I don't think regulations are enough. They're just a band-aid on the gaping wound that is a capitalist, market based economy. No matter what regulations you make, some companies and individuals become winners and over time will grow rich enough to influence the government and the regulations. We need a better economic system, one that does not have these problems built in.
Sure, but you can't ignore the negative sides like environmental destruction and wealth and power concentration. Just because we haven't yet invented a system that produces a good standard of living without these negative side effects doesn't mean it can't be done. But we aren't even trying, because the ones benefiting from this system the most, and have the most power, have no incentive to do so.
Political corruption is a consequence of capitalism. Taking over the political system provides a huge competitive advantage, so any entity rich enough to influence it has an incentive to do so in an competition based economy that incentivizes growth.
When did Political corruption not exist? In what system in history did the people in power have so few rotten apples that corruption was an anomally?
Blaming corruption on capitalism is silly. As long has worldhas resources, people want control of reasources, and bad actors will do bad actors thingies.
You're right, political corruption is a problem in other systems as well, not just capitalism. I guess it would be more accurate to say that power concentration causes political corruption. We should try to figure out if it's possible to manage the economy in a way that limits the amount of power any individual can have to such an extent that corruption would be impossible.
That's why we need new ways to make decisions using direct democracy. Any system that delegates decision making to an individual or small group is vulnerable to corruption. Everyone should participate in decision-making.
"Everyone" is for lack of a better word, stupid, and routinely votes against their own interests, and don't know what they actually want. Just ask Americans.
I agree, and that's why the decision-making process should be more complex than just a simple vote. It should be a process where everyone participating is forced to consider the issue from all sides.
I don't think there is exists a magical political system that we set up and it magically protects us from corruption. Forever. Just like any system (like surviving in an otherwise hostile nature) it needs maintenance. Maintenance in a political or any social structure is getting off your bottom and imposing some "reward" signal on the system.
Corruption mainly exists because people have low standards for enforcing eradication of it. This is observable in the smallest levels. In countries where corruption is deeply engraved, even university student groups will be corrupted. Elected officials of societies of any size will be prone to put their personal interests in front of the groups' and will appoint or employ friends instead of randomers based on some quality metrics. The question is what are the other people willing to do? Is anyone willing to call them out? Is anyone willing to instead put on the job themselves and do it right (which can be demanding)?
The real question is how far are the individuals willing to go and how much discomfort are they willing to embrace to impose their requirements, needs, moral expectations on the political leader? The outcomes of many situations you face in society (should that be a salary negotiation or someone trying to rip you off in a shop) depend on how much sacrifice (e.g. discomfort) you are willing to take on to get out as a "winner" (or at least non-loser) of the situation? Are you willing to quit your job if you cannot get what you want? Are you going to argue with the person trying to rip you off? Are you willing to go to a lawyer and sue them and take a long legal battle?
If people keep choosing the easier way, there will always be people taking advantage of that. Sure, we have laws but laws also need maintenance and anyone wielding power needs active check! It doesn't just magically happen but the force that can keep it in check is every individual in the system. Technological advances and societal changes always lead to new ideas how to rip others off. What we would need is to truly punish the people trying to take advantage of such situations: no longer do business with them, ask others to boycott such behaviour (and don't vote for dickheads!, etc.) -- even in the smallest friends group such an issue could arise.
The question is: how much are people willing to sacrifice on a daily basis to put pressure on corrupt people? There is no magic here, just the same bare evolutionary forces in place for the past 100,000 years of humankind.
(Just think about it: even in rule of law, the ultimate way of enforcing someone to obey the rules is by pure physical force. If someone doesn't listen, ever, he will be picked up by other people and forced into a physical box and won't be allowed to leave. And I don't expect that to ever change, regardless of the political system. Similarly, we need to keep up an army at all times. If you simply go hard pacifist, someone will take advantage of that... Evolution. )
Democracy is an active game to be played and not just every 4 years. In society, people's everyday choices and standards are the "natural forces of evolution".
Capitalism is a good economic engine. Now put that engine in a car without steering wheel nor brakes and feed the engine with the thickest and ever-thickening pipe from the gas tank you can imagine, and you get something like USA.
But most of the world doesn't work like that. Countries like China and Russia have dictators that steer the car. Mexico have gangs and mafia. European countries have parliamentary democracies and "commie journalists" that do their job and reign political and corporate corruption--sometimes over-eagerly--and unions. In many of those places, wealth equals material well-being but not overt political power. In fact, wealth often employs stealth to avoid becoming a target.
USA is not trying to change things because people are numbed down[^1]. Legally speaking, there is nothing preventing that country from having a socialist party win control of the government with popular support and enact sweeping legislation to overcome economic inequality somewhat. Not socialist, but that degree of unthinkable was done by Roosevelt before and with the bare minimum of popular support.
[^1]: And, I'm not saying that's a small problem. It is not, and the capitalism of instant gratification entertainment is entirely responsible for this outcome. But the culprit is not capitalism at large. IMO, the peculiarities of American culture are, to a large extent, a historic accident.
You can't really separate wealth and power, they're pretty much the same thing. The process that is going on in the US is also happening in Europe, just at a slower pace. Media is consolidating in the hands of the wealthy, unions are being attacked and are slowly losing their power, etc. You can temporarily reverse the process by having someone steer the car into some other direction for a while, but wealth/power concentration is an unavoidable part of free market capitalism, so the problem will never go away completely. Eventually capital accumulates again, and will corrupt the institutions meant to control it.
A smart dictator is probably harder to corrupt, but they die and then if you get unlucky with the next dictator the car will crash and burn.
Actually, the system that produced the greatest standard of living increase in human history is whatever Communist China's been doing for the last century.
Mao and communism brought famine and death to millions.
The move from that to "capitilism with Chinese characteristics" is what has brought about the greatest standard of living increase in human history.
What they're doing now is a mix of socialism, capitilism and CPP dominance. I'm not an American, but I understand FDR wielded socialism too, and that really catapulted the US towards its golden era.
Chinese do capitalism better than anyone else. Chinese companies ruthlessly compete within China to destroy their competition. Their firms barely have profits because everyone is competing so hard against others. Whereas US/EU is full of rent seeking monopolies that used regulatory capture to destroy competition.
We haven't really been trying to find such a system. The technological progress that we've had since the last attempts at a different kind of a system has been huge, so what was once impossible might now be possible if we put some effort into it.
There is no system that fulfills your requirements.
It is even easy to explain why: Humans are part of all the moving pieces in such a system and they will always subvert it to their own agenda, no matter what rules you put into place. The more complex your rule set, the easier it is to break.
Look at games, can be a card game, a board game, some computer game. There is a fixed set of rules, and still humans try to cheat. We are not even talking adults here, you see this with kids already. Now with games there is either other players calling that out or you have a computer not allowing to cheat (maybe). Now imagine everyone could call someone else a cheater and stop them from doing something. This in itself is going to be misused. Humans will subvert systems.
So the only working system will be one with a non-human incorruptible game master, so to speak. Not going to happen.
With that out of the way, we certainly can ask the question: What is the next best thing to that? I have no answer to that, though.
Cheating happens in competition based systems. No one cheats in games where the point is to co-operate to achieve some common goal. We should aim to have a system based on recognizing those common goals and enabling large scale co-operation to achieve them.
all systems are competitive, if the system involves humans - after all, even in a constrained environment like academia, where research is cooperative, the competition for recognition is still strong. This includes the order of the authorship presented in the paper.
What you're asking for, regarding cooperation to achieve common goals, is altruism. This does not exist in human nature.
Academia is competitive because it's designed to be competitive. If things like funding, recognition and opportunities go to "winners", people will try to win. It's possible to design systems that do not force people to compete. For example you could take away the names from papers and assign funding randomly/semi-randomly and the competition would end. Then add some form of retroactive funding (or other kinds of rewards) that's awarded to research that has produced useful results, and you'll get your incentive to do good research without the need for competition.
It's harder to design systems that avoid competitive behavior, but I don't think it's impossible. And of course competition is not all bad, it's a good tool when used carefully. But it's way too much when most of our systems are based on it.
Any form of reward leads to competitiveness. In research, it's the funding, and the credit/accolades. In business, it's the money.
Any sort of scheme to try allocate the funding leads to competition for said funding!
In other words, in order to remove all competition in the system, you need unlimited funding. Even randomly allocating funding is insufficient, as it simply means you're competing on luck (for example, by trying to acquire more slots in the lottery).
> harder to avoid competitive behavior, but I don't think it's impossible.
Which i think is not true - it is in fact, impossible, unless you add in the condition that there's unlimited 'resources' (after all, there's competition for resources while it is limited).
This has been proven over and over not to work. Humans are inherently competitive, and so corruption ALWAYS takes over.
Even if you make everything and everyone equal, they eventually get bored and start trying to one-up each other and push the limits of what's allowed, which is just another way to say corruption.
Small government, big government, socialism, communism, capitalism, everything the world has tried has ended in mass corruption.
> It's possible to design systems that do not force people to compete
I have yet to see any real evidence of this working on a societal level.
> What is the next best thing to that? I have no answer to that, though.
i argue that what we have today is the so called next best thing - free market capitalism, with a good dose of democracy and strong gov't regulations (but not overbearing).
I assume they are saying that in practice, if wealth gives one influence (if one lives in capitalism), one will use that influence to make one's market less free to one's benefit.
