I'm fully aware that Sweden and Denmark are different countries (I lived in Denmark for 3 years), but this reminded me of the reel of Swedes playing every time I visit IKEA, where they talk about how corruption is absolutely unthinkable in Swedish society.
And there's also this tidbit from the article:
> Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned: “There’s a lot of evidence that it’s probably even worse here.”
Yeah swedish people think like that. Living in sweden and having some experience I can tell you that there's no corruption because the police don't care to investigate it, even with proof they won't bring people to justice. Most that happens to corrupt people is that they quit job and go to work somewhere else.
There is probably plenty of it, many escape but they do prosecute it when found (especially when it involves taxes). Håkan Nesser (book author) and Daniel Kindberg (Soccer club president) are probably the most famous recent cases, there's also been a bunch of cases related to social security fraud.
Most of it probably isn't glamorous enough to warrant full page articles but you do note them popping up in news at a steady rate.
"Sweden's sudden awakening to corruption - From small arrangements between friends to large-scale bribery and embezzlement, Swedes are discovering the extent of a phenomenon they had underestimated" - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/08/s...
I think they really aren't, not at large. At the core they need to feel superior, and that includes believing that they are genetically honest, unlike those people with darker skin and brown eyes.
Since the late eighties Sweden has privatised, as the euphemism goes, heavily. In particular schools and medical and elder care have become cesspools of corruption and mob activity. It's gotten worse in construction as well.
Today some active politicians simultaneously perform as senior advisers and the like for so called public affairs, i.e. lobbying, firms. That is, in the open. The leader of one of the largest parties in parliament and kind of part of the current government had a mob leader as guest at his wedding a while back.
There's an agreement among the largest parties to blame the fallout on immigrant minorities. They still disagree about whether to also put blame on sexual and gender minorities, as well as indigenous minorities. I expect them to start agreeing more during the next election.
Interesting. It really seems like wherever the power goes, the corruption follows. The good news with privatization is that it doesn't attract the corrupt looters to government and you can trust them as a culture to be a watchdog for corruption.
When the government as a body is in control of everything, all the corrupt looters go there, but you can't have the private industry keep them in check unless you count on the pipeline of years in industry gaining financial freedom -> public service as a regulator.
Here's an interesting question: If most people in a society believe corruption is at level X when it's actually at X+N, is it better to expose the reality or not?
Being a member of a society that you believe has low corruption disincentivizes you from being corrupt yourself because people generally want to follow the surrounding norms. So it's probably good for people to believe that corruption is better than it is.
But exposing corruption is also necessary to root it out and actually punish the people involved.
How does one make the trade-off for when disclosure is net helpful for reducing overall corruption? Does it depend on X and N?
It's funny that reel is at IKEA, given IKEA's sketchily engineered tax structure, and that it's also the same company that paid off Romanian secret police under Ceaușescu.
What's sketchy about their tax structure? Just curious what you think.
I think they are pretty open about it?
The original purpose of IKEA was to foster self reliance, essentially making everyone a bit handier. IKEA brings decent quality furniture to people who otherwise wouldn't afford it. I think it's a noble goal, hence why I ask.
As I understand it, and I could be wrong, IKEA is owned by a non-profit organization called INGKA, set up in such a way to generate revenue not to a few rich people but:
"INGKA Foundation’s purpose is to further, without pursuing any profits, a better everyday life for the many people in need. We achieve this purpose by funding the IKEA Foundation, which is committed to helping children and families living in poverty afford a better everyday life while protecting the planet."
Regarding them paying of Romanian secret police, I'm very interested to hear about it. I know they used east german prisoners for a time as cheap labor.
It's mostly marketing. Danes, and other Scandinavians, love the idea that they are more honest then others. It's not correct in Denmark. I find Denmark to be a quite corrupt country
Tax-evasion in small scale called "sort arbejde" is quite common.
Former primeminister and current foreign miniater Lars Løkke Rasmussen is a interessant figure. He's famous for not even being able to pay for his own underware.
>All of Scandinavia, he believes, has persuaded itself that crime exists only in violent, poor abscesses on the edges of their societies. “The Danes totally subscribe to this idea that Denmark has no corruption, and to the idea of Denmark as the end of the road,” Brügger said, referring to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s notion that “getting to Denmark” is the goal of every modern democracy.
First, this is an assertion about “All of Scandinavia”, and there is some contradiction about crime exists but is small, and Denmark has “no corruption”. But this is basic over-generalization, between low and none, and a exposé that provides anecdotes but doesn’t challenge statistics.
Still people will claim (rhetorically) “none” when the real answer is not zero. And is that really incorrect? To be correct is to quantify and provide your reasoning. That’s something that public discourse is yet to embrace.
Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters.
If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other.
One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.
That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great environments, some create hells on earth.
Source: I lived in 3 different countries + an isolated island.
But you don't even need my biased opinion on the matter. We have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and cultures that celebrate them.
> We have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and cultures that celebrate them.
And you could take single individuals from either culture and drop them in the other culture, and most of them would happily act and think just like the new culture, and swear blind that they’d always thought that way.
It would be an interesting experiment to see how many individuals you could replace one-by-one before the culture changed. Or perhaps, like a Ship of Theseus, you could replace all the people, but have the culture endure.
> If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize... People are the same everywhere.
> That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great environments, some create hells on earth.
Sure. People are not the same in their current behaviors. People are the same in how they acquire their behaviors or change their behaviors based on the conditions of their environments. And sometimes these changes are very quick.
To give a very simple example, many people in my native country who would throw burning cigarette butts on the ground, stop doing so immediately when they, say, immigrate to the US. They didn't really change all of a sudden; what remains the same is the people's opportunistic ability to adapt to the conditions of their environment, regardless of what is moral, just, etc.
Some of those cultures that apparently celebrate gay people were also chemically castrating them not that long ago, and also have a lot of locals who still hate gay people and cannot wait to get back to the old ways.
The rise of the far right in Europe and USA might challenge your idea of fixed regional cultures quite soon.
My idea was to convey was that the sense of identity attached to a people is weird. And that people are just people. You can get the same set of people(genetically, demographically same) to kill millions in a war and become pious afterwards and vice versa.
When I said people are the same it means the same people who created great environments can in all likelihood create hell within a generation span.
Individuals are drastically different from each other. Populations of humans, however, regress to the mean fairly readily, and even small groups (at least if they aren't grouped according to precise selection criteria) will tend to reflect very similar emergent patterns.
More accurately, I think it's just confusion about the Law of Large Numbers.
People confuse population-scale average behaviors with guarantees about individuals.
In any country you can find outliers that don't match the country's norms.
The hard part is that the devious ones can leverage their country's (or culture, or state, or relgious affiliation, etc.) norms to disguise their bad behavior. It's easier to scam someone if you pretend to blend in with groups known for being trustworthy.
This is not true in general. Environment does not only influence behavior, it selects for it.
As evidenced by our ability to breed behavior traits in domesticated animals - I.e. ragdoll cats, retrievers, rat terriers, etc. have distinct behavioral traits that have been intentionally selected for.
Those dog breeds differ by like a factor of 10 in size, way more than humans basically in any aspect.
But yeah, depending on how strong the selective force is... Ashkenazy Jews have an average IQ of what, around 130 points? But on the other side also suffer a lot more genetic disorders.
Interesting are also the altitude tolerance of Sherpa, body morphology of the Kenian runners and the dive endurance of a particular South east asian tribe (if I remember correctly), some organ is able to store a lot more blood than usually
You are saying humans are unpredictable, but then you make predictions.
I think you are saying that people's behavior changes based on stimulus. That doesn't mean they're unpredictable, just that the prediction shouldn't be unchanged behavior regardless of stimulus.
I read it as the GP saying there's often confusion about assuming behavior about individuals as opposed to making predictions based on trends of large groups of individuals.
For some population, you can safely state that some portion of them will contract appendicitis. You cannot make that same assertion about an individual person. This likewise carries to specific behaviors (theft, charity, becoming a pet owner, etc).
If you have a really well working economic system you can bribe everyone to be nice and you declare yourselves saints and history ended. Still makes those that upend these economic systems the evil ones. Even if paradise burns away the candle earth on both ends.
but i digress, and its hard to communicate that its better to end good times with ability to move, then to be caught in paradise, when the resource window falls shut. you want to be able to wiggle and act in the dark times, keep it together , have tech thats maintainable but not existence ending , while wild hordes fight for the last glimmering bits of the golden era.
What you say seems to be an exaggerated view of the world ("It's just people"). You confuse a few people with sociopathic trails with the average normal human with a heart and a conscience.
The examples you give come from environments which are likely to attract sociopaths. You yourself are with a higher probability a narcissist than the average human [1].
I disagree that people are unpredictable systems. The ruling class very much knows that people are not only predictable, but even programmable. It’s just the aspirational middle and some lower classes that have internalized the idea that there is no way to predict and that every human is the same and all different groups and people are equal in characteristics and qualities. For example, liars will lie, predictably, even if expressed as a function of probability.
Great documentary! The story that chocked me most was the social democrat local politician that helped criminals launder money and evade taxes in his spare time… How low can you sink?
Everyone that tells him/herself a story, can use that story to justify crime.
Defender of the underdogs.
Saviour of the home-country from the foreign hordes.
In every story, there is idealisation and demonisation, a giving up of complexity and the moral horror justifications of fairy tales.
Perhaps. But it takes a lot of story telling to be able to spend your days voting for higher taxes on law-abiding citizens, and your nights helping the worst in society evade those taxes…
In the third world, corruption is very open from the clerk in a local revenue office to the top ministers/secretaries. There is a price for every service.
In the West, it is hard to see low-level corruption (bribes for services) in offices. However, corruption takes form in the shape of collusion; and this collusion is pretty much legal. Revolving door, consultants, lobbyists, conflicts of interests, setting up NGOs to grab money from the govt, offering sinecure jobs like advisors, directors, etc for friends and family--these are some strategies to do unethical yet legal stuff in the West.
In Canada you can just steal public funds if you're in the government with complete immunity. Set up a government program to support X (ex - greeness, gender education in congo, studying a random worm somewhere in asia, etc), then just transfer the funds directly to your own companies, and the companies of your friends and family [1]. We had like 5 major corruption scandals in the last 2 years - basically zero repercussions for those involved.
If you pick the right reason/name for X - anyone who crticises you can also automatically be labelled racist, dumb, fascist or whatever as well.
I was just listening to a talk by Stephen Kotkin were he mentioned corruption. He said corruption is not binary. Instead, it's a continuum. The question is how much of the money a public servant spends will actually end up in the desired outcome. In China, he said, maybe 20% will end up in the pockets of the public servant while the other 80% is spent on the road. In Nigeria, he said, everything will go to the servant and there will be no road.
This continuum hides one thing: overbidding in terms of project cost and underdelivery in terms of quality. At least in US, quality is maintained, while costing 300% more (look at any subway, rail projects). In the third world, projects are overbid, also underdeliver in terms of quality. No quality control at all.
Corruption is multidimensional. There's the size. There's the nature of the parties involved. There's the question of whether it's legal or illegal - which itself as a continuum as my lawyer girlfriend always reminds me
I d'ont. Im portuguese living in Denmark for many years. The difference is just perception.
The portuguese say: "this shitty country is so corrupt". I never encountered any corruption in Portugal.
The danes say: "See we are the best and justest country in the World without corruption". Facts say otherwise. Just google Lars Løkke Rasmussen and take a look at his actions
It became obvious to me in the banking crisis 2008 as everybody in Germany talked about corruption in Greece and ignored the German companies involved that bribed Greece politicians.
It doesn’t help either that the corruption perceptions index is often shortened in German to Korruptionsindex = corruption index which makes it sound objective instead instead of subjective
Italian living in sweden. It's 100% identical. They don't even bother to hide it, because there can't be corruption here by definition. So to us it's so obvious.
Readit News
And there's also this tidbit from the article:
> Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned: “There’s a lot of evidence that it’s probably even worse here.”
Most of it probably isn't glamorous enough to warrant full page articles but you do note them popping up in news at a steady rate.
Today some active politicians simultaneously perform as senior advisers and the like for so called public affairs, i.e. lobbying, firms. That is, in the open. The leader of one of the largest parties in parliament and kind of part of the current government had a mob leader as guest at his wedding a while back.
There's an agreement among the largest parties to blame the fallout on immigrant minorities. They still disagree about whether to also put blame on sexual and gender minorities, as well as indigenous minorities. I expect them to start agreeing more during the next election.
When the government as a body is in control of everything, all the corrupt looters go there, but you can't have the private industry keep them in check unless you count on the pipeline of years in industry gaining financial freedom -> public service as a regulator.
Being a member of a society that you believe has low corruption disincentivizes you from being corrupt yourself because people generally want to follow the surrounding norms. So it's probably good for people to believe that corruption is better than it is.
But exposing corruption is also necessary to root it out and actually punish the people involved.
How does one make the trade-off for when disclosure is net helpful for reducing overall corruption? Does it depend on X and N?
The original purpose of IKEA was to foster self reliance, essentially making everyone a bit handier. IKEA brings decent quality furniture to people who otherwise wouldn't afford it. I think it's a noble goal, hence why I ask.
As I understand it, and I could be wrong, IKEA is owned by a non-profit organization called INGKA, set up in such a way to generate revenue not to a few rich people but:
"INGKA Foundation’s purpose is to further, without pursuing any profits, a better everyday life for the many people in need. We achieve this purpose by funding the IKEA Foundation, which is committed to helping children and families living in poverty afford a better everyday life while protecting the planet."
https://www.ingkafoundation.org/our-charitable-purpose/
https://www.inter.ikea.com/en/this-is-inter-ikea-group/about...
https://www.inter.ikea.com/en/-/media/InterIKEA/IGI/Financia...
Regarding them paying of Romanian secret police, I'm very interested to hear about it. I know they used east german prisoners for a time as cheap labor.
Or taking one class a year as a "student" to qualify for student housing with rent control, etc.
It's still a great country, just take the marketing with a hint of salt - a self certain smugness / hubris can easily make you blind to real problems.
Tax-evasion in small scale called "sort arbejde" is quite common.
Former primeminister and current foreign miniater Lars Løkke Rasmussen is a interessant figure. He's famous for not even being able to pay for his own underware.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1546653/
First, this is an assertion about “All of Scandinavia”, and there is some contradiction about crime exists but is small, and Denmark has “no corruption”. But this is basic over-generalization, between low and none, and a exposé that provides anecdotes but doesn’t challenge statistics.
Still people will claim (rhetorically) “none” when the real answer is not zero. And is that really incorrect? To be correct is to quantify and provide your reasoning. That’s something that public discourse is yet to embrace.
If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other.
One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.
That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great environments, some create hells on earth.
Source: I lived in 3 different countries + an isolated island.
But you don't even need my biased opinion on the matter. We have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and cultures that celebrate them.
And you could take single individuals from either culture and drop them in the other culture, and most of them would happily act and think just like the new culture, and swear blind that they’d always thought that way.
It would be an interesting experiment to see how many individuals you could replace one-by-one before the culture changed. Or perhaps, like a Ship of Theseus, you could replace all the people, but have the culture endure.
> That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great environments, some create hells on earth.
Sure. People are not the same in their current behaviors. People are the same in how they acquire their behaviors or change their behaviors based on the conditions of their environments. And sometimes these changes are very quick.
To give a very simple example, many people in my native country who would throw burning cigarette butts on the ground, stop doing so immediately when they, say, immigrate to the US. They didn't really change all of a sudden; what remains the same is the people's opportunistic ability to adapt to the conditions of their environment, regardless of what is moral, just, etc.
The rise of the far right in Europe and USA might challenge your idea of fixed regional cultures quite soon.
When I said people are the same it means the same people who created great environments can in all likelihood create hell within a generation span.
People confuse population-scale average behaviors with guarantees about individuals.
In any country you can find outliers that don't match the country's norms.
The hard part is that the devious ones can leverage their country's (or culture, or state, or relgious affiliation, etc.) norms to disguise their bad behavior. It's easier to scam someone if you pretend to blend in with groups known for being trustworthy.
This is not true in general. Environment does not only influence behavior, it selects for it.
As evidenced by our ability to breed behavior traits in domesticated animals - I.e. ragdoll cats, retrievers, rat terriers, etc. have distinct behavioral traits that have been intentionally selected for.
But yeah, depending on how strong the selective force is... Ashkenazy Jews have an average IQ of what, around 130 points? But on the other side also suffer a lot more genetic disorders.
Interesting are also the altitude tolerance of Sherpa, body morphology of the Kenian runners and the dive endurance of a particular South east asian tribe (if I remember correctly), some organ is able to store a lot more blood than usually
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12785802.amp
I think you are saying that people's behavior changes based on stimulus. That doesn't mean they're unpredictable, just that the prediction shouldn't be unchanged behavior regardless of stimulus.
For some population, you can safely state that some portion of them will contract appendicitis. You cannot make that same assertion about an individual person. This likewise carries to specific behaviors (theft, charity, becoming a pet owner, etc).
but i digress, and its hard to communicate that its better to end good times with ability to move, then to be caught in paradise, when the resource window falls shut. you want to be able to wiggle and act in the dark times, keep it together , have tech thats maintainable but not existence ending , while wild hordes fight for the last glimmering bits of the golden era.
The examples you give come from environments which are likely to attract sociopaths. You yourself are with a higher probability a narcissist than the average human [1].
[1] https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/96cff233-cefd-45...
Deleted Comment
In the West, it is hard to see low-level corruption (bribes for services) in offices. However, corruption takes form in the shape of collusion; and this collusion is pretty much legal. Revolving door, consultants, lobbyists, conflicts of interests, setting up NGOs to grab money from the govt, offering sinecure jobs like advisors, directors, etc for friends and family--these are some strategies to do unethical yet legal stuff in the West.
If you pick the right reason/name for X - anyone who crticises you can also automatically be labelled racist, dumb, fascist or whatever as well.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Tech...
Source: https://youtu.be/ZD8BhZEJcjI at around 1:00:00.
Corruption is multidimensional. There's the size. There's the nature of the parties involved. There's the question of whether it's legal or illegal - which itself as a continuum as my lawyer girlfriend always reminds me
Deleted Comment
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024
I always thought the lower the more realistic
The portuguese say: "this shitty country is so corrupt". I never encountered any corruption in Portugal.
The danes say: "See we are the best and justest country in the World without corruption". Facts say otherwise. Just google Lars Løkke Rasmussen and take a look at his actions
It doesn’t help either that the corruption perceptions index is often shortened in German to Korruptionsindex = corruption index which makes it sound objective instead instead of subjective