This is one of the aspects of the Islamic world that I do not like. Bartering/bribing/coercing is super common, and I fail to see how it could have any positive benefit at all.
My home country has huge Islamic influences, and it is prevalent there as well. All it does is destroy your sense of trust for any authority, and without even minimal trust no one ever tries to improve things, a vicious cycle.
I'm from Iran but I actually have been living in the US for 12+ years. In my home country bribery is common but what is worse is finding the right person who has connections to bribe. My dad was in construction business (roads, bridges and dams) and he worked hard but he was always cash flow negative even though he was bribing generously. It turned out he could have been bribing the boss directly instead of bribing the employee and employee bribing the boss.
What's funny is my dad is retired now but the boss and the guy he was bribing are both living happily in Toronto, Canada thanks to Canada's investment visa and basically no rules for dirty money.
> but the boss and the guy he was bribing are both living happily in Toronto, Canada
Yep. Similar, where I am (London UK) is, depending on how you measure it, not corrupt at all, or staggeringly corrupt.
Not corrupt at all, because it's nigh-impossible to bribe your way out of speeding fine or into a planning approval.
Staggeringly corrupt because it's a huge parking lot for dirty money from secretive sources around the world, mostly stored in real estate, and thus facilitates massive global corruption.
The UK has been relatively proactive regarding money laundering. It was actually one of the first countries to mandate a publicly accessible company registry that includes beneficial owners.
Canada is on the other end of the spectrum in terms of both transparency requirements and enforcement, so much so that the term "snow washing" has become part of the vernacular internationally, and even garnered its own Wikipedia entry. There are developing countries (e.g., Ghana) that have more robust anti-money laundering regimes.
Yup, I'm originally from a country where it's a common saying between people that there are "laws that stick" and "laws that don't stick". The only value of a law is in its enforcement, watching the flow of oligarchs' money towards City of London tells me enforcement is still very subpar.
> An unexplained wealth order (UWO) is a type of court order issued by a British court to compel the target to reveal the sources of their unexplained wealth. UWOs were introduced by sections 1–2 of the Criminal Finances Act 2017
> In June 2003, Abramovich became the owner of the companies that control Chelsea Football Club in West London.
I don't understand, would Putin ordering the purchase mage it illegit?
It's of course possible that Abramovich got his riches by illegal means. Nevertheless buying a football club seems like a normal thing to do (for rich people).
Canada is really surprisingly blatant about their lack of concern for the origin of money. Your story sort of reminds me of the craze of Chinese millionaires buying homes in Vancouver and British Columbia as safe haven assets.
When I did some overland traveling in Africa this was extremely common.
At the border crossing between Mauritania and Senegal there was a little "immigration" hut where you'd have to get your passport stamped. One very well dressed official in Ray-Bans just took people's passports and set them on a pile and they'd stay there for hours unless you'd slip in a bank note.
All he had to was stamp them, nothing else. Other travellers I was with refused to "take part in this corruption", I happily gave the guy a fee and was on my way. It's either that or standing around in the scorching sun for hours mobbed by begging locals.
At every checkpoint you'd have police / military with Kalashnikovs asking for a "petit cadeau" (little gift). At first they're very intimidating but after a while you realise they're totally harmless and will just let you pass if you just say "no sorry". Most are extremely bored and just happy to see you. In the Western Sahara they'd even invite us to some tea, teach us a few words of Arabic and one of them even asked "you, give me laptop?" Yeah sure buddy! Preloading one with a keylogger could be fun!
One guy traveling with us in a car told the story of when he first drove in Africa. In Senegal he got pulled over and police fined him 50$ cause he didn't have a danger triangle. The next year he got pulled over again and proudly showed them the triangle but he was fined 50$ again cause he didn't have 2x danger triangles. You don't know whether to laugh or cry. Good times.
My dad (a retired airline pilot) ran a flight school in Kenya at some point before I was born. He was a high-up examiner in the Kenyan aviation scene. He eventually left after being shot at for not taking bribes, and routinely saw e.g. partially sighted pilots saying things like "Tally-ho chaps I'm coming in" on the radio at their favourite light aircraft airfield and the runway / taxiway just emptying as everyone legged it.
This heavily reminds me of Papers, Please [1] by Lucas Pope. Great game and a good example of how to tell a story through mechanics rather than a linear storyline.
the rest of your text makes it abundantly clear that it was a bribe, so why call it a fee? Unless you got an official receipt for it, which I highly doubt...
You're right. It just doesn't seem right to use the same word for both 10$ that saves you hours of tedium and a suitcase with a hundred grand to get a building permit.
When I have to get my passport renewed it's possible to pay a higher fee to get it done quicker. The difference is it ends up in the state coffers vs in some official's pocket. But in the end it's just to jump the queue, same thing.
Well yeah, there are smaller and larger bribes... OTOH "Baksheesh" for me is more like a tip that you would give to a waiter in a restaurant, which is the mildest form of corruption possible (if it can even be called that).
A fee to get your passport quicker isn't the same as a bribe for me - after all, you can also pay extra to get a better seat on a flight, better service and be able to board sooner, would you consider that bribing the airline? Whereas paying someone at the gate to upgrade you to business class would be bribery...
I think there's a real difference between a "facilitation payment" and a "bribe". In each case, the official intends to use their position for personal benefit - and yes that is clearly problematic - but in the former case, the payer has no corrupt intent.
It’s just the scale. A “facilitation payment” is a small bribe.
The payer of any bribe is participating in a corrupt system. Paying $1 to get your passport stamped is small, but it still is bad. Think of all the poor people who don’t have $1 and get hosed by this.
No, it's really not the scale - it's about intent. $100 to a customs officer to avoid being held up for a day when you've done nothing wrong is totally different from $100 to a customs officer to overlook unpaid duties on a suitcase full of goods.
It's a form of direct taxation. In most of these countries officials literally officially get paid $50 a month as their salary. But their position allows them to directly "tax" people in the ways being described here. Their boss and their bosses boss will probably be in on it and be receiving a cut.
Ok, if it's already calculated into the officials' salaries (the same way as waiters get paid less, because they get tips from customers), then they should at least give you a receipt for this "tax payment"...
I'm confused. Calling it a "facilitation payment" feels like a subcategory of bribes to me, and would be a form of corruption. Can you explain why you would see "facilitation payments" as not being corrupt?
A facilitation payment is a payment made to an official to do their job.
Real personal example: I'm trying to register my newly-purchased car with the RTO (c.f. DMV) in Bangalore. I have all the paperwork I need. The car is mine, my address details are correct, my proofs of address are sufficient, my fee is paid.
Only there are continual requests for more paperwork: different proofs of address, proofs of prior addresses in other countries, proofs that are officially stamped etc etc none of which are formally necessary.
On the advice of the car dealer, I paid INR 4,000 in facilitation money and suddenly the paperwork is in order and my car is registered.
The official's intent is to extort me for money, but my intent is just to comply with the law that requires my car to be registered. I'm willing and able to provide all the required paperwork. My intent is not corrupt.
If I was trying to register a car that was stolen, and I was paying the RTO official to overlook the inadequacies in my documentation, that would be a bribe. My intent is to pay the official not to do their job.
Ha. That still sounds sketchy. It would be like going to a DMV in the states to get your license and slipping a $20 to person who gives your driving test to get out of parallel parking or something....
It’s not bribing your way out of a crime or something but it is still dodgy and corrupt.
If you're paying someone $20 to get out of parallel parking in your driving test; that's a bribe.
If you're paying someone $20 to pass your driving test after you performed a perfect parallel parking maneuver but they baselessly claimed you were "too far from the curb"; that's a facilitation payment.
A lot of "bribes" in Africa are simply to expedite things. And in a lot of cases, they unfortunately need expiditing because the officials want money and delay it unnecessarily. Still, its quite a fair bit different to giving someone money to allow your AK47 shipment to go past customs.
Interestingly US law makes a distinction as well. You can’t bribe officials of foreigner governments, but paying money to speed up otherwise normal work said official would do is legal (to the US govt).
the US has (or used to have) this when it comes to processing certain forms/visa applications (I129, I140). it’s called premium processing. Is this corruption?
No because it is official policy with the money going to the organization. Having it go into the pocket of the person sets up perverse incentives that depend on the person.
If you get a receipt back for the "fee," it's not corrupting the process.
The style of writing indicates to me at least that OP was not writing to be technically precise to this level. Since it is abundantly clear to you that the payment was a bribe then isn’t the natural conclusion that it was a bribe and that “fee” was used to convey the idea that there was a cost involved that couldn’t be avoided?
I've seen similar things all over poorer regions of Central and South America as well. My take on this: I'm paying a portion of the salary of the immigration official, police officer, etc. For better or worse, that's often how they feed their families.
Doing the "right thing" is also hard. Paying a fine instead of a bribe could mean waiting 10 days for your license to be returned.
Our traffic laws are also very inconsistent here so it's very easy to make mistakes abroad:
Like Honduras requires two traffic triangles, but others only one. Nicaragua prohibits changing lanes in roundabouts, but it is allowed elsewhere. El Salvador enforces speed where there are no speed limit signs while Guatemala enforces them where there are many signs. And so on.
What you're describing is "corruption" and no, it does not have any positive benefit. It's the system that develops in the vacuum from a well working state, because when there is a general low level of trust, the quite human way to resolve that is to build "networks of trust" within society and that's not a good thing, because if you don't have a societal contract on how everyone should behave, the society won't be very nice to live in.
This also has nothing to do with Islam, you'll see it in most of the developing world and of course even in developed countries, but normally more contained.
I guess the extreme of this would be a country like Russia that more or less runs on bribes and favors, while at the same time having most actors accepting that nothing can be done about it.
The reason that this is classified as an Islamic cultural aspect in my mind is the clear differentiation between coexisting societies where I grew up.
The more "eastern" societal clusters have this kind of mentality more prevalent, while the most "western" ones not so much, while both are next to each other and equally poor.
The fact that other cultures share these aspects does not invalidate their presence in Islamic countries in my point of view, and of course I cannot prove that this is the case, the same way that no one can prove that it is not either. Of course I could be wrong
I think that corruption and economical development being inversely correlated is pretty widely accepted, but of course it doesn't have to be linear and exactly the same in different countries. In general though, the more well off the country is, the less need there is for corruption.
There are groups tracking this and I don’t think your statement is correct as corruption does vary, based on culture, from country to country.
The Corruptions Perception Index [0] is one that’s been around for a while and it shows differences between country. It’s not just GDP/PPP and there are many factors that affect it.
But also, haggling for example. It is something incredibly common in probably most Islamic cultures, markets/shops without prices are common place.
I think the unwillingness to set a fixed price that can be judged fair or not by either parties, and the need for a back and forth or a ripoff is a related part of the mentality
I'm not sure what your point is. If you ask yourself what corruption is; it's not a force of nature appearing from nowhere, it's a social response in a population to uncertainty, unmet needs and danger. So a country with a history of conflict, for example, would be expected to develop some level of corruption as the fabric of society breaks down.
The way you're phrasing it, it almost sounds like you're insinuating that some countries simply "are" less corrupt, and this is why they are more developed, which is perhaps a comforting thought if you happen to live in a highly developed country, but it's quite obviously not true which a simple historical review of a few centuries back can normally show.
I think they mean that reducing corruption is one of the factors that leads to economic development.
Some countries are less corrupt and this leads to more development, investment, etc.
It’s a low cost investment as the amount of corruption is very low, but the friction has much greater impact negatively than the cash generated.
I wish I could find the paper, but economically it’s better off to give the inspectors raises above the amount from bribes as that will improve development from the things that now happen that were being blocked by bribes.
> economically it’s better off to give the inspectors raises above the amount from bribes
I can't speak to whether this is verified or not, but at least it makes sense. The same logic is often used to motivate why politicians have relatively high wages, as decreasing them would incentivize bribes. It's of course not black and white and well-off politicians may still accept bribes, but at least I have a hard time seeing how the wage wouldn't be a factor.
I heard a similar anecdote about badly paid police officers, how many countries have this issue where police are paid so little they pretty much have to take bribes, in a perverted sense like waiting jobs in the US "include" tips, so the notion of an uncorrupted police officer is completely foreign as you simply wouldn't be able to make ends meet.
To be fair, he said "This is one of the aspects of the Islamic world that I do not like." That does not imply that the practice is limited to Islamic countries, but it does imply that it is common in all Islamic countries. That said, I don't see any reason to believe the practice is a direct result of those countries being Islamic.
Things seem to have got a bit better in Egypt. I've been here 3 months and yet to be asked for a bribe in spite of dealing with many roadblocks and a visa extension. Also the unpleasantness of having to haggle with taxis has been removed in Cairo by them having Uber. Quite a contrast with Luxor where there is no Uber and you have to deal with ten taxi guys shouting at you when you get off a bus.
I've traveled backpacker-style and off the track etc in quite a few countries, many of them really poor.
Egypt has by far been the worst place to visit when it comes to the locals. >50% of all money transactions (eg booking a tour, or buying water in a small shop, ...) the seller tried to scam me, whether it was ridiculous overcharge, bait and switch, not the right change, ....
Worst was the idiots around tourist attractions, like camel riders close to the pyramids in Cairo, but a security guard with AK-47 at the airport wasn't pleasant either. He said plainly he wanted baksheesh or our baggage would be overweight.
We got the tip to buy an arabic newspaper and carry it with me visible but not in a pointing-it-out manner. The idea is that people see it and think I know the ways. Worked, a bit.
I understand where you're coming from, and I sympathize with your comment (indeed, I am suffering from it as well), however I disagree that it's an Islamic world issue. It's common in underdeveloped / developing countries, a large amount of which are Islamic countries.
As for why it happens or why it's common... there are plenty of reasons, really. (obviously, I will talk about my country only, and what I see) Personally, I believe that the most important one / the root cause is that the law isn't enforced, which erodes peoples' trust in it as well as people's respect, and you end up with people exploiting that (a vicious cycle, as you said). Not only that, but when the law is finally enforced, it's usually not enforced fairly[1].
If anyone is curious about Islam's stance, well, Islam explicitly says:
Translation: "And do not consume one another's wealth unjustly or send it [in bribery] to the rulers in order that [they might aid] you [to] consume a portion of the wealth of the people in sin, while you know [it is unlawful]."
روى الإمام أحمد عن ثوبان قال رسول الله: لَعَنَ اللّهُ الراشيَ والمُرتَشِيَ والرائشَ الذي يَمشِي بَينَهُما..
Translation: The Prophet (S) said, 'Allah's curse is on the briber, the bribed, and the agent between them.’
And there are more.
I do not blame you (nor anyone else) for the correlation, I just wanted to clarify.
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[1] This is off-topic, but there was a huge issue in Egypt with regards to people building apartment complexes and buildings illegally, through bribing the province officials. Well, recently,the government said that enough is enough and went to crack down on that. They placed huge fines on the illegal buildings (supposed to be paid by the builder in question / building owner, but he/she actually have no incentive to, so the people who paid were actually the building residents), and said that if the fines aren't paid, the buildings will be bulldozed (and indeed, some were).
They punished the people who bought residence in the illegal buildings (some of whom actually didn't know that it was illegal). But the governmental workers / officials who gave out the fake permits and took the bribes? Not a single one was punished.
I don't see how it's comparatively well-hidden, let alone harder to fight as a result. There seems to be just as much hidden corruption at the upper levels in less wealthy and non-western countries, except that there's also more lower-level and visible corruption in those countries.
A police officer in rural Colombia can be negotiated with to obtain an outcome that is satisfactory to all parties. Try that at the San Fransisco DMV, even if they want to help you they can't because the process is the process.
There are pros and cons to both systems. The low bribery systems tend to curb the worst behavior (no amount of donating to the right causes will help you put a toxic waste processing plant in Manhatten) at the expense of really screwing the people who are edge cases.
The equatorial developing nations tend to have a lot of class divide and racism problems that get nastier in a regulatory environment where everything is fuzzy. If you want to see a bribery based regulatory environment done right look at eastern Europe from 1980-2000ish (years vary depending on where you look).
HN loves the "hurr durr stupid poor countries and their bribery" trope but for those countries routine bribery is mostly just a cultural workaround for the fact that they can't afford a massive administrative state to grant you a stupid variance from their stupid zoning rules on your stupid garden shed (or whatever). They're effectively pushing decision making onto the leaves of the organizational tree and cutting the organizational tree out of the payment loop somewhat. Yes, it goes awry sometimes but it's not like western bureaucracies have any lack of similarly bad outcomes.
I don't know about you but I don't want my police officers to be "negotiated with". I want them to enforce the law fairly and evenly, and not waive laws for their personal gain.
That works fine on paper and in internet comments but in reality the law is often asinine and/or intentionally broad to facilitate easy enforcement and enforcement is almost always subject to the discretion of those doing the enforcement. Their discretion is anything but fair and even.
By saying you want the goalposts located at the "fairly and evenly line" you're just moving the inequality from being the fault of the enforcers to be the fault of other parts of the system. The poor guy can't take time off work to fight the ticket and the end result of the system is barely any fairer.
If you're being reasonable it's much easier to say "officer, I'm being reasonable, here's some money, screw off" than it is to try and appeal to a bureaucracy, especially if you're doing something that's outside the letter of the law but within the spirit of the law.
For most people most of the time the difference is a wash. The main difference is the edge cases and failure modes. Think about this next time you're (you reading this comment with disdain, not the person I'm replying to in particular) waiting for a police officer to finish writing you your ticket for going the same speed as everyone else while looking slightly more interesting than everyone else.
I have always been curious about this, because in my mind systems (however distasteful we may find them) do not arise for no reason. You imagine it reflects some underlying dynamics going on.
I have heard that Arabic / Islamic society is much more family, neighbor, who-you-know oriented versus western society trusting more the rules of some authority, even if not personally known to you. Even for example, mundane things like if you need your plumbing fixed, you don't look up the yellow pages, you ask your friend to refer someone.
Does this lead to "favors" being more acceptable, like as a gift to someone you know for having helped you? Interpreted in a more charitable way, bribes/baksheesh are an expression of gratitude (though now an obligation of doing business)?
You start to think such factors must be ingrained in a people's mentality, because otherwise, why don't we just declare laws that make this sort of practice illegal and everyone is happier?
Some economists / sociologists classify this as low-trust/high-trust societies. In low-trust societies, trust typically does not extend far beyond family and personal connections. There's nothing Islamic about it: low-trust is more or less synonymous with low- to middle income societies, with the majority non-Islamic (China, India, Latin America).
High-trust is largly "Western" (North America, Western/Norhern Europe, Oceania), but also the rich Asian countries (Japan, South Korean, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore). The causal relationship between high-trust and high-income is difficult to disentangle, but there's plausibly some form of positive feedback loop at work.
I'm not sure what you have in mind with "arise for no reason". Both historically and presently by population-majority, low-trust society seem the norm and high-trust the exeption.
> The causal relationship between high-trust and high-income is difficult to disentangle, but there's plausibly some form of positive feedback loop at work.
I've read that the rule of law has something to do with it. E.g.: "Where civil liberties and property rights are secure under a strong rule of law, fewer social resources are up for political grabs and groups have less opportunity to benefit via zero-sum or negative-sum competition against other groups."
While I mostly agree, I thought Japan is meant to be notorious for corruption? A very different type, of course: not handing in used notes to a tax official, but rather high-level, white-glove type thing. Like, making sure the state turns a blind eye to safety failings at a nuclear plant.
Maybe there is another dimension than low/high trust?
The low/high trust distinction for many writers (e.g., Fukuyama in Trust) isn't primarily about trust in government to be uncorrupt (or even societal trust in government more generally), but rather about a shared consensus about social rules that facilitates reliable, predictable interpersonal cooperation. e.g., A person can trust that if they enter into an agreement with someone else, there's a likelihood that person will perform without a third party outside of the agreement interposing themselves and insisting on a bribe, and if they don't perform, there's a set of neutral rules (e.g., the courts) to resolve the dispute that again don't require exogenous pressures like bribes or influence from powerful family members. Basically less uncertainty, that in turn creates less unnecessary economic friction. Japan satisfies this definition of a high trust society. Trusting that the government can't be bribed is an aspect of the high/low trust concept, but it's not really the core.
There's an interesting treatise, "L'invention de l'homme moderne" by Robert Muchembled, where he details how medieval Europe transitioned from a decentralized and low-trust environment to a centralized and high-trust environment with independent arbiters like police and the courts. For most people, in most regions and most points in time, the idea that a central authority would decide what is right, what you can and cannot charge, how you can and cannot deal with those who harm you, etc., would be completely alien. Central authorities waged wars and asked for taxes and that was pretty much it.
> This is one of the aspects of the Islamic world that I do not like. Bartering/bribing/coercing is super common, and I fail to see how it could have any positive benefit at all.
Sorry but that just sounds massively Islamophobic. I'm half Croatian, we have had a history of more-or-less open corruption in all levels of government, from policemen to heads of state, and the same applies for wide swaths of Eastern Europe. Not to mention the entire narcorruption situation in Southern America.
Corruption is a symptom of weak government structures (and, to some extent, poverty) which force people to fend for themselves on all levels to survive, not something that is inherently tied to any religion or ethnicity.
GP didn't say that corruption was limited to the Islamic world, just that it's one aspect of the Islamic world that he doesn't like. Of course corruption is widespread around the world.
I think you mean "non-first-world" countries as it's relatively common in all poor countries (or countries that are "rich" but have huge poor populations with only the 0.1% having all the wealth) not just islamic countries.
This has nothing to do with the Islamic world and everything to do with poverty and income disparity. The fact that you associate this with Islam is repugnant. The West is equally corrupt - you just don't gain a moral kick from recognizing the equivalence.
> The fact that you associate this with Islam is repugnant.
I think that your comment would've been a lot stronger without the jab. Every time you call someone repugnant for having a particular bias (which we all do), you increase distance and decrease understanding.
Expressions of religious bigotry are not conducive to HN's guidelines.
Bigotry on the basis of religious grounds is repugnant wherever you see it, and should be called out wherever you see it, because it always results in atrocities. Casual bigotry like this only grows into collective hatred through complicity.
It seems much more appropriate to write "Islam doesn't teach people to be corrupt. Corruption is a function of poverty, not religion. For example countries of religion X aren't islamic but report similar signs of corruption." Calling people bigots seems less appropriate and counter productive.
Someone who makes even a rude assumption about a people isn't necessarily a bigot. They could just be wrong and you could correct them without insulting them in the same you would hope people would correct you if you said something inaccurate.
I think its very clear that the auto-hatred of Islam is driven by bigotry and fear. Anyone who does even a cursory examination of the subject can see it does not, in fact, promote corruption.
You might be pantywaiste about calling out bigotry online, but I'm not.
My home country has huge Islamic influences, and it is prevalent there as well. All it does is destroy your sense of trust for any authority, and without even minimal trust no one ever tries to improve things, a vicious cycle.