Re:Venetians are pondering raising their entire city
by bryananderson on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @01:07PM
(#36127435)
The assertion that something is always there even when there’s absolutely no evidence for it is an unfalsifiable “Russell’s teapot” argument.
It is trivially true that someone makes money from every project; the land, labor, and materials have to come from somewhere. But it’s only corruption if someone is extracting surplus beyond the actual necessary cost.
Fortunately the Transit Costs Project has a great database of global costs for rail transit projects, making it possible to discern when something is fishy. I highly recommend reading at least their executive summary.
Re:Venetians are pondering raising their entire city
by scotty79 on Friday June 09, 2023 @05:54AM
(#36255582)
> The assertion that something is always there even when there’s absolutely no evidence for it is an unfalsifiable “Russell’s teapot” argument.
Stating that every large project involves some degree of corruption is less like claiming that there's a teapot in the orbit of Jupiter we can't hope to observe. It's more like claiming that every sufficiently large economy has some gray area even if we didn't directly observed it.
Survivor bias. You only hear about corruption in failed projects. You don't hear all that much about corruption in successful projects because it couldn't have been that bad if the project went well and was a good idea. I can assure you that with every successful project many people got rich on the side too.
Getting rid of corruption is impossible. But it can be done in a better or worse way.