> I am not really sure how you are supposed to stop corruption once it gets rooted in your society.
Well, assuming that all people are roughly the same as each other, the answer would be to adopt traditions and systems from countries that aren't corrupt. Attempt the sisyphean task of convincing people that giving power to the middle class is going to lead to a better future.
As your comment reveals, the instinct when confronted with corruption is ... centralise power and try to force it to be used for good. That doesn't work, so try to convince people to decentralise power. Political and bureaucratic elites are regularly revealed to be corrupt, so stop making them the bottleneck for handing out the "allowed to run a business!" stamp. Centralising power just gives corrupt people a target to aim for and increases the blast radius when they worm their way in to a position.
How you convince people to do the sensible thing and decentralise power is beyond me though. The instinct to push power to a single leader is remarkably strong in humans.
I am a fan of the Singapore anti-corruption method of paying bureaucrats a lot of money. That way they don't have to have corruption side hustles and you can attract good talent to these positions. Somehow this is more unpopular than widespread political corruption.
According to transparency international, Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries on earth. If a politician could make several million dollars a year just from his job, you could attract major corporation CEO caliber people. Otherwise, why would a highly talented person want to deal with untangling that mess?
This is the very famous in economics theory of Becker and Stigler. The high pay isn't so that they don't need side hustles, it is to make the (small) chance of being discovered and losing their job painful. You pay much above market wages, people will not risk losing their job.
Is it true? Well, maybe. From Van Rijckeghem and Weder (2001):
> ... we find evidence of a statistically and economically significant relationship between relative wages and corruption.... While economically significant, the relationship, nevertheless, implies that a large increase in wages is required to eradicate corruption solely by raising wages... The relationship between wages and corruption is not found in regressions with country-fixed effects which points to ineffectual wage policy in the short run...
I haven't found much better evidence than that, though there is Di Tella & Schargrodsky (2004) with a detailed study on a hospital.
The knee jerk reaction against corruption is to centralize power: "X institutions are corrupt, we will give more power to this candidate who demonstrated to be a good person, so he will vanish those institutions and saves us fron corruption".
That's what Bolsonaro did in Brazil. In his campaign, he demonstrated to be a good christian and a person of faith. In Brazil, people strongly associate that with being a good person.
> That's what Bolsonaro did in Brazil. In his campaign, he demonstrated to be a good christian and a person of faith. In Brazil, people strongly associate that with being a good person.
Wasn't Bolsonaro elected because the previous president and his main opponent (Lula?) was so corrupt that he even landed in jail, which is a rare event for a prominent politician?
I don't know if Lula committed corruption, but he apparently wasn't more corrupt than the judge who tried him, who became Bolsonaro's Minister of Justice. All the charges were dismissed eventually because of court bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luiz_Inácio_Lula_da_Silva
Lula was condemned in 3 different courts. Not unanimously because the higher court judges disagreed about increasing his sentence by a small amount or a lrge amount.
Al the cases were dismissed because a new law was passed that created a new court and said every case like Lula's should be judged only on that new court.
Thanks for the info. I don't follow Brazilian politics, but somehow the picture of a corrupt ex-president going to jail persisted in my head, since that was the news we were getting here back in the time.
I couldn't understand why our news in Germany was pretending that a guy convinced of corruption would be a saviour of Brazil against the evil Bolsonaro.
That highlights one of the main problems in our societies. We just accept information served to us by our governments without much checking. Either because we don't care about every topic, or because we don't have a means to actually check.
When the baseline of corruption is high enough and those who judge you are equally or more corrupt, convictions for "corruption" are a weapon from those who do not want a specific someone on the government rather than real intention of reducing corruption.
Simplifying, it's like this: If the road to presidency is corrupt, you either become also corrupt (on a varying degree) or stay as one of those parties with no more than 1% of the votes. But then, there's a pact of silence between cronies. And those who are accused of corruption are the ones that either went too far or went against powerful people in the government.
This reminds me of why I hate when government agencies excuse an overly broad rule by saying they "won't prioritize enforcement" against favored/minor actors. Eg [1].
Well, assuming that all people are roughly the same as each other, the answer would be to adopt traditions and systems from countries that aren't corrupt. Attempt the sisyphean task of convincing people that giving power to the middle class is going to lead to a better future.
As your comment reveals, the instinct when confronted with corruption is ... centralise power and try to force it to be used for good. That doesn't work, so try to convince people to decentralise power. Political and bureaucratic elites are regularly revealed to be corrupt, so stop making them the bottleneck for handing out the "allowed to run a business!" stamp. Centralising power just gives corrupt people a target to aim for and increases the blast radius when they worm their way in to a position.
How you convince people to do the sensible thing and decentralise power is beyond me though. The instinct to push power to a single leader is remarkably strong in humans.