This is going to sound a bit racist but it’s clear that the people that are least corrupt are the artists formerly known as Aryans, along with the Japanese. At first I thought the pattern would match that of IQ but it’s interesting to see how India and China are similar in corruption when the Chinese are much more intelligent than the Indians. Perhaps a genetic component? Another thing may be geographical isolation, not that it is unrelated to genetics.

All I got from the link was, “the shift from tribes to not-tribes via the changing mating patterns which prolly impacted altruism genes amongst other behavioral traits”.

If you break up the tribal system by outlawing marriage between first cousins, it seems like you get an environment that promotes people who are less tribal, but not necessarily more altruistic. It may be that altruism only makes sense within a small group and that this trait becomes maladaptive. After all, being nice to people you are close to increases the chances that they will reciprocate, but being nice to strangers minimizes this chance. But if you have altruism and manage to root out tribalism, then you have created something that isn’t quite viable. Of course, that may be the current situation – the West being flooded by people who are exploiting this altruism which they have no intention of reciprocating.

One other thing is, NWE’s used to ostracize those who played selfishly. This is a powerful theme throughout stories from European history. Punish the cheater.

That doesn’t happen anymore. Now, when others play selfishly, NWE’s punish themselves for not being inclusive enough.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8605-brain-scans-reveal-mens-pleasure-in-revenge.html

I keep thinking about this study, and I really, really want to facilitate a GWAS on quantifiable pleasure at punishing cheaters. Just the pleasure. People will often go to great lengths and expense to punish cheating, going well beyond the point of rational self-interest, and I’m convinced that this is somewhat distinct from (also pleasurable) vengeance/retaliation behavior.

Besides the high correlation with extreme maleness of neurological phenotype, I strongly suspect that it’s differently wired in clannish vs outbred frameworks (clannishness implies protecting cheaters if they’re from the right clan) and that Libertarians – those supposedly most anti-authoritarian of people! – take quantifiably more pleasure in the punishment of cheaters than others.

There is no genetic explanation here. All countries have gone through periods of horrendous corruption. I don’t know for sure why some nations seem intractably corrupt, there are likely multitudes of reasons. But placing the blame on someone’s chromosomes is taking the lazy way out, IMO. Corruption is likely due to cultural and economic conditions. As countries develop their economies and there’s a more even distribution of wealth, there is less incentive to try and beat the system. For example, giving police and judges adequate pay makes them less likely to be tempted by bribes. In a country like Russia, police officers are paid miserably, whereas in the U.S., it’s a middle class salary job. Thus you have people working hard, risking their lives every day and still in poverty. It’s no surprise that they turn to bribes to supplement their income. If there’s any pattern you see it’s that affluence and transparency/justice are strongly correlated. Scandinavia is the least corrupt region in the world, and not incidentally it’s the region with the most even distribution of wealth on the planet according to the Gini coefficient.

You have the direction of causation backwards.

Try to find a study or indicator saying that poorly paid scandinavians resort comparatively more to bribes and corruption.

Hah, clever analysis. Hard to falsify, but it’s reasonable.

My fundamental suspicion is that no change in genetics have taken place from the freeloader punishing societies of yore, and that vindictiveness is very sensitive to what a young man is told is the manly thing to do. Culture and propaganda, in other words. In South China, acting out is seen as immature. In North China, vindictiveness is masculine. No one is more aggressively vindictive than a liberal who believes he’s crushing vs an evil racist, while I suspect that the same liberal would be reluctant to punish a jerk in traffic.

Jayman, I take it you’ve exhausted any other explanation other than genes?? I seriously doubt you have. I know this is an HBD blog, thus you are more apt to leap to any conclusions that would validate that perspective. Are you not aware that corruption was once rife in the USA? Look at the that went on during the Guilded era. You think there was some genetic mutation between then and now that’s responsible for the decline of corruption? Of course not. There are socioeconomic/cultural factors at work. What do the Western European nations(and I’ll include other Anglosphere countries outside of Europe) have in common? They are progressive cultures. I don’t mean progressive in the political(left-leaning) sense of the world. I mean it in the sense of forward-looking. Progressive cultures are always looking for ways to improve upon themselves and create a more equitable society. They have the strongest history of democracy. Corruption has fewer opportunities to fester in such environments. These are *cultural* traits that came from cultural and social development, not genetic traits. IQs in Russia are comparable to scores in England, but the difference in corruption is vast, as is the difference in distribution of wealth, democracy and transparency. Russian culture also is very machismo relative to the West, where they are used to living under the reign of the strong-man with an iron fist. Now that I said that it reminds me of something else I think may explain the difference. I think nations lie on a continuum of masculine-feminine values. Nations with feminine values are preoccupied with compassion, political correctness, feminism, anti-patriarchy, egalitarianism. The most culturally feminized part of the planet is Scandinavia where there is simply no culture of strong masculinity. It’s driven by feminist values bordering on androgyny. Men in Scandinavia are completely emasculated. This is somewhat true throughout the West but the apex is Scandinavia. Russia on the other hand, there is no feminism, there are strong roles of men and women and they respect the strong man. The more I think about it, you could almost perfectly plot where a country falls on the corruption perception index by where it falls on the masculine-feminine continuum. Countries where there is a strong culture of machismo, where male values dominate and there are strong roles between the sexes tend to be the most corrupt. You will see this the least in Anglo-Germanic-Nordic countries, and it becomes increasingly more masculine as you head east and south.

Off topic sort of but I just ran into this article on the feasibility of intergalactic travel: http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/08/space_limits?currentPage=all