The normalization of corruption in organizations (2003) [pdf]
gwern.net206 points by rendx 11 hours ago
206 points by rendx 11 hours ago
The rationalization aspect of their model can't be overstated enough in my opinion. It never starts with something clearly unethical; it starts with something more complicated. Something that is uncomfortable and morally suboptimal, but has some justification being appealed to — it benefits the group, it's otherwise unfair for some members to have to bear some small temporary cost for the benefits of others, or something of that sort. The level of the corrupt behavior becomes more and more extreme though, such that justification becomes more and more questionable, until you're left with something more seriously problematic. In the meantime, the people who questioned the slippery slope might have left, and you're left with people who aren't in a position of power for whatever reason (they're junior, or in small numbers) to question what has become clearly unethical cultural norms.
Very insightful on how this corruption develops:
"How can a group hold a worldview so at odds with the wider culture and not appear to be greatly conflicted by it? The answer may lie in the distinction between particularism and universalism. An individual develops social identities specific to the social domains, groups and roles – and accompanying subcultures – that he or she occupies (e.g. manager, mother, parishioner, sports fan). [...]
In the case of corruption, this myopia means that an otherwise ethically-minded individual may forsake universalistic or dominant norms about ethical behavior in favor of particularistic behaviors that favor his or her group at the expense of outsiders. [...]
This tendency to always put the ingroup above all others clearly paves the way for collective corruption."
CS Lewis has a speech about the ingroups and corruption. His thesis is that the mere desire to be "in" is the greatest driver of immoral behavior:
"To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”"
In undergrad I did a formal Philosophy / Sociology study, where we were looking at human motivations. The research indicated that prestige is the number 1 driver of human motivation. Gaining prestige "trumps" ethics. Nobody likes to hear that.
I think this is one reason it is important to cast unethical behavior in terms of lack of competency — that someone has to break the rules to get ahead because they're not competent enough to do things fairly or ethically.
Empathy, while important in my opinion personally, often doesn't matter to certain people. So you have to decrease the prestige associated with unethical behavior, above and beyond it being unethical per se.
In my opinion you've drawn exactly the wrong conclusion.
Raising the stakes just increases the pressure to cheat (and not get caught).
This. I think so much of the fascism and corruption afoot in the world comes from people who believe they deserve things they are incompetent to get. Their sense of entitlement is in conflict with their competence and unrestrained by concern for others. To soothe their ego wound they project their faults onto the person who has what they want. "It isn't my failure; it's your trickery!" Now instead of shame and impotence they feel righteous anger.
I think you are correct. I've spent extended time in uber wealth circles, and this describes the offspring mindset of the generations after wealth acquisition. Their incompetence matches their entitlement, and then they walk into nepotism.
I don't know that it's necessarily incompetence. The idea of "overproduction of elites" pops up frequently:
https://www.niskanencenter.org/are-we-overproducing-elites-a...
You may be supremely competent but unlucky enough to be born at the wrong time, to the wrong family, competing with the wrong people, to rise to the level that you feel you deserve.
I look at this re-occurring overproduction of elites concept, and feel like it has good points but seems to be welded like a weapon, soon followed by statements like "you're just unlucky, get over it."
We must begin with the presuppositions. Begin with the questions:
1. What are elites?
2. What are elites for? Why do they exist?
We can't really talk about "overproduction" of elites without knowing the answers to these questions.
Elites are meant to be guardians and servants of the common good. This is why traditionally, we spoke of the nobility: they were supposed to protect the common good for the good of society and model virtue so that others had a point of tangible reference. In order to do that, you needed to be properly educated. Not technically trained, but educated, which is something relatively rare in proportion to the vast numbers who are pushed through compulsory schooling and even university.
So, are we "overproducing elites"? Given how mediocre our "elites" generally are, I would suspect that we have rather an underproduction of them, and instead an overproduction of the vacuously credentialed.
One obstacle, of course, is that in a modern liberal culture, we are forced into a kind of impotence when speaking about the common good. On the one hand, modern liberalism imposes its own measure of the good life that elevates liberty for its own sake - divorced from any tradition and any objective measure - as the end of human life. Indeed, tradition is caricatured as an obstacle that impedes liberty rather than as a liberating dialogue spanning centuries and millennia that helps us orient our lives by sharing with us the wisdom of out predecessors.
On the other, this very hostility toward tradition or any objective normative claims (which are unavoidable; see first point) acts as a corrosive agent that impoverishes and constrains the scope of legitimate political discussion. Over time, this scope has been whittled down to economics. Everything else is privatized. Of course, the inevitable effect is that economics them begins to swallow up everything else. Everything is recast as an economic issue, and the human good is confined to economic categories. This explains the rise of consumerism, because a society whose common good can only be a matter of economics, and one that recasts all of life and reduces it to economics, can only comprehend the good life as a matter of consumption. This is a recipe for misery and delusion, of course, but the is the necessary result.
In such a culture, wisdom and what counts as elite are measured in economic terms. Universities become institutions not for liberating human beings by developing reason, virtue, and understanding, but ostensibly tickets to "economic success". Billionaires are our aristocracy, not because they are excellent or virtuous or duty-bound to serve in that capacity by virtue of their rank, but because in a consumerist society, money is magical. This is interesting, because traditionally, the nobility was often prohibited from engaging in trade and commerce. It was seen as beneath their position. If an aristocrat was wealthy, his wealth was not what conferred onto him his rank.
An elite only exists in order to serve the common good. That is its only legitimate reason for being.
Now let us return to the original question...
No, but I don’t think ethics is #2. Someone intrinsically motivated might be technically competent, autonomous and self-confident about his/her goals. I might skip your meetings about ethics; I might be too busy.
Did that ever replicate?
Is prestige the number one motivator only statistically?
In other words is it the number one motivator for 31% percent of the college students that were tested and lets say empathy was at 29%?
Misanthropy and bald self interest gets overplayed I think. Often times because it allows bad actors to normalize and justify their own misanthropy.
Presenting this kind of unbacked, unqualified anecdotal data is great for "edgy truthtellers" but also deeply poisoning the well.
Scientific studies, particularly within the fields of evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and behavioral economics, identify prestige: the striving for respect, admiration, and high social rank; as a primary driver of human motivation. Unlike dominance, which relies on fear and coercion, prestige is based on the voluntary deference of others toward individuals who possess skills, knowledge, or success in locally valued domains. Key scientific studies and theories supporting this include:
The Dual-Strategies Theory (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Cheng et al., 2013): This foundational theory posits that humans have evolved to use two distinct strategies to gain social rank: dominance (fear-based) and prestige (respect-based). Studies show prestige is a more stable, long-term motivator, associated with higher intelligence, conscientiousness, and social skills.
"The Big Man Mechanism" (Brand et al., 2020): This study demonstrates that prestige-based hierarchies are a unique human adaptation. It shows that people willingly grant influence to high-prestige individuals in exchange for knowledge and skills. The research indicates that individuals are highly motivated to gain this respect to secure social capital.
Evolutionary Perspective on Social Status (Maner & Case, 2016): Research suggests that the desire for prestige is an ancestral mechanism designed to boost social standing, leading to better access to resources and reproductive success.
Prestige vs. Dominance Health Outcomes (2022 Studies): A study comparing the two paths to status found that prestige-seeking is associated with better physical and mental health, higher life satisfaction, and lower stress, whereas dominance is associated with negative health outcomes.
These studies indicate that because prestige provides a mutually beneficial social structure, humans are heavily driven to obtain it through the demonstration of valued skills.
> "Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; But the harm does not interest them."
-T.S. Eliot
Absolutely. In an ideal setting, elites model excellence and serve as an example for others to follow. In practice, things are never so pure, and in bad cases, quite bad. This is why we may speak of the fish rotting from the head down. The general populace takes its example from what is taken to be its elite, even if in objective terms, that "elite" is a total failure.
You see this with political opinions. People generally don't think very deeply about politics. They generally reflect the political sensibilities of the in-group they aspire to remain part of or aspire to join. It's a signal. A reasonably intelligent person can make the distinction between signal and genuinely informed opinion, but often, and especially among the poseurs, it's not about the truth value of an opinion. It is about the signal. This is the very definition of bullshit: something said with total indifference to its truth value, and only valued for its instrumental usefulness.
Also Lord Acton - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
Corruption empowers, and absolute corruption empowers absolutely. It seems to me that some people adopt this perspective.
Acton was, by the way, an ardent supporter of the Confederacy. In his opinion, the federal government curtailing the independence of states was a more significant act of oppression than slavery.
If you're familiar with English history, then it's more understandable that Lord Acton (Catholic, and born a mere Baronet) was against powerful central authorities.
And at least according to Wikipedia, Acton's positions on the Confederacy and slavery were very mainstream for English Catholics of the day.
positions on [...] slavery were very mainstream
To clarify - John Brown was an American, with a Puritan/Calvinist background, born to fairly humble circumstances. Very unlike Acton.
And Britain's record on slavery is both far more complex, and far less bad, than many modern ideologues might have us believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
I think there's a war about that wasn't there?
Yeah, and he didn't like the outcome. Salient quote (from a letter to Robert E. Lee):
"I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo. "
There are several lies in this. The objective of a Confederate victory was to enforce slavery farther south. Mexico was a few years away from collapsing. Brazil would emancipate within 20 years. Would the Confederacy last 20 years as the last slave state in the western hemisphere?
Slavery would not have lasted, as the mechanization and industrialization of agriculture would soon make slave ownership uneconomical. Same with draft animals.
Well, he wasn't wrong.
Whining about States rights to enslave people is certainly a take.
Particularly when in context, the war was caused by the South acting to usurp abolition in the North via the legal system (i.e. Dredd Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott)
The importance and applicability of "states rights" is always oddly narrow.
The importance and applicability of "states rights" is always oddly narrow.
I grew up with a very strong sentimental sense of moral universalism. I loved Beethoven's Ode to Joy and the romantic idea of universal brotherhood.
But as I bank years in the adult world, as a worker and a neighbor, I've been progressively disillusioned. I don't find universalism to be a common viewpoint. I've found it to be very rare that anyone wants to be my "brother" or "sister". And sometimes those that seem to, end up being exploitative, callous, or strictly fair-weather.
I'm not resentful or anything. I have a happy family and a few close-ish friends, and life feels full. But I can understand how the loneliness and coldness of the world makes people more particularist. People may think: "if the world acts like it owes me nothing, then what do I owe the world?"
As an ideal, I have little doubt that most people believe this, it's just that it's something that's very easy to exploit, and you stand to gain a massive amount if you do. Its a real tragedy of the commons scenerio. With millions and billions of people and just one commons, there's plenty of tragedy to go around.
It's still worth it to try - I find it difficult to give up completely. Most people I meet are not evil, and it's not like you're going to make it out alive at the end regardless.
But isn't it just a failure to communicate it? What if almost all other people are similarly disillusioned?
Also, according to psychologists, one negative experience outweighs roughly five positive experiences of the same magnitude. So, as we get older, we might have tendency to accumulate negative experiences, and as a result become more cynical and less idealistic. And so it kind of perpetuates.
That…. Just provides more evidence their world view is likely more objectively true?
I realized as I got older that the ambient air of socialist/collectivist virtues that filled the all young people spaces wasn't because of some kind of special enlightenment achieved by the contemporary youth (as I deeply believed as a millennial riding high on the rise of the internet), but instead was just an easy ideology for a group of people with little to lose and a lot to gain.
Underneath, people are overwhelmingly just in it for themselves, and judge others by how closely they align with their personal set of "whats best for me" ideals.
As someone from a constitutionally socialist and culturally collectivist society, the idea of American millennials embodying either seems to me like cosplay. You guys are so allergic to imposed social obligation you won’t even care for your own parents in their old age. What kind of “collectivism” could you possibly practice?
Collectivism means the subordination of individual autonomy to the governance of the collective according to the needs of the collective. You’re a cog in a machine and your purpose is to serve the collective—starting with your family and radiating in rings out from there. I’m not sure Americans can even understand the collective mindset, much less practice it.
We don't embody it, not by a long shot. We're old now.
I'm speaking about 20 years ago, when getting any kind of peer or social circle respect had the prerequisite of subscribing to socialist utopian ideals, and it wasn't something that was hard to foster in America's dead-end job work culture (which is where you work when you are young). This is urban/suburban America, where most people live.
From what I can tell this was the same with Boomers (they were the OG hippies afterall) and I see the same ideas in today's crop of young people.
The youth however hold little sway over the direction of the country, they're not actually that invested, so by the time they are having an impact, many have already received their first shots of the euphoric side of American capitalism, a career that gives them power and money (after years of wading through dead-end/entry level hell).
No need for the romance. We don't have to be "brothers". That outlook is divisive in nature anyway, and a weapon for abusers: "I thought we were brothers. Now, put aside your hesitations, and help me hurt these 'other' people."
We can just be people. Don't hurt anyone, no one gets a pass to hurt you. Hurt someone, someone gets a pass to hurt you. Just you, not your "brothers". No matter the status of anyone involved.
Severity, intent, and priors must play a factor in the level of returned hurt, but should never end with none, and death should be a last resort, but never completely off the table.
That's the good-faith interpretation of the golden rule. Instead of the popular abuser and enabler (turn the other cheek) interpretations. They both call anyone who dares hold anyone accountable, a hypocrite for supposedly not following the golden rule.
I don't care what story book it's in, or who said it, or when. It's a good rule on it's own merits. Doesn't mean everything that comes form the same source is equally valid.
This is a good explanation of the Irish Machine in Chicago, corrupt white governments in the south, and Somalian welfare scams in Minnesota. It also explains the endemic corruption in tribal or clan-oriented societies like Afghanistan.
Conversely, radical universalist regimes—even bad ones like the Taliban—can cut down on corruption. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tackling-corruption.... It’s possible that the low levels of corruption in New England, compared to the rest of the country, is the legacy of the radically universalist Puritans.
The author cites Arendt a fair bit, whose claim to fame was that entirely ordinary people could become voluntary instruments of atrocity.
I think the belief of ordinary people most likely to dispose them to atrocity is that of prioritizing the ingroup. Once we believe that the members of one's own family, or company, or country, carry more moral value than others, we're doomed to a descent limited only by our ability to make these world-worsening trades.
When I was a child, my dad would sometimes engage in small acts of corruption to please me or my brother. Taking somebody else's spot, telling white lies to get more than his share of a rationed good, that sort of thing. It never sat right with me. "Family first" has a very ominous ring to me.
Yes, the slogan "America first" is a forerunner of the worst kind of imperialism.
also "Make America Great Again" states that America is not currently great, which given its geo-political and economic position is just dishonest. Combined with "America First" you get an entirely clean canvas to be incredibly radical while cosplaying conservative.
To me this is the best example of how language can be used to bypass rational thinking in the listener to manipulate and propagandize.
See also:
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
Newspeak by George Orwell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Verbal Behaviour by B.F.Skinner - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_Behavior
I would argue MAGA will be rather fitting campaign slogan for the democrat side come next election.
> I think the belief of ordinary people most likely to dispose them to atrocity is that of prioritizing the ingroup.
In my opinion, there is another tendency even more significant in that regard. Namely, the visceral desire to see "bad guys" deservedly suffer. Once people are in that frame of mind, they strongly resist any attempts to understand and maybe prevent whatever the "bad guys" did, let alone questions whether it was actually bad.
This is what fuelled lynch mobs, it's what makes MAGA types cheer when ICE murders immigrants, and it's what makes certain leftist circles chant "eat the rich" along with images of guillotines and wood chippers.
When you point out that poverty causes crime, rightists get mad at you for "excusing" or "justifying" crime, and when you point out that poverty causes support for far-right politicians, leftists get mad at you for "excusing" or "justifying" racism.
Of course, this interacts with your point: when someone from the ingroup does something bad, people are willing to look at their reasons and if found lacking it is only the individual that should be punished, whereas the outgroup is never afforded the luxury of complexity, and the entire group is held responsible for each individual's sins.
What you describe is deepest human nature. We are tribal, period. No amount of morales will change that, no matter how it sits with you personally.
Wouldn’t that be horrible? If great masses of humans did act morally, and you didn’t have this justification that everyone does it?
I feel like this is a false binary. Acting more morally some of the time is surely possible (both as individuals and as a society); we have at least some level of ability to choose our actions independent of our nature.
Yes, I was about to say this. A human is basically testicles with a brain attached, and the natural goal of life is to make sure that the genetically closest material survives and reproduces. That's why it's common to have stronger relationships with your family than with randoms on the internet. The more different the genetic material is, the less you care - individuals of different culture, of different race, of different species, of different kingdom of life, and finally viruses that are just strings of RNA floating around and nobody advocates about their rights because fuck that.
> A human is basically testicles with a brain attached
> The more different the genetic material is, the less you care - individuals of different culture, of different race, of different species, of different kingdom of life, and finally viruses that are just strings of RNA floating around and nobody advocates about their rights because fuck that
The type of mental model that ignores 50% of the world's population due to having that same proportions of chromosomes not matching one's mental heuristic of what constitutes a human is what I'd say "fuck that" to, personally
Okay but you have to admit that this is not how things functioned through majority of human history.
The excessive focus on the nuclear family is itself a very recent trend that would otherwise be viewed as very odd by many if not most historical social organizing systems.
Given the diversity of social models which have emerged globally, I have no idea how you could possibly make that claim.
I have no idea how to argue with you because it feels like we can't agree whether the Earth is obviously round or obviously flat.
>The more different the genetic material is, the less you care
This is sort of true but it misses that we don't actually have DNA sensors built into our eyes. Instead we rely on heuristics like the Westermarck effect where we will (normally) tend to not find someone we lived with as a child attractive regardless whether they're a blood relation or not.
We influence who (or what) is in our group through our behaviour, thoughts and associations. Look at the vast number of people who value their dog or cat over other human beings. It's unlikely their dog is closer to them, genetically speaking than any single human on Earth but they spend time and invest emotionally in their pet so they form a bond despite the genetic distance.
If you see a child being hurt it likely invokes a slightly stronger emotional response if the child reminds you of someone in your own life. Often this will be someone who looks like you/your family (i.e. is genetically similar to you) but it might be some other kid you've grown attached to who is not related at all.
So yes, we are driven by a calculating selfish gene mechanism but we're also burdened/gifted with a whole bunch of emotional and social instincts and rely on imperfect sensors not tricorders. It's why people can form group identities over all sorts of non-genetic characteristics (e.g. religion, nation, neighbourhood, sports team affiliation, political ideology, vi vs emacs, etc).
That's completely true because there are many aspects to what is "my group" and what isn't, but the key point is, people naturally care about their group more than they care about strangers. Thinking in terms of genetics provides a simple model that's good enough to explain a lot of phenomena. But yes, if you want to go deeper, you need to consider other factors - at first glance it seems like "culture" is the most important one.
An even worse sign is when we believe that the members of one's own family, or company, or country carry less moral value than others.
Uh oh, is this a reference to the radar meme/study?
The one that conservatives keep claiming shows that liberals care more about out-groups than in-groups, but actually shows that either 1) many conservatives are illiterate and can't read a survey question, or 2) many conservatives literally don't care if right or wrong happens to acquaintances, strangers, their countrymen, humans in other countries, non-human animals, living things, etc?
It's not a reference to any study. It's common sense, and you see it everywhere, on every scale and throughout history.
What children do you think have a better future on average: Those whose parents love them or those whose parents hate them?
What companies do you think succeed in the long run: Those with people who love working there or those with people who hate working there and want to jump ship?
What countries become the best to live in: Those whose populace dream of moving abroad or those whose populace love their native land?
I guess I'm confused as to who is allegedly providing the counterargument that they should love out-groups more than in-groups?
It's rare to see anybody literally arguing it, but it's more common than not in the real world.
Oppression would be quite impossible throughout history if people weren't willing to oppress their own kind to the benefit of others.
Even those arguing for loyalty to the in-group are rarely those who would themselves make any sacrifices for that group.
> Oppression would be quite impossible throughout history if people weren't willing to oppress their own kind to the benefit of others.
No what's far more common is that people change their perception (or have different perceptions) of who is "their own kind."
You can actually see this happening in real time in the US with the emerging concept of "Heritage Americans." It's a way for losers and crybabies to narrow the scope of who is "their own kind" without having to openly declare that they simply don't love their countrymen.
It's complex. My wife's father-in-law immigrated from Italy to escape the destruction wrought by fascism in WWII and seek economic opportunity. He was part of a diaspora of a small village in Abbruzze that settled around Binghamton, NY. I would say that they all love Italy and they all love the U.S.
Those are people I know very well because I have been to so many parties, dinners, and other events with them. I've seen the same thing with people from India, China, Sri Lanka, etc. I'd assume that it's the normal condition of immigrants.
That's pretty insulting, mate.
You should look into what Conservatives have actually done.
It wasn't Liberals that took children out of factories, mines and chimneys.
Clearly you've never read Hayek.
Sure, post memes as proof.
Well it's not really a meme, it's a study. And it was an earnest question as to whether GP was referencing the study. They claim they weren't ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also it sounds like you're referring to the British political parties Liberals and Conservatives, not the lowercase-l and lowercase-c political philosophies by the same names, which the study is actually about.
The situation in which people exchange favors within their mutually beneficial personal networks seems to be the basic and typical way things function. It’s actually remarkable that we are able to resist this tendency and normalize fair and impartial institutions.
The brain actually has specific neurological system that compartmentalise reasoning contexts in different social contexts, so we operate according to different sets of assumptions and rules of behaviour and reasoning in different kinds of situations.
Unless you’re autistic
True. I really don't know enough about it, but it may well be these functions are still there, after all I expect the relevant neurological systems are still there, but the impact on social cognition from autism render their effects basically irrelevant.
Can you share some resources on the above?
The the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) both play roles in this. Not a neuroscientist, just going on my own reading.
I enjoyed this paper, and there's innumerable things that could be said about ingroup-outgroup dynamics and corruption.
In my personal experiences with corruption with organizations, ingroup membership often becomes increasingly narrowly defined, and defined in such a way as to benefit a certain group of individuals at the expense of others. The underlying rationale is a narcissistic entitlement or rationalization for why one person or small group of people is deserving of disproportiate benefits or flexibility at the expense of others. It starts with some kind of distorted egocentric schema about others in a more distal way, and then becomes increasingly strict and more proximal. Narcissistic egocentrism is at the core; it only manifests more weakly at first, and then becomes stronger. The ingroup boundaries never stop shrinking, because there always has to be some justification for why that particular group — which was never really defined by the initial ingroup boundaries, the ingroup was only a proxy for themselves — is more deserving than others.
The US supreme court allowed thank you gifts for politicians to not be considered bribes somehow in a 2024 ruling, I think that alone might break the US.
The US Supreme Court is the very worst a supreme court could be. They've been thoroughly co-opted and will only start to see the light when it is their asses that are on the line.
The whole way the Judicial system in the US is beholden to politicians, and is thoroughly politicised looks completely horrific to me in the UK. Even the election officials responsible for overseeing voting are politicians.
Combined with this elected King George III presidential nonsense (not just king in general either, specifically the powers George III had in the 1780s) and I despair sometimes. Get yourselves a decent parliamentary system. If you avoid proportional representation it works fine. Unfortunately the US population is somehow convinced the current US system is modern and up to date. They'll probably still think that in another 200 years.
What do you have against proportional representation?
We can't "proportionally" represent a constituency which returns a single individual
So, if you want PR you have to either: Have two distinct classes of MP: Some were directly elected and represent an area, others are just to make the up proportions - but obviously these are just worse right? Second class MPs.
OR Abolish the constituencies entirely, now nobody represents your area and its particular concerns, or everybody does, which as we know amounts to the same thing because of how dilution works.
Unlike other electoral reforms a PR system has deeper implications far beyond the elections themselves. Historically the UK actually didn't have a single electoral system for every constituency, and that was fine†, indeed it works fine in the US today, the thing which needs to be coherent is what happens after the election and PR meddles with that.
† Well, not "fine", this is the era of the famous "Rotten Boroughs" but the fact that the system varies from one place to another wasn't key there.
It also means that people are voting for party lists, not individuals, and the lists are controlled by the parties. In a proper parliamentary system the parliamentarians directly represent their voters, and have a mandate from them. Parties do not have that, only MPs have that. By passing the mandate from the representative to the party, and the party having list control, that puts far too much power over parliamentarians in the hands of unelected party functionaries that draw up the lists and have no mandate themselves.
That's way less bad than it appears, because in a proportional system you will have more than 2 parties. In practice, every election is an election of those invisible bureaucratic hands, instead of some heads on display.
lest we forget luxury fishing trips, RVs, real-estate debt payoffs, or payoffs of relatives' tuition
[flagged]
It was SCOTUS, literally. They literally weakened the legislation. And by SCOTUS we mean conservative majority specifically.
From dissent of disagreeing SCOTUS justice: "absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love."
> It is reasonable to assume some gratitude should be allowed, otherwise you'd have to ask how long a teacher should be tossed into jail for receiving a "Best teacher ever" mug from his students.
This is unfathomably ridiculous and you know it. Profoundly bad faith argument.
Not really, because that's the core issue had hand, but I might not have made my intention with the argument sufficiently clear.
The question the court looked at: Did Congress intend "receiving gifts as a bribe" and "receiving gifts as gratitude" to be two separate crimes for non-federal employees as it is the case for federal ones (In which case handling the issue would have been left up to the states)?
The majority opinion refused to consider the moral argument (although they snuck it in in their argument on a lack of fair notice), but IMO that's by far the most intuitive one, when you allow yourself to look at the problem from the legislative perspective. By looking at the extremes it becomes very clear that there are two very different problems:
Imagine a group of students doing much better than their peers on their final exam thanks to the efforts of their teacher and they gift him a "Best teacher ever" mug.
But now reverse the causality:
Imagine a teacher demanding to be gifted a "Best teacher ever" mug before putting extra effort into preparing his students for their final exam. The group that gifted him the mug does much better than their peers as a result.
IMO these should be two very different crimes, but there is also a valid argument that they are about equivalent, as pursued by the dissenting opinion.
But that's not something a court should legislate.
As a counterexample, here is an example of a Singaporean officer refusing to accept a bribe, as reported by Lee Kuan Yew:
The people who crave that money and influence tend to be control freak psycho/sociopaths. They need to feel superior to others because deep down they don’t/can’t value themselves. They don’t even know what they’re competing/fighting for anymore. They just can’t stop because they know no other way.
There are some great movies that deal with this: Wall Street, The Firm, The Big Short, Suicide Kings, Michael Clayton, among others.
One can even consider the never ending Ethics classes in college an ironic form of corruption that never teaches anything we don't already know by secondary school, but used to pad credit numbers and tuition revenue.
My business ethics professor just showed clips from Yes, Minister! and House of Cards in class and showed the tactics. Seemed odd at the time, but I got more out of it than a normal ethics class.
> Fear is induced by coercion, the threat of negative consequences such as ostracism and demotion. To be sure, blatant coercion facilitates the denial of responsibility and thereby compliance with corrupt directives. Such coercion, however, leaves less room for (perceived) volition, a key precondition for the dissonance reduction process discussed earlier. Newcomers subject to blatant coercion have a sufficient justification for their obedience – to avoid the threat – and thus do not need to realign their attitudes to accommodate the otherwise dissonant behavior. Indeed, blatant coercion may provoke resentment and reactance against the source of coercion and the targeted behavior (e.g. Nail, Van Leeuwen & Powell, 1996). The upshot is a greater likelihood of grudging compliance, whistle-blowing and voluntary turnover (and thus, risk of exposure). Further, coercion may affect behavior only as long as the pressure is applied. For these reasons, blatant coercion tends to be an ineffective means of sustaining corruption.
Astute. When the average person is asked to imagine how corrupt leaders operate, I think they tend to overemphasize the effectiveness of simple violence. To foster a corruption that will last, you have to mold the circumstances so that corruption is the only option that makes sense.
The 1972 Knapp Commission report is essential reading on the topic
Such an insightful article. Had to cover in 3 sittings though - the reading is a bit dense.
It's Gwern! He's like a combine harvester for data in all forms, digesting it and putting stuff out there that is usually bullet proof and extremely enlightening. I've yet to see him put out something that didn't meet that standard. Well worth your time, also on other subjects.
The actual linked PDF is not from Gwern, it's a 2003 paper from two sociologists Blake E. Ashforth and Vikas Anand.
This is how the US falls. The entire US as organization, with corruption at the very top.
Another good read: https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/business-ethics/resou...
I take some issue with these kinds of articles that minimize the impacts of "street crime" in favor of the admittedly much broader and insidious effects of corporate crime.
Corporate crime generally can coexist with a functioning system, even while it drains the prosperity of society, but street crime will just dissolve the society overnight. People physically abandon locations with high street crime.
A corrupt system is still a system, meaning that in theory it operates to produce something of value for society (e.g. in addition to lying about climate change, causing cancer, and blocking renewable energy via lawfare and propaganda, BP provides a colossal amount of fuel for society) but street crime produces nothing and destroys community outright at the local level.
But street crime is often a symptom of the "much broader and insidious effects of corporate crime": social systems stripped of resources by politicians to provide grants to baseball stadiums, police patrols in quiet wealthy streets but abandoning poorer quarters, tax incentives to companies that then pay their employees so little they are a burden on the food security systems, mental health care priced out of reach for the poor so they end up homeless and violent.
You can list these connected problems all day.
Absolutely on point!
You need only look at the bureaucracies in countries which rank high on the corruption index. Most join to just earn a livelihood but are soon "socialized into corruption".
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#Causes
Per R. Klitgaard corruption will occur if the corrupt gain is greater than the punitive damages multiplied by the likelihood of being caught and prosecuted.
Since a high degree of monopoly and discretion accompanied by a low degree of transparency does not automatically lead to corruption, a fourth variable of "morality" or "integrity" has been introduced by others. The moral dimension has an intrinsic component and refers to a "mentality problem", and an extrinsic component referring to circumstances like poverty, inadequate remuneration, inappropriate work conditions and inoperable or over-complicated procedures which demoralize people and let them search for "alternative" solutions.
The references section has lots of links for further study of which Robert Klitgaard's Controlling Corruption is a classic with case studies.
One thing i would like to know more of is how Technology either reduces or exacerbates corruption.
Well, I know of one technology whos primary use-case is corruption: Crypto.
With corruption, one needs to look at the overall system i.e. involving Society/Individual/Economics/Politics/Organizations/Processes/Technologies/etc. rather than narrow silos.
On the whole, i feel technology has been a corruption mitigater since it reduces the human factor (i.e. the motivation/cause) from the process chain. This has been validated in my own personal experience.
On the flip side, when used by people-in-control it concentrates power in the hands of the few and its non-linear disproportionate effects can exacerbate the problem tremendously eg. various Internet based scams.
PS: Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762452...
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This sounds like an LLM-generated response. Care to confirm/deny?
You sound like a bot. Prove you aren't.
I'm not particularly fond of large corporations.
Anyway, you and I both know I don't and the parent comment does.
See the diagram; A Systems Thinking model of Corruption from the article Evaluating the Impact of Institutional Improvement on Control of Corruption—A System Dynamics Approach - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-Systems-Thinking-model...
Systems Thinking provides a holistic view of the interactions contributing to an outcome expressed as a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD). The CLD developed using Systems Thinking shows the full complexity of the problem at hand, and then simplifications are necessary to create a working quantitative System Dynamics simulation. Figure 1 was developed based on 43 in-depth interviews and 155 survey interviews with government officials, aid agencies, civil society organizations, business people, lawyers, and the general public in Pakistan. It shows the complete set of relationships considered to represent the problem of corruption in a nation.
In the CLD, connections with directed arrows imply that a change in the tail variable leads to a change in the variable at the head of the arrow. An arrow labelled with polarity ‘+’ means changes in the same direction. Increasing the tail variable increases the head variable, and decreasing the tail variable decreases the head variable.
On the other hand, ‘-’ implies changes in the opposite direction. For example, increasing the tail variable decreases the head variable, and decreasing the tail variable increases the head variable.
These connections create highly non-linear behaviour because feedback loops develop where a change in one variable in the model will ripple through the cause-and-effect structure to return to its source and either reinforce or inhibit the change.
The reinforcing feedback loop is labelled with an ‘R’ and inhibiting or balancing feedback loops with a ‘B’.
Connecting these loops often leads to emergent and unexpected behaviours in the system.
There should be a checklist of simple rules of thumb that any created or reorganized entity should undergo.
For example if the organization is self-financing it breeds corruption.
If an entity mediates between buyers and sellers it can't be financed by sellers.
It should be fairly easy to compose that list by observing corrupt and underperforming setups that are already entrenched.
Corruption is defined as deviation from universalism. Shouldn't orgs at least pretend to care about productivity or is that the ultimate sin for a universalist? Or is the ultimate sin not pretending that universalism is productive?
Young people hate it when friends work together because it means they are at a disadvantage as they are not making friends