Summary
Corruption is a disease of societal norms or expectations. Society sustains these expectations by sanctioning deviations from its norms. Corrupt societies face scandals that destroy their self-esteem by highlighting the gap between the ideal and actual norms of behavior. These traumas elicit responses ranging from cynical to cover ups, to naive. These solutions fail because they assume that greedy individuals, instead of wrong societal norms, cause corruption. Society must rebuild its depleted expectations capital through a multi-pronged program: 1. shrink the government to essential functions, 2. cut employment and increase productivity in the essential functions, 3. pay opportunity wages to government employees, 4. election financing reform, 5. transparent and accessible government, 6. modernize the payment system, 7. education, and 8. enforcement.
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Extract
Changing Expectations As a Source of and Remedy for Corruption
Most anticorruption drives and investigations fail. To improve the chances of their success, we need to ask: What is the nature of corruption? How does corruption seep into a non-corrupt society? Why is it so resistant to reform? Given the record of failures, what could be an effective strategy to limit corruption?
Corruption is not simply a problem of greedy men and women using public off...See the full content of this document
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