[btilly]

As I commented elsewhere, the Russian name for this is blat. It isn't just corruption. It is a personal trust network for getting things done, that you can't get done if you follow the official rules. You get what you need through corruption, and your ability to do so strengthens your trust in your personal network.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn86C4ZwBSg for an excellent explanation of it. And also an explanation of why the most important thing that Epstein did (the thing that actually made him most of it money), was run a blat network. Elites who had learned to trust that he could let them have otherwise impossible sexual experiences, were willing to pay him large amounts to broker introductions and financial deals that others couldn't.

[ACS_Solver]

Right. And oh my do I hate blat.

It's a difficult concept to translate to English because it's not synonymous with corruption or bribes. A one-time bribe transaction isn't blat. You want a school to accept your kid so you "gift" the school some supplies, that's not blat, it's a one-time thing and the school principal doesn't owe you any additional favors. Blat is more like a social network of people trading favors, and each individual transaction within your blat network may involve different things. It could be money, it could be access to a product (that you still have to pay for), it could be time or labor.

Maybe you know a plumber and he will come look at plumbing problems for you and your family, for free or for a low price. But you work at a grocery store and the plumber can always buy cheese because you set some aside for him. That's a blat relationship. And then the blat network grows - one day you mention you'd like to see a theater pay and it turns out the plumber's wife works in a theater and can help you get tickets, he'll set you up. Your husband is an engineer though so he can help tutor their child in mathematics.

[fwipsy]

None of those examples you gave sound like corruption to me, with the possible exception of tickets. It seems to me that the problem is when people who are in a position of power and responsibility abuse their power for personal ends. Plumbing or tutoring or cheese are privately held goods and surely the possessors of those goods can dispose of them how they want?

Or perhaps in all of these examples the plumber/grocer/engineer is entrusted with responsibility from the government to ration a scarce resource?

[btilly]

They are all corruption, or corruption adjacent.

The plumber is working for a company. He's supposed to be working on an official job. But he's doing the work slowly because he's actually working on your plumbing problem.

You are working for the grocery store. You are stealing cheese from the store system that is supposed to allocate it, and making it available it to the plumber as payment for your plumber being corrupt on your behalf.

Again, the wife "who can help you get tickets" is stealing access to them. That's corruption.

The engineer who is tutoring, is paying for that act of corruption. This may or may not happen when the engineer is officially supposed to being doing something else as part of their job. If so, that's possible because people learn to look the other way for you, so that you'll look the other way for them.

And in a society where everything works this way, what do you think happens to overall economic productivity? Exactly! Which creates scarcity. Scarcity that makes the ability to get things through the blat network even more valuable!

[thatcat]

Would you say the scarcity is what starts the corruption?

Like you can't get a plumber so you have to use your personal network or there aren't enough tickets so you have to obtain one through your personal network, etc?

[pixl97]

It's probably better to look at a system wide level than any one shortage. For example is there no plumbers because school loans to learn apprenticeship were robbed by the rich, and the actual plumbers aren't able to get more licenses because of the graft they' have to pay for an additional one.

It's never just one thing.

[btilly]

This kind of corrruption goes as far back as we can find records.

I think that the real question is not how the corruption started. But, rather, how in some places rule of law came to be established instead.

That said, I don't have a good answer to that question either.

[fwipsy]

None of that was specified. As I said earlier, the problem is not with quid pro quo; it's in the stealing which you've now specified as additional context. I could just as easily specify another context where each of these actions are legitimate. (Perhaps free tickets are part of the theater worker's perks.)

If I said "I baked a cake for my mother," then you could say "BUT YOU STOLE THE FLOUR!" It doesn't prove anything.

[btilly]

My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that it is easy to forget that others might not get the context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish live, but not remembering to remind people that water is wet.

That said, there were contextual clues. If you go back, I said, "You get what you need through corruption..." The next reply was agreeing and expanding on that. This strongly suggests that each step in the description involves corruption in some way.

That said, hopefully you're now clear that these blat networks involve pervasive corruption.

When a community that is used to blat networks moves to a different country, the blat network doesn't go away. Throughout US history, it has been common to see blat networks in immigrant communities turn into straight up organized crime. The most famous example being the rise of the Mafia. But it is hardly an isolated example.

[fwipsy]

Yes, the context was talking about what we would call corruption, but given that I read the comment as trying to explain things to a western reader, I think it's worth calling out the unstated assumption that makes this actually bad rather than just friends swapping favors.

[scj]

Could you elaborate (hopefully with real examples) of what it's like to be in the out group with few connections (or perhaps no connections) in regards to a particular good / service?

[ACS_Solver]

> My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that it is easy to forget that others might not get the context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish live, but not remembering to remind people that water is wet.

Yes. It's fascinating, HN is in most ways a bubble with a particular kind of leadership, but sometimes these cultural differences shine through.

To me, it's completely obvious that in the case of a plumber working through blat, he's not just legitimately doing extra work (assuming the law allows that in the first place). Of course it means the plumber is working on your pipes while he's supposed to be doing his actual job, or maybe he actually does it outside the hours but when he needs to replace some part for you, he steals it from his work. But apparently to people who grew up in a different environment, what comes to mind is legitimate side business.

[ryandrake]

Yea, I guess I don't get it either. I know someone who can eat at a local restaurant for free whenever he wants because he knows the owner. In return, he helps the owner maintain his car and does little odd handyman jobs around the owner's house for him. Is this blat? Is it corruption? Or is it just friends doing each other favors?

[btilly]

It's a slippery slope.

What rules are you breaking to do your favor? What rules do you expect someone else to break for the return favor? What rules might they later expect you to break? To what extent do you stop seeing the rules of external society as rules that you're supposed to follow?

It starts as favors.

By the time you're stealing from your employer, it's blat.

By the time you're recruiting one friend to submit paperwork to help another friend commit insurance fraud, it's still blat. But also its starting to look like something else.

Once you owe a favor to a Mafia Don, it's called organized crime. But the underlying blat is still recognizable.

[hatthew]

From the sound of it (I have never heard of blat before this post), the important distinction is that the owner is on board with it. If he could eat for free because he knew a server who would give him the employee discount, it would be blat. If he worked as a mechanic and took parts from his employer to repair his friend's car, it would be blat.

[creato]

It's pretty tiring seeing so many people push the bounds of acceptable behavior. It's pretty simple: should someone in your chain of management discipline you for setting aside that cheese? If yes, you are engaging in corruption.

That action is basically stochastic theft from the grocery store, because you've altered the pricing of a possibly scarce good.

[nephihaha]

We call that restaurant thing "mate's rates" here. There is a symbiotic relationship there, a trace of barter and also keeps work off the tax books.

[pavel_lishin]

I'm not the person you were replying to, but they gave you some "toy" examples; let me give you some real ones.

My grandmother was ill. My grandfather, her husband, was sufficiently well connected that she got good medical coverage. Then he died. And so we lost our connections to the good doctors, to the good healthcare she was getting, and her care got significantly worse.

We have a family member with some property that's in a weird state, paperwork-wise. We were working on it, because another family member had a friend in the bureaucracy - think, the local tax office - who could have helped us sort it out on paper. Then he died. So now, we have to do things by the book, which is incredibly difficult without having a friend there to cut through the red tape.

It's not about getting the plumber to prioritize your work, or getting the nice slice of cheese. It's about making sure grandma's osteoporosis gets treated, it's about not losing your house.

[ACS_Solver]

Well in the Soviet case, plumbing and cheese are most certainly not privately held resources. Doing such work as a plumber means you're essentially acting as self-employed or a business, which is illegal. The cheese is probably produced on a collective farm and sold at a state-owned store.

But surely the cheese case would not be okay even in a Western capitalist context where the store is privately owned. Just replace it with a more scarce product. A store employee isn't allowed to tell customers the store is out of iPhones while keeping a dozen stashed for preferred buyers.

[awesome_dude]

For a Western context, perhaps "tickets to a highly sought after event"

[fwipsy]

In Western capitalist context, An apple employee can't do that because they would be stealing from Apple. If they are reselling phones that belong to them, they can dispose of them however they like.

I think the Soviet context is key. Because the state is rationing these items, it creates a black market based on personal connections. In Western society nobody cares because (ideally) the market is competitive and you can just buy from someone else.

[ACS_Solver]

Yes, an Apple employee doing that would be stealing from Apple. But in the capitalist context, we also have entirely legal business models that I would argue are equivalent to corruption ethically. A business that chooses to sell its products or services only to a select group of customers (entirely legal) and then picks those customers not exclusively based on their finances but based on what else they can provide. Such as access to certain people, different favors, etc. That is IMO ethically questionable.

But the Soviet everyday corruption variety of retail employees reserving cheese for someone who can return favors, that particular thing is particular to a socialist economy with a scarcity of relatively basic goods.

[awesome_dude]

> the problem is when people who are in a position of power and responsibility abuse their power for personal ends

Is that not the definition of corruption?

[pyrolistical]

Corruption like almost all things fall on a spectrum.

Those are examples of soft corruption

[adiabatichottub]

I don't know about difficult to translate, sounds a lot like being a "Good Old Boy"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/good_old_boy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_boy_network#United_States

Of course, it has several connotations depending on exact context.

[jimbokun]

Seems like a big part of it is an extensive barter network since the straightforward exchange of cash for services has broken down, so you need to know the right people with skills or access to, and something of value to offer them in return.

[ElevenLathe]

This is 100% how working people everywhere survive. I'm a middle aged person who grew up lower-middle class in an unassuming town in the US midwest, and this is how everything got done. Our kitchen was remodeled by the guy my Dad knew from the bar, who was introduced to him by their mutual bookie. He later did some work on our basement (a tree root was growing in) and needed a backhoe. The husband of my Mom's coworker had one and was looking for a place to park it for a few months, so we could use it but had to keep it parked in our yard afterward for a while. My Dad was a bureaucrat and helped all these people file for the government program he was a representative for. My Mom watched other kids for free when needed so that they would watch me if she needed. I missed the deadline for applying for drivers' ed one summer and, rather than wait, she called up somebody she knew at the schoolboard and they were able to get me in. The owner of the corner store across the street from our house also had an unpaid sideline in connecting people in the neighborhood who could help each other. Nobody would think of taking their car to a professional mechanic until they'd asked around to a few neighbors, who would never accept any money. We knew what kind of beer our garbage men liked to drink so, when we went to throw away something that was on the borderline of whether or not the city should let you (e.g. throwing away a mattress on a day that isn't one of the scheduled "large items" days), we set out a 12 pack of it (and a case at Christmas time, just to keep good relations). At a certain point in my childhood, the programming of pirated DirecTV cards became a vital currency in this web -- my Dad bought a card reader/writer for our family PC and I went to work trawling through sketchy IRC channels to get the latest images to flash onto them. Sometimes I would get paid a nominal amount, but it felt good just to be useful.

This wasn't the global south, and we weren't even especially poor (though some in our neighborhood were). We were prosperous citizens in the core of an empire at the peak of its uncontested power. This is just how a community works, and has since the beginning of time. The extremely marketized nature of modern upper middle class life is the aberration in human history, and presumably will not last forever.

[matheusmoreira]

> It's a difficult concept to translate to English

> Blat is more like a social network of people trading favors

It's like Vito Corleone in Godfather but applied to an entire society.

[suzzer99]

This basically describes how boards of directors and other power structures at that level work. Just with much more expensive assets and favors.

[pseudohadamard]

  And oh my do I hate blat.

CYKA BLAT!

[petsfed]

I was initially confused because blat (блат,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(favors)) sounds, to my non-slavic-speaking-ear very close to bylad (блядь, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_profanity#Bly%C3%A1d'), and I thought "even the Russians wouldn't be that cynically direct about it, right?"

[btilly]

They may sound somewhat similar, but apparently have unrelated origins. блат is borrowed from Yiddish, while блядь has a Slavic root.

That said, they do sound less similar to someone who has learned a Slavic language. We learn to distinguish pairs of sounds that differ in our language. English doesn't have a lot of words with a "ya" sound, and so to us "я"and "а" are easy to confuse. It is easy to confuse "d" and "t". But the easier to hear distinction is a hard sign т versus the soft sign on дь. But hard versus soft isn't even a concept in English, so you're not listening for it.

[ACS_Solver]

I can confirm those words do not in fact sound very close. They're not etymologically related either, and to a fluent Russian speaker they don't sound particularly similar.

[torginus]

It's interesting that you contrast Sweden and Russia, considering while I have not lived and worked in Russia, I've worked with Swedes quite a bit and my experience with them is that they don't really emphasize red tape that much - in the context of development, they don't really mind if you bend the rules if it's for a good cause - what I mean is there's a general attitude of pursuing sensible outcomes over blindly following processes.

They're also not big on oversight and I got what it looked like to me a surprising amount of autonomy and responsibilty in a very short amount of time, that I felt out of depth for a while, but got accustomed to it. A very laissez faire way of work.

I felt much of the system was informal, and based on the expectation of not abusing trust. Which was very refreshing, as most companies in my experience exist in a state of bureaucratic gridlock - you need to push the change to repo X, but Y needs to sign off on it, and it depends on changes by person Z, who's held up by similar issues etc.

It's a very emotionally draining and unproductive way of working, and is usually overseen by bosses who create these processes, because they don't trust their employees, or to get a feeling of power and control, or they simply don't understand how and what their subordinates do, so they kind of try to force things into these standard flows.

Which also doesn't work, but it accountably doesn't work. Even if a days' changes take a week, and still end up lacking, you can point to that Task A is blocked by deliverable B, which is at a low priority at team Foo, so lets have a meeting with that teams manager to make sure to prioritize that in the next sprint etc etc etc.

This is how most places turn into that meme picture where there's one guy digging a hole and 5 people oversee him.

[ACS_Solver]

I didn't mention Russia, and I've never had the misfortune of living there - though I speak the language and am well familiar with the capture.

The Swedish term for how you describe work is "frihet under ansvar" - translated, "freedom under responsibility". That's a common approach at workplaces where you're doing qualified work, like engineering, and the meaning is that you're given a lot of flexibility and freedom in how you do your work as long as you reach the expected result and you take responsibility if things don't work out. That's good, and yes companies here are very informal. We don't even culturally like things like managers instructing employees on what to do, it's all phrased very casually.

In context of government work or the public sector, I'd say we take rules and procedures seriously, which is one of my favorite things about the country. To me, that makes interactions much more predictable than in countries with a "people before systems" culture.

[jimbokun]

One interesting effect of LLMs getting so good at generating code, all of the process related things you mention take up a greater and greater percentage of the overall time to develop and deploy a feature, making them even more salient.

[torginus]

They always have. I would guess the majority of people employed and salaries paid on a given project basically goes to waste. Just today I had an hour-long meeting about an impact of a bug, which was clear as day with a simple fix, but would've involved so much red tape to fix (for no good reason), that the couple minute fix-deploy-test-merge cycle would've taken at least a week of effort spread across people.

[gkoz]

What a blast from the past, this word. Exactly right. It was a spectrum from a sort of mutual aid to regular corruption to outright mafia.