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.
> 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.
Yes, exactly. I went on holiday to Cairo a few years ago. Small bribes (bashish) is 100% normal there.
My tour guide was this bright 22 year old who dreamed of going to the UK to be an uber driver, so he could make enough money to get married. I told him if he went to the UK, he needed to know to never bribe officials, ever. He made the most adorably confused face - like his brain was blue screening. He had no conception of how a society could function without bribes. “But … how does anything get done?”
Greece is kind of the worst-of-both-worlds for this. Nothing works properly, but you also can't pay someone to make it work. In a country with good honest corruption you pay someone else to wait in line for you at the post office while the folks behind the counter smoke, chat to each other, and ignore you. In Greece you can't do that, you have to wait while they smoke, chat to each other, and ignore you. The friend of mine I was visiting also did the brain blue-screen when I asked who you paid to wait in line for you.
On the upside, a country that undergoes the transition from highly corrupt to well functioning inevitably goes through the stage you describe. My native country was going through that as I was growing up, starting with the Soviet "corruption is just how everything works" to being a fairly well functioning European society now.
Somewhere in between, there was definitely what you described. I've heard people with the remarkable complaint "there isn't even anyone to bribe". Of course if a society gets stuck too long at this stage, it turns into a different problem altogether.
I can't speak to China, but having spent most of the past decade in India and Sri Lanka I can say the problem there is that nobody is willing to unilaterally disarm. Everybody agrees that bakshish is deadweight loss and inefficient, but if Person A stops doing it and Person B doesn't, Person B gets more of whatever the finite resource in question is (slots in a school, permits, gasoline, whatever).
Xi Jinping has disciplined millions of officials as part of his anti-corruption campaign. That cannot be some corrupt way to silence dissidents while being popular with an allegedly corruption-omniscient citizenry.
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.