I think that Matthew Crawford has hold of the wrong end of the stick in his post on California corruption:
I grew up in California, moved away in the early Nineties, and moved back in 2019. One of the new things I noticed upon my return was small signs stuck to the side of a car, or printed on posterboard and erected on a street corner, advertising “DMV servicesâ€. After some intercourse with a few of these, always conducted in halting, heavily accented English, I came to understand that these entrepreneurs are “fixersâ€, a species that most Americans are unacquainted with. If you want to get something done in the developing world, you often need to engage the services of a fixer. This is someone who has connections in the bureaucracy, often by virtue of kinship. Being a naïve visitor without connections, you couldn’t possibly know whom to bribe, how to approach them, or what forms must be observed. These things must be accomplished with delicacy. You, brainwashed to believe in the Weberian version of bureaucracy as impersonal rationality, are too naive to navigate a real one in most parts of the world.
Any Chicagoan will feel a twinge of nostalgia about that. Until ten years ago or so that’s the way lots of things worked in Chicago. When you needed to get a variance, you went to “a guy” or what Mr. Crawford refers to as a “fixer”. “The guy” actually had a pseudo-office, a corner or bench in City Hall and there was frequently a line of people waiting.
I don’t think that globalization or multiculturalism has anything to do with it and political corruption, single party rule, and confidence that your corrupt arrangement will not be detected let alone punished have everything to do with it.
Was the same in Philly. The “guy” was usually a relative and/or off duty cops did a lot of it. Of course that veered from fixing stuff into outright crime. Our New Jersey hospital was being paid as a Tier 2 hospital ie lower rates. Its outcomes were the best for all tier 2 hospitals in the state and better than over 50% of the existing tier 1 hospitals. Appeals to the insurance companies went nowhere or the state insurance commission. However, we found a guy who is best friends with the chair of the committee that makes recommendations to the insurance commission about tier status. We hired him to represent us and now are tier 1.
Steve
Growing up, I was taught a superior aspect of liberal democratic systems over its competitors was it intrinsically did better against pervasive and petty corruption — the idea of rotating power and open disclosure.
Certainly been learning the world is more complex then that.
A guy who worked for me, and friend of a certain E. Burke, told me once that any meeting with Harold Washington began first with placement of an envelope on his desk. Front left.