[wpskidd]

How about we instead consider distancing the human political actors from direct contact with temptation? Corruption is an integral part of all political systems and ultimately festers until inevitable failure and restart. Can’t we start to consider open source, programmatic execution of popularly derived decisions?

[DayDollar]

I have quite the oppossite approach- if corruption is so unavoidable, why not instituionalize it? The economic sector gets 25 % of the votes in parliament. Companys can boost the percentage of there representive in this fixed part, by paying taxes (in secret). If there are 25 company representives, and every company pays 1 billion - they get each get 1% of the economic-sector-power to distribute.

Corruption outside of this fixed percentage is heavy penalized, as in life prison sentences.

[thingification]

If we know that corruption varies a lot between states (as in countries) and, worldwide, has reduced over time, why would we think it's inevitable?

I see a lot of estimating-as-inevitable in many problem areas - for example: the environment, race and sex relations, security / "privacy". I'm not sure whether it has increased, or I'm just more aware of it these days.

When we think that a problem is inevitable, we may conclude that various reponses that otherwise have little to recommend them might be a good thing: populisms, zero-sum thinking, authoritarianism, radical transparency. This idea of inevitability is in conflict with optimism in David Deutsch's sense: optimism as the principle that all problems are caused by lack of knowledge (and therefore that all problems are either solvable, or truly inevitable because of some law of physics - no examples of the latter being known).

[DayDollar]

No trying to be optimistic here- but the fact is that with the nightwatch state- alot of corruption simply ceased to be because the rule of law evaporated- making corruption effectively legal behaviour. Germany, the place where i live is incredible corrupt, but most of it is legal behaviour, thus not showing up in your statistics.

[wool_gather]

Nothing in your scheme prevents corruption outside its designated lines any more than what we have already. So I have a counter-proposal: why don't we just skip the legitimization step and move straight to the life sentences?

[DayDollar]

Its basically a free market for power- and in a market for power, nobody trust one another- so game theory tells us, everyone will try to make secret agreements, and then go all in to get the most out of it.

And if all that lobbying money piled up , goes into the organized corruption, there is little left for the rest of the power percentage.