I'm saying this to you, but the only real reason I have to talk about it is 'for science', and nothing you have done in the past two months suggests you care about 'science' (meaning explanations of problems). I am just trusting that you do, when you are not doing anything to indicate it.
I was really going to just link to the Global Corruption Barometer as an update to my previous post, if it showed data on corruption for China and Islamic countries. But the charts that show the breakdown of perceptions for each country are too hard to find; maybe I'm looking the wrong report and it's in the Corruption Perceptions Index. Two of the ones I have open, 2009 and 2013, don't even mention China, and neither those nor 2017 include Iran.
Maybe I should try harder, and actually check the Corruption Perceptions Index. But I'm lazy.
The 2013 report, p10, lists Jordan and Vietnam in the group, '30~40% paid bribes in the last year'. (Taiwan is also in this category, as a proxy for all of China.) In the 2017 report, p8, Jordan (where Yara's family is from) is in the 'less than 5% paid bribes' group, while Vietnam is in the '50~75%' group. I think everyone would prefer for their country to have a low bribery rate, but it seems probable that the 2017 data is wrong for Jordan, and that Jordan is more similar to nearby Arab countries, as Jordan is not a big outlier in terms of GDP or religion.
I am interrupting this analysis to say, because my swap space usage has been creeping up the past few minutes and is now 90% full despite plenty of unused memory, that I would like to watch Is Gen Z Really That Dumb?, but two seconds in it literally says "science news" and has a screenshot of an article. I don't think I can interpret it as "not a news video". So I'm closing it without watching it.
Interesting and slightly shocking, similar to how Costa Rica was at the top of the Happy Planet Index for four years in a row despite a really high robbery rate: the 2017 report, p4, Thailand is at the top of countries that say their government is doing well against corruption, with 72% saying this. 5th place out of 119 countries is only at 54%. And yet, in the same report, p8, 40~50% in Thailand had paid a bribe in the past 12 months.
This could be bad data, like with Jordan and Vietnam. The 2009 report, p10 (labeled 8), puts Thailand in the '7~12% paid a bribe' group.
Notable result in 2009 report, Singapore. Chinese culture, but they also speak English (which is why my previous post had a bunch of bookmarks from Yahoo Singapore, which was previously Yahoo Asia). 2009 report, p34 (labeled 32), paid a bribe (one report notes that females are less likely to have paid bribes, but says this is solely because they interact less with institutions; this question says "your or your household" and I assume this phrasing is used with all the reports):
Hong Kong 7%
Japan 1%
Singapore 6%
Southern Korea 2%
The next page, "HoW WoUld yoU ASSESS yoUR CURREnT GovERnmEnT’S ACTIonS In THE fIGHT AGAInST CoRRUPTIon?" (changing this to lowercase in a text editor, with Ctrl-L, would be easy but this is funnier)
Ineffective Neither Effective
Hong Kong 12% 0% 88%
Japan 68% 21% 11%
Singapore 4% 0% 96%
Southern Korea 81% 3% 16%
It also has Thailand, and this data seems completely inconsistent with Thailand ranking at the top in the 2017 survey: here, only 28% in Thailand say goverment is effective, while many countries have a higher percentage.
Japanese people not having an opinion shows up here, compared to southern Korea. Similarly to how they are less likely to have an opinion on the BBC/Globescan country ratings polls (like 2012 and 2014 editions).
Countries with low bribery rates having sharply divergent views of success of anti-corruption: officials can be paid small amounts by ordinary people, but they can also be paid large amounts by companies. So low bribery rates is not proof of lack of corruption.
This has all been "interesting things from skimming a few parts of several reports with contradictory data". Also, the 2009 report does have on p30 (labeled 28) the breakdown by sector, though it doesn't separate out police and military as Gallup does in the US. (A great deal of trust confidence in the military, and while 50% having confidence the police may not seem like a lot, it's behind only military and small business, and way ahead of confidence in "The criminal justice system".)
Still: corruption of "Public officials/Civil Servants", which includes the police, is rated the same or lower than the average corruption score in Hong Kong, Singapore, and southern Korea, but higher than the average in Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Morocco.
These are the cultural conditions for revolution over the price of bread or the price of energy, even if the revolution leads to worse conditions as with Libya.
Anyway, basically the reason I'm writing about this is Russia. I think Russia is a country with a fundamentally individualistic moral system, that tries to have group-based and rule-based morality. (Rule-based is when saying bad things about the Communist party was illegal, and punishable by death, and then the rules suddenly switched at some point.)
So, even if the US also has individual-based morality, the US is honest about it. People are crazy about their guns in the US, and a bit less crazy about 'freedom of speech' or in general freedom of behavior, which can result in people exercising their freedom to insult or abuse other people who are trying to use their freedom of speech.
So it apparently can result (perhaps surprisingly, given reported bribery rates) in lower rates of theft in Russia, but maybe the 'dishonesty' of trying to force a different type of morality on people who do not really believe in it leads to high bribery rates.
Like, the reason I noted Singapore is that Singapore pays its leaders well. Quick search says,
As of early 2026, the Prime Minister of Singapore receives an annual salary package of approximately S$2.2 million (approx. US$1.6–1.7 million), making them the highest-paid political leader in the world. This total package includes a 13th-month bonus, Annual Variable Component (AVC), and a significant National Bonus based on performance.
Structure: The salary is set at twice that of an entry-level Minister (MR4 grade), which is S$1.1 million, bringing the total to S$2.2 million.
This is the highest in the world, for official salary. (Of course many leaders are much richer, or gain a lot of wealth through corruption.) This is supposed to reduce corruption, and 96% of people in Singapore think it works.
So: if police officers were paid much, they might not take bribes. If a culture says "we can't pay police officers a lot because they are supposed to be public servants" (compare the Servant of the People TV series, set in Ukraine which is basically like Russia other than the language), but the police officers interact with a lot of people who earn more in the private sector, it isn't surprising if the police take bribes.
Overall, especially with the "bribes from common people vs bribes from big corporations" component, corruption is a matter of priorities. And like many problems, it can have low visibility when people don't talk about it; if someone has a 30% chance to their knowledge of a problem with other people they know, awareness quickly dies out, compared to a 90% chance. I recently watched all of [92k views, 26 Feb 2026]If This Dam Fails, It Pollutes Half of Europe. - YouTube. The creator blames it on corruption, and Romanian people did prevent the gold mining project from happening. But mining is a business, which earns money, and maybe — at least in the past 40 years, and until the mine stops earning money from copper and the toxic tailings remain behind the dam — Romanian people have benefited from it. But awareness of it is really low. Even the Romanian Wikipedia article for it is really short.
So when Greta learned of the global warming problem, she thought, "how can people ignore this big problem?" Sweden is listed in the 2017 Global Corruption Barometer report as a country where less than 5% paid a bribe in the last 12 months, much lower than the average. One might decide, as people in Thailand might possibly think based on conflicting data, that having to pay a bribe is not a big problem, as other countries like the US just have fees like the new visa integrity fee. Rather, this corruption is an indicator of other problems: people accept the bribes, and don't view it as important to talk about or spend a lot of their time on, because of other problems. Maybe crime like robberies; maybe problems in their personal life, like not being able to find a relationship. Or maybe problems which people have chosen to create only recently, like protests and fighting against the police in Iran.
Compare this post from March 2012, in which I compared the energy of a bullet to sunlight. (See: earthquakes, and wildfires: conducting controlled burns to stop a big fire later on.) (I don't remember anything else I said in that post, but I'm pretending that this isn't the case)
No comments:
Post a Comment