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Comment by SolarNet | Hacker News Reader

This is a country that executes drug users and jails pilots for whistle blowing. Authoritarian corruption is why this plane crashed.

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Other authoritarian regimes seem to not be afflicted to the same degree when it comes to airline safety.

Authoritarian culture is well-known as a risk for aircraft safety. Japanese carriers had a poor safety record, due to the culture of authority, where a first officer was reluctant to point out a captain's errors. Following a decent amount of training in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management the safety record improved. Similar techniques are now being taught to surgical teams in hospitals, where there has traditionally been a reluctance for junior members to point our mistakes made by the senior surgeon.

But what is "authoritarian culture", in the context of authoritarian regime? I'm not an expert on Japanese culture, but does the emperor still have power to set the norms and the punishment? And could you provide a better link than the "Crew resource management" one, which makes no mention at all of a Japanese airline?

edit: here's a story about Japan Airlines, which apaprently had a spate of accidents in 2005, but previusly, hadn't had a fatal accident since 1985 (and apparently was the last airline in 2005 to have had a crash). https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/business/worldbusiness/sa...

Probably because they aren't as corrupt. Do you have a specific example in mind?

Saudi Arabia for all that it is authoritarian isn't corrupt (within it's own country) they are pretty effective at rounding those people up on a regular basis. North Korea is stuck in the 1960's and led by an insane idiot but they execute people for using their top offices for personal gain.

>> North Korea is stuck in the 1960's and led by an insane idiot but they execute people for using their top offices for personal gain.

That is an incredibly naive point of view on the issue. USSR used to regularly jail/execute people for corruption, so to the outside it might have looked like it was really hard on people using their positions for personal gain.

But the truth couldn't be any further from this - basically everyone was corrupt, because that's how the whole system worked - and the people who were prosecuted were the ones who have fallen out with someone even higher up. It was basically the case of everyone is guilty, but the ruling party would selectively pick people to blame for things going wrong. The surveilance apparatus was very effective and it was trivial to find something on someone, it was just a matter of how hard you looked - and I can guarantee that pretty much everyone had to either take or give a bribe at some point in their lives, because the simplest things in life(like getting coupons to buy food for example) depended on you giving a "gift" to the right person.

I'm not glorifying them or anything. But bribes are part of an authoritarian system, those people have an almost feudal right to the power, and hence to extract value from it. However at the higher echelons where the government was ran from, failing to do the job you were given for bribes was a problem. I suspect that effective members of government took bribes in such a way to incentivize the behavior they needed.

> basically everyone was corrupt, because that's how the whole system worked - and the people who were prosecuted were the ones who have fallen out with someone even higher up

This is a textbook means of social control. You may also refer to our war on (some) drugs (when consumed by certain people).

The Soviet Union was almost feudal in nature if Wikipedia is right,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura#Patron–client_rel...

Sorry, you've lost me here, in what seems like an extreme case of No True Scotsman. Just a few weeks ago, Saudi Arabia was the major news story for allegedly sending a hit squad to secretly murder its own citizen -- a man not charged with a crime but happened to be a vocal critic of the regime -- in its own embassy. Nevermind the convoluted attempt at a coverup, nevermind the regime that operates completely on nepotism.

I'm not saying they aren't nepotistic nor prone to poor attempts at covert ops. Just that they expect a modicum of results, even from their appointed family members. No one wants to die on an airplane because their cousin wanted a few extra bucks to look the other way on airplane safety. Where as bribes for access in the first place are very common in authoritarian regimes, I wouldn't even call that corruption per se, because they have the feudal power to extract the value from the post as long as they perform.

No?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_air_carriers_banned_in...

No what exactly? That poorly-run airlines are based in poorly-run countries is not a surprise, nor does it address the claim that "authoritarian corruption is why this plain crashed", unless you think that every country not on that list is not authoritarian.

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