Hacker News

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.

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.

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")

>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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 )

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.

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.

> 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.

>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

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

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

The answer is: those who are already in power.

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.

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).

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!")

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Is this some sort of mathematical model that doesn't play out in reality?

Your response just proves his point. All of that paperwork, all of those contracts- that assumes you can trust the government to fairly enforce the law.

In a society where corruption rules, you have no reason to spend time and money on any of that because you know you’re one bribe away from it all being kindling for your next bonfire.

So yes, in areas with high corruption they don’t bother. They either just set aside some cash to pay off whatever official they need to if things go sideways, or they hire the local judge’s son to an empty position of power so that they can win anything that goes to “court”. That’s not a sign of high trust, that’s an acknowledgment there’s no point in bothering.

The framing of "low trust" vs "high trust" is useful but another important distinction when conducting business in different jurisdictions is whether *institutions* or *counterparties* are more trustworthy.

If institutions such as courts are trustworthy (in that they will impartially adjudicate contracts and help you enforce their terms) then you are able to work with a wider spectrum of counterparties who you do not yet trust. You just have to document and hedge against the risk via contracts and insurance, as you point out.

If institutions such as courts are absent, corrupt, or otherwise captured then you must ensure that you only interact with counterparties that you can trust or have direct leverage over. Perhaps ones with which you share personal or reputational connections.

Western Europe is a low trust environment compared to the beacons in (cultural) East Asia, like Singapore. I can leave my kid with an iPad in her hand here without fear of it being nicked, like in London.

But business wise, western Europe is still relatively high trust. I suggest you read more about this.

As the US transitions into a high corruption / low trust environment, business investment disappears.

Trump tried to solicit bribes from anthropic, retaliated by violating the DoW contracts when they didn’t pay, and then somehow forced Dario to publicly apologize for bringing the matter to light. Do you really think this is how the US will win at AI?

Look at the car industry, where the corruption and coercion started earlier. For some reason, Trump used ICE to illegally detain a bunch of Kia engineers. They announced they’re not going to add more trimlines to their EV lines in the US.

Honda announced they’re canceling planes to build three new model lines in Ohio.

The macro statistics are dire. Pre-Biden, US factory investment was $80B per year. Trump wiped $30B off that number in 2025. Biden got it up to $240B, so Trump “only” wiped out 10-15%, but, because he was starting from a high number, the damage is equivalent to 35% of all factory investment that existed when he last left office!

The rate at which industrial production is fleeing the US is increasing. This year, the loss will probably be greater than the entire 2018 US factory investment base.

There are similar trends happening in tech and academia. There’s not much left once that happens. (Insurance, banking and marketing, mostly.)

> Look at how business works in the rich west works. Everything is formalized with contracts, risk is portioned out and offloaded to every party under the sun.

Sounds like formalized corruption to me.

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...

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.

> 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".

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.

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.

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.

The point isn't to make a logical assertion. It's a fucking heads up.

That's why there are two pieces. You also need to push back. Collectively pushing back, not just individually. That's the only way.

Perhaps ironically, there are still institutions that to some extent rely on social trust in autocracies. For example, black market is an institution. As is "bribe economy" – the general understanding that getting X done generally costs you around Y, where Y is not arbitrary. Then there's the whole thing about criminal organizations that typically rely on social cohesion and upholding all kinds of rules.

Do you have a source for the 12k arrested in the UK?

I'm asking because all I could find was a list on Twitter that didn't cite any sources itself and also had very implausible numbers (including he 12k/year for the UK). Implausible based on the lived reality of friends of mine living in e.g. the UK or Germany.

That's not what you voted for. Homeowners, on the other hand, did vote for it. In most countries they're the majority, and they're better at mobilizing politically. Autocracies are probably less likely to have the same issue because the leaders are petrified of a revolt from the lower classes. In a democracy, the majority (homeowners) will vote away your money.

> There is always few groups advertising affordable living in Munich. Never happened. Every year the rent climbs to new never seen high.

Well your population grows trough migration, your land does not and your construction doesn't match either in a long term inflationary environment with every incentive pointing in the continuation of that path.

See also Canada, Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Australia, etc, etc

The purpose of a system is what it does.

"As intended" is something that doesn't exist at all.

What a perfect example to demonstrate the "collective ignorance and hypocrisy of western people" they were mentioning. There is a dichotomy in "Corruption", it is weaponized as a tool of neocolonialism in the continued subjugation of the global south and systematically downplayed and re-framed in the west.

The west is just a shorthand for countries within the global north that are part of the international liberal order. This is all well established terminology, including "western imperialism" and "western hegemony". Its not our fault you are hearing these words for the very first time.

or in other words: people in power are corrupt, but they usually are corrupt equally for everybody.