The US gets a green square and a high rank, smaller countries are corrupt and unfair. I could fill up paragraphs about how corrupt and dysfunctional our (US) legal and political systems are. Meanwhile I spent a long time in Central Africa (a red square country) and know to compare.
I don’t get the purpose of these rankings.
I’m from Africa, have left now, and this is pure nonsense.
The USA doesn’t have to be literally perfect for it to be a good place.
It’s vastly better to a degree that left me totally mindfucked for years after I moved to the first world.
I trust your observations of where you came from but I believe this is over-generalizing to places you may not have personal experience with.
Property rights are an especially important tool when it comes to the operation of a materially wealthy society. But their imposition does not somehow guarantee that a society is more just or fair and less corrupt than any other.
Edit: I looked up the figures in my notes. The paper involved all Supreme Court cases involving the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The court struck down 232 state laws, 179 of the decisions were in favor of corporations, 55 were in favor of the growing railroads and 9 were in favor of individual black petitioners.
The paper isn't online and I don't have access to it anymore to check but I believe it is this paper.
"Protecting Corporations Instead of the Poor" by Alec Karakatsanis in Harvard Law Review 275.
By contrast, especially in Central Africa, the borders on the map are largely aspirational on the part of the governments. Even the word “Democratic” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a bad joke. The dominant local power in most of that landmass is more likely to be a warlord/crime boss than the government.
I would argue this is a false statement. There are pockets of instability there, especially near Goma and Virunga or very rural areas. The last few years especially have been unstable. But if you look at the country as a whole (which is the size of all Western Europe) over the last 15 years, the size of the territory not controlled by the internationally recognized legitimate government has been very small.
But a better test is this: would you go for a drive there with your family? Would you invest billions in a multi-decade mining project there - if you had to depend on the government’s version of law & order only?
1) It varies far too much from country to country to generalize in this way.
2) Justice is patchy and even across many areas of law depending on where you are.
Other aspects are much worse.
Also, most legal systems are generally good for this purpose, you just have to use your money judiciously in bribes instead of lawyer's fees.
I have not seen the lack of low level corruption in the states compared to other countries. Like in other countries they simply confine their corruption to those powerless to do anything about it.
Also, I’m low-key wondering if I should start handing the cop my wallet. They never give me a warning, maybe if they got some money out of the interaction they’d start...
Not judging, just curious.
As someone involved in law in the US, the US is really good at these types of things. People, including Americans who have lived here their entire lives, are consistently amazed when they learn the power of the court and how functional it all has managed to be.
I share your concern for corruption in the US, but I submit that you have lost your sense of proportion. The US is not -- by any stretch of the imagination -- anything less than "mostly not corrupt".
US has been given a surprisingly high score while France and Italy are way below China!
There seems to be quite a lot of bias in this kind of scoring.
If for example you consider lobbying=corruption (in many countries it is), then the US should indeed be many rankings below.