Are we living in the same reality?
Look at how business works in the rich west works. Everything is formalized with contracts, risk is portioned out and offloaded to every party under the sun. You bring in people with licenses and accreditation, 3rd party consultants, etc, etc. All of this work and expense is incurred so that if things go wrong then the parties all have precisely defined ways in which they can (expensively) drag the matter through a courtroom and whatever comes of that will be enforced with state violence.
Contrast with (certain parts of) the far east and eastern europe. The west is the low trust environment.
Your response just proves his point. All of that paperwork, all of those contracts- that assumes you can trust the government to fairly enforce the law.
In a society where corruption rules, you have no reason to spend time and money on any of that because you know you’re one bribe away from it all being kindling for your next bonfire.
So yes, in areas with high corruption they don’t bother. They either just set aside some cash to pay off whatever official they need to if things go sideways, or they hire the local judge’s son to an empty position of power so that they can win anything that goes to “court”. That’s not a sign of high trust, that’s an acknowledgment there’s no point in bothering.
Lawyers in the west are a high status career, because we trust the rule of law. In China, its considered a joke career. What is the point of being a lawyer, when relative position, influence and power within the CCP is the lone factor in winning a case? Big companies all end up with shadow positions that are there just to pay money out to CCP honchos and their kids. Board positions and executive positions go to the CCP.
> In China, its considered a joke career.
Is there a source for this or is more of a vibes thing?
source is my wife who spent the first 25 years of her life in China. So I guess vibes? But she was/is pretty academically rigorous, so I believe her.
So I would caveat it as if you are a really good strong student in China, it would seem that you are much more likely to go into Engineering, Business, or Join the CCP. Its not an A student type of career, more of a B or C student.
It's widely believed in Western society due to the language barrier to access Chinese social media.
But it's not true , or only half true 30 years ago. I personally know 3 or 4 of my alumina abandoned their expertise of Optical Engineering to pursue Lawyer career 20 years ago and made big money.
Another example is one of celebrity law professor (not lawyer though) who recently got involved in a controversy because of Epstein file. He shut down his “weibo" (a Chinese Twitter ) account. He also made tons of money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luo_Xiang
China moves very fast compare to the western society. Something true today might not be true 3 years later. Let alone half-truth 30 years ago.
And that's exactly what's happening here too, starting with the high-powered law firms who settled with Trump when he sued them instead of fighting. Overnight they ruined their reputation, because who is going to trust them when they folded so easily to government pressure? Moreover, as Trump's will becomes law, literally everything they went to school for becomes moot. All their experience about intellectual property or contract law or whatever is worthless when the law is actually whatever the guy in charge wants on any given day.
That's nonsense. No matter how corrupt the CCP is, it cannot have a stake in all court cases in China. Maybe politically sensitive trials are a farce (arguably that's the case in much of the West too, but that's a different story) but that doesn't make the profession as a whole a joke.
The central government in Bejing doesn't care even a little bit about some property dispute in Henan but there's a local apparatchik who cares or who could be made to care with the right consideration.
This is from my Chinese wife, basically by "joke" I mean its not the top students who are going into it. You don't become rich becoming a lawyer. The top students in Schools join government, become Engineers, do Business, etc.
A lot of what I've seen is that boring small civil and criminal cases (shoplifting) aren't that different in China than they are here.
In places where you can’t trust courts, you see organized crime fill the gap - goons start enforcing rules for the bad guys and there are no individual good guys big enough to stop an army of well paid goons. With tech enabling every kind of surveillance in the US, that could be a very dangerous combination (bad guys get privacy, while normal people can be ripped out of their homes).
In societies where the government is corrupt, or even where the courts are slow and expensive, people then trust in the individuals becomes more important.
Being able to rely on being able to enforce contracts means you need less trust in people you do business with.
The framing of "low trust" vs "high trust" is useful but another important distinction when conducting business in different jurisdictions is whether *institutions* or *counterparties* are more trustworthy.
If institutions such as courts are trustworthy (in that they will impartially adjudicate contracts and help you enforce their terms) then you are able to work with a wider spectrum of counterparties who you do not yet trust. You just have to document and hedge against the risk via contracts and insurance, as you point out.
If institutions such as courts are absent, corrupt, or otherwise captured then you must ensure that you only interact with counterparties that you can trust or have direct leverage over. Perhaps ones with which you share personal or reputational connections.
Western Europe is a low trust environment compared to the beacons in (cultural) East Asia, like Singapore. I can leave my kid with an iPad in her hand here without fear of it being nicked, like in London.
But business wise, western Europe is still relatively high trust. I suggest you read more about this.
> Western Europe is a low trust environment compared to the beacons in (cultural) East Asia, like Singapore. I can leave my kid with an iPad in her hand here without fear of it being nicked, like in London.
Funny that you take London as an example of Western Europe's low-trust environment, entirely ignoring the fact that the population of London can hardly be called Western European anymore. According to [1] in 2021 only 36,8% of the London population was White British, trend decreasing.
> But business wise, western Europe is still relatively high trust.
Maybe because the population actually working and doing business is still Western European? But that won't last long if current trends and policies continue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_London
> [...] the population of London can hardly be called Western European anymore. According to [1] in 2021 only 36,8% of the London population was White British, trend decreasing.
If you want to make that argument, you'd at least need to look at the proportion of the population that's Western European, not just British.
> If you want to make that argument, you'd at least need to look at the proportion of the population that's Western European, not just British.
The page I linked shows 53,8% white in 2021. Even if you count the majority of whites as West Europeans (and not East Europeans), they were under 50% in 2021, probably even less today.
If you have more accurate and up to date data, please share.
But that misses the point. I don't say London is not high-trust because of the non-Western population. I say London is not a western city anymore because of its population.
London is a western city, because of its location and culture.
London has been a city of traders and other foreigners since at least the days of the Romans.
> London is a western city, because of its location and culture.
The dominant culture of the local population is not "Western" anymore.
> London has been a city of traders and other foreigners since at least the days of the Romans.
Is it?
Let's look at the official data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_London
Percentage of white population in London over the years:
- 1961 - 97,7%
- 1966 - 95,5%
- 1971 - 92,6%
- 1981 - 86,6%
- 1991 - 79,8%
- 2001 - 71,15%
- 2011 - 59,79%
- 2021 - 53,8%
It's clear that, up until very recently, London was a city of traders and other foreigners living there among the highly homogenous local population.
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As the US transitions into a high corruption / low trust environment, business investment disappears.
Trump tried to solicit bribes from anthropic, retaliated by violating the DoW contracts when they didn’t pay, and then somehow forced Dario to publicly apologize for bringing the matter to light. Do you really think this is how the US will win at AI?
Look at the car industry, where the corruption and coercion started earlier. For some reason, Trump used ICE to illegally detain a bunch of Kia engineers. They announced they’re not going to add more trimlines to their EV lines in the US.
Honda announced they’re canceling planes to build three new model lines in Ohio.
The macro statistics are dire. Pre-Biden, US factory investment was $80B per year. Trump wiped $30B off that number in 2025. Biden got it up to $240B, so Trump “only” wiped out 10-15%, but, because he was starting from a high number, the damage is equivalent to 35% of all factory investment that existed when he last left office!
The rate at which industrial production is fleeing the US is increasing. This year, the loss will probably be greater than the entire 2018 US factory investment base.
There are similar trends happening in tech and academia. There’s not much left once that happens. (Insurance, banking and marketing, mostly.)
> Look at how business works in the rich west works. Everything is formalized with contracts, risk is portioned out and offloaded to every party under the sun.
Sounds like formalized corruption to me.