Some kind of food.

> So when I hear stories like that Americans could end homelessness by redirecting the money they spend on Christmas decorations, I don’t think that’s because they’re evil or hypocritical or don’t really care about the issue. I think they would if they could but the coordination problem gets in the way.

Upper-middle class nerds love these “X would end Y” statistics. It means that they can just throw money at the problem and don’t have to think about “politics”, because politics is too messy for them (too much people, too few numbers and stats). But ending homelessness is inherently a political project because you have to find the root cause for it. You can’t just give them money to rent apartments if they just become homeless in two years again. So what’s the issue? Is it mental illness? If that then you need to support the mentally ill directly, not just indirectly once they become homeless. Is it unaffordable rent and home ownership? Then that needs to be fixed. Except there are probably interests that would like rents and home prices to stay at their current levels. Competing interests i.e. a political problem.

> This is one reason I’m so gung ho about people pledging to donate 10% of their income to charity. It mows through these kinds of problems.

Right. These EA people exist, so I’ll just donate to them and let them figure it out. They have big IQs after all. Then I read in the yearly report that they spent 80% of my 10% on BS like safeguarding against run amock general AI. Sigh.

“Scott Alexander” can pat himself on his own back all he wants for his 10%. But he’s confusing two different things. Politics is bigger than turning in your sworn 14 units of good-doing acts for the year–it’s about more than “being a good person”, or publishing “facts” about Christmas decorations and homelessness. If you are working two jobs and can still barely get by then the only long-term fix might be to help change some policies. And maybe five people that you know are in the same boat and so you donate your precious “almond money” to some politician that you think isn’t a fraud. You’re in a different situation than some upper-middle class blogger who world builds for a hobby.

You can band together to make lobbying illegal. What I feel like your saying is that you don't like that you have to vote for someone whose views don't always match yours but that's how it will always be. If I'm not understanding you correctly please let me know.

"But even if they were, there is so much corruption and money on the side of keeping it legal"

Then vote to make it illegal. What is the alternative? A monarchy in which the same corruption could occur? A revolution which causes massive suffering for a long period of time and then you form a new government that is a democracy which faces the same issues?

The unfortunate thing is that corruption is in many cases all but impossible to prove or quantify. And in some cases there is a mixture of corruption and genuine interest. As one example a war that furthers national interests, but also ensures rich rewards for companies of which you will receive returns from (indirect or otherwise) ends up in a balancing act of trying to measure immeasurables - perceived self interest vs perceived national interested.

Okay, then an honest comparison would be wealthy "individualist" countries vs wealthy "collectivist" countries (not that that distinction is quite meaningful, but still). Poor countries have higher corruption that rich countries, that much is obvious and not very interesting.

From my personal experience in China I can tell you that it's standard practice to hand paper bags full of cash to government officials (and CCP members) in order to get government contracts.

Xi targeting his political rivals with "corruption" charges hasn't changed this culture.

Maybe it's a cynical view, but I wouldn't be surprised if anticorruption laws were used to get rid of someone for other reasons, especially by corrupt people.

But if it was simply about political maneuvering, death penalties are wasteful and severe. So that suggests that there is more to it.

I also don't think the show has a particularly anti-individual message: individual police officers and drug dealers are repeatedly shown as struggling within a collectively dysfunctional system, and individual members of each group are shown as themselves corrupt while being protected by the collective. The show is more nihilistic than proscriptive, other than the small handful of "successes" that occur (like Hamsterdam).

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other. -- John Adams

Our culture is predicated on not elevating individualism and freedom above responsibility. They go hand-in-hand. When morality becomes relative, and "whatever feels good" is the standard of acceptable behavior, you see the sort of social decay that is happening all around us.

Just look at our most recent leaders -- a couple of highly corrupt guys with no serious religious conviction.

While I don't disagree with your general comment, I would point out that the words you are using can be interpreted multiple ways. For example:

"Individualism and freedom" does not have to mean shortsighted individualism and freedom. Any thinking person should realize that social cooperation and wealth creation through specialization and trade is in their individual, "selfish" interest. And that being the case, any thinking person should realize that "individualism and freedom" must include supporting and preserving social institutions that facilitate social cooperation and wealth creation through specialization and trade. That is what "Western culture" is supposed to be about, and the fact that many Western cultures don't do a good job at this doesn't mean "individualism and freedom" are bad; it means that many Western cultures have forgotten what "individualism and freedom" is actually supposed to mean.

Conversely, "social responsibility and harmony" does not have to mean preserving social institutions that facilitate social cooperation and wealth creation through specialization and trade. The Soviet Union's leaders and official media outlets like Pravda were constantly talking about "social responsibility and harmony", but what they meant by that was absolute obedience to the Party and its leaders, even as those leaders killed millions of their own people and sent millions more to gulags. Similar remarks could be made about the present government of China; yes, they claimed that they executed a former top minister for "corruption", but given their history, what that actually means is that this former top minister was purged for reasons which most likely had nothing at all to do with actual corruption in the sense we use the term.

He might have just been the honest fall guy who promoted too much social harmony to the detriment of his superiors lifestyles

Our biology evolved for thousands of years before language was invented. To suggest our language influences our biology is nonsensical. Our biology influences language. Propaganda is all about setting a biological mood not embedding a specific chant. Media had been stoking the right moods until the internet enabled an unfiltered emotional meta-mind.

They intentionally wrap news in titillating music and graphics. It’s all research based effort in the fields of behavioral economics, public relations, etc.

An educated minority are leveraging that education against the majority to optimize for themselves. “Because that’s the history of our society!”

We lost that in the Obama administration. Not that it would have mattered....

Language does certainly influence biology and vice versa.

I agree we are living in precarious times and there's no benefit to promoting an equally opaque system built for an elite class

Corporations that own cable news and are given all the money with no strings by the government; hardly an Obama era shift.

Making it illegal is meaningless.

Which culture are you suggesting does not get systematically corrupted by selfish individuals?

27th isn't too bad!

There's plenty of corruption in Europe, Asia and Mexico/Canada.

Does this mean that it’s the least corrupt place in the world?

Also, corruption is absurdly high in Venezuela since they moved away from individualism and toward collectivism.

In other words, if you just allow the powerful to do what they want in the name of "harmony", you will have no corruption. That the CCP experiences no corruption is laughable.

This doesn’t mean much. Selective enforcement of anti-corruption rules is a common method for national elites to eliminate potential rivals. It’s especially common in regimes with pliable judicial systems.