alt Hacker NewsI have an unusual perspective here.
In my country the politicians are openly very corrupt. (Well, possibly yours too ;)
Recently there has been a lot of improvement to the infrastructure. I realized that what has happened is, a lot of EU funds have been made available for development, and people are lining up to skim a little bit off the top.
How you say, the incentives are aligned, yeah?
I find myself in the odd situation where for each dollar that gets embezzled, a little bit of actual construction happens. That seems like a force you'd want to work with, rather than against.
I mean yeah ideally we'd get rid of corruption, but haha good luck with that. At least now they're fixing the roads.
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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 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!")