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by red_admiral 747 days ago
The opposite can happen too. Scott Alexander's old post "In favour of niceness, community and civilisation" quotes an Atlantic article [1] for an example of a model where all of a country's officials can flip from mostly-corrupt to honest at short notice, once corruption falls below a threshold. A lot of other threshold situations like the one you described feature in that article too - including, sadly, a "Rwanda" model for how when inter-group animosity crosses a threshold you can end up with genocide.

As far as I can tell, the formal name is "population dynamics".

[1] https://archive.is/BXq66