You have to understand how gears shift from there. Trust is essential for business transactions and specifically for long term investments. You can make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust (a lot of money on a leap means if you don’t trust the other side or the government to keep conditions stable, you won’t see a return).

Now if you are in a high trust society, you may have a lot of leveraged businesses or governments who have gotten loans or permission to do something based on past trust history. If the trust degrades systematically Investors may want returns faster, or interest rates go up, or partnerships don’t happen. That’s why low trust places don’t grow as fast - trust is the oil for growth engines and lack of it is sand for the same.

Corruption also does a lot of small-profit-for-the-corrupt that leads to massive damage to the overall society via second and third order effects. (example: someone stealing copper cables that stop electricity to entire cities for a while).

It looks like a tautology to me. Like: "Corruption erodes social trust in places where social trust exist and is key for the political system."

This does sort of feel like the kind of thing I might think and wonder about and then do a lot of work doing a study and some research and writing up an article and in the end everyone says "yeah, no duh!"

Corruption erodes social trust where social trust exists.

Of course. Because in a dictatorship your social trust is based only on other things than the govt while in a democracy your social trust is in the govt as well.

So following this through, does it mean that autocracy is the preferred government for a country that sleepwalked past the tipping point where corruption is entrenched because the institutions that could uproot it are themselves deeply corrupt?

People generally are saying the same thing, the more trust exists the more you got to lose.

However, it's not that simple there's a different kind of trust that comes with these types of social structures and they usually trust that as long as they keep their head down nothing will change. You can obviously draw parallels with conservatives here, but in reality people more often than not just want to live their life.

Democracies tend to be a lot more active politically and promote transparency so there is trust that your government is being transparent and that your vote matters. Of course if you find out that your political activism and votes don't accomplish anything due to corruption you check out and start disliking your government. Autocracies don't have political movements to begin with (exceptions apply) so it is way less impactful. There's way more comparisons to be made, but in general they roughly boil down to the same thing.

Well obviously.

> From V-Dem, we use two measures of democratic quality: the Regimes of the World (RoW) classification and the Liberal Democracy Index. The RoW (Lührmann et al., 2018) is a categorical measure distinguishing closed autocracies (no multiparty elections), electoral autocracies (multiparty elections that are not free and fair), electoral democracies (free elections but limited liberal protections), and liberal democracies (free elections with strong liberal protections).

by "democracy" they of course mean liberalism

I have been thinking about this more and more the past few points, to the point where I feel like I have to run for office as a social duty. (USA) There are so few politicians who give more than lip service to stopping corruption.

Our districts are embarrassing. People tolerating the blatant corruption by the Trump administration is something I don't understand. They will get upset about Epstein, but don't care about the corruption. (See for example the recent Jared Kushner contracts for one of many examples) Congress campaigns funded by PACs.

Phrases of interest: "Conflict of interest". "Shame". It is wild how people still vote for corrupted politicians, which is almost all of them. My parents are the prototype. If you take money from corporate-funded interests, you still have a conflict of interest, even if you aren't caught acting in the favor of those corporations.

Corruption makes things more democratic in an autocracy by providing a mechanism of soft power by people not directly in the autocratic office.

Corruption makes things less democratic in a pure democracy by granting more soft power to some individuals' 1/N office ( N= population size).

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BS data is BS. On what basis have they classified each country as a democracy or an autocracy?

What you're saying is that with the shift to autocracy, all these trust problems will become manageable?