You want a quick and easy way to understand how your government works?
Look at the streets. A little 'as Johnny Toothpick said, Palermo's scourge, and not only is the traffic, but seriously: if your house is practice casually overcome strips or park on the second row, though often yellow at the traffic light is seen as green and use the bike is the stuff of daring people, it means that whoever is in charge is corrupt. The axiom is not - in fact - only intuitive, but it is also the result of the comparison of data on road accidents in the world and the World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index, which in a nutshell measures the degree of government corruption.
Why this happens is, in fact, intuitive, though not entirely clear: the law is the law, but the citizens respect it if they know that by doing so, participating in a whole that works and they get ultimately benefit. If a citizen has no confidence in his government and he knows that to succeed he must rely on his skills, lawful or not lawful, legally or morally, that's the place where the matter becomes apparent are the roads. Conversely, a political mechanism that leverages and enhances his talents, rather than exploit them for the benefit of a small elite, yes creates an economically better reality, but also smoother and safer roads for all, how is it better here.
The author compares said the figures on fatalities in the countries of the world according to the WHO with its placement in the World Justice Project and is a valid syllogism. The WJP considers data collected about 100 thousand people, 2,400 experts and 44 indicators to measure the opening of a government, its corruption, respect for fundamental rights and justice. Guess it is put Italy? Our overall score is 0.64, which is roughly the score of Romania, whose deadly traffic inspired the aforementioned article. Spain is also set better than us, while Germany and Norway comes to 0.81 to 0.87. And incidents where we are? Better Romania, luckily, that counts 9.3 deaths per 100 thousand inhabitants against our 5.2; but still we are being very badly if we compare, for example, with the United Kingdom, which stops at 2.8. If the report is therefore not exact, however, it follows a logic among others hardly new. Already a number of researchers have tried to explain the bond that exists between corruption and road accidents, and here is a summary of the main conclusions.
Among the most interesting it is, in my opinion, the fact that corruption affects the development of infrastructure. That is obvious. Take Italy: because his bicycle network is so embryonic, despite the favorable climate for the use of the bike? Because there are no incentives for the use of the electric car as in other countries, and why at the same time we are still in the development of clean energy sources? Perhaps, at least partially, to the contrasts that such operations would have with the domestic automobile industry's interest? A powerful lobby everywhere but that other countries - most recently France - have learned at least in part to silence.
Another interesting study affects us in the same way and adds a fundamental element: a influence bad drivers there are also cultural factors. In other words, as I have often said, if we have a corrupt government and therefore uninhabitable streets, the blame is also a lot of our reasoning, our culture. According to the analysis, there are features (typically alien to Italian average), as intellectual autonomy, which would be able to reduce accidents by reducing the traffic.
An example? Our attachment to the fathers and to the village, and the consequent strong tendency to commuting. In addition, the researchers say, a mind prone to hierarchical social structures (other feature I would say very Italian) is able to facilitate traffic jams and died in the street. If the two things are coinciding, the study said, that if you lie culturally predisposed to submission are governed by inefficient and corrupt powers here that the problem of mobility becomes very serious. Just as it is our home.
From Wired