The Corruption Conundrum

Every human civilization has some amount of corruption. Corruption exists because humanity always has a proportion of people who are less able and less honest and who want to be paid or make money regardless of the cost to others, or who promise more than they deliver.

There’s also the very real problem of defining corruption.

Unfortunately, defining corruption is a bit like defining pornography. Everyone knows what it is, and everyone can recognize it (if in their own terms), but few can agree on a concrete definition.

A simplistic way of defining corruption might be: any activity that biases the outcome of any economic transaction or activity to grant an advantage to a party on the basis of factors other than price, cost, availability, and quality or (2) any legal or regulatory determination arrived other than through equal application of the law and standards of the land.

Corruption can negatively impact the economy directly, through, for example, tax evasion and money laundering, as well as indirectly by distorting fair competition and fair markets, and thus increasing the cost of doing business.

Studies have shown that, in general, countries where free markets and economic opportunities prevail tend to have less corruption, but the problem with totally free markets is that monopolies tend to proliferate, working conditions are poor, and economic inequalities grow. To mitigate those problems, societies such as the United States and European democracies regulate a fair amount of their economic activity in order to ensure that foods and medicines are safe, that dangerous working practices are outlawed, that industrial pollution is reduced or eliminated, that consumer products are not dangerous to the user when employed properly… and so forth.

Such regulations raise the cost of doing business, and businesses have always tended to oppose them, find ways around them, or ignore those regulations. That means that regulatory bodies not only have to spend funds to assure enforcement but also have to devote resources to explain and defend what they do as well as guard against bureaucratic and legislative attempts to dilute the effectiveness of laws and regulations. Such attempts could often be classed as another form of corruption in that they’re designed to reduce costs by foisting diseconomies on customers and society under the guise of lowering costs to the producer of goods or services.

As a consequence, government organizations tasked with protecting the public have a tendency to grow as economic entities attempt to evade or challenge regulations. In addition, each advance in technology also creates downsides that, if not controlled and regulated, can have massive negative impacts on health and the environment.

Unhappily, the situation isn’t any better in non-free market or authoritarian societies, because protecting the health and safety of the population is at best a secondary goal and because economies that are less market-driven are even more susceptible to corruption. First, in such regimes, loyalty is more important than competence. Second, because conformity, obedience, and loyalty are more important than profit, most economic entities are less efficient than in market-driven economies, and ability by outsiders is at the least minimized. Third, innovation tends to be stifled in most large organizations and overlooked or squashed in smaller ones. Fourth, the more prevalent the practice of bribery, the more likely that resources will be directed to less efficient uses, including to padding the incomes of middlemen/women.

So… societies effectively have a choice, either pay excessively to enforce standards and reduce corruption or fail to address standards and allow corruption, with the result that everyone pays excessively in terms of less efficiency throughout the society and in terms of far greater income inequality.

You’re going to pay. The only question is whether you want more government or more corruption.

7 thoughts on “The Corruption Conundrum”

  1. Bill says:

    Often the corruption begins by failing to setup safeguards so that the corrupt people can’t easily abuse the system and then be used as an excuse for killing a program. Many conservation programs have been killed or made useless because of this. We hear of the occasional abuse of people on welfare buying expensive foods. They cases are used as arguments to kill the program but not to reform it.
    It would seem that people with experience in those programs could design a system so that the level of corruption is at a break-even point with the cost of enforcement. As has been stated there will be corruption or people cheating the system. Safeguards can be put in place to make this work at least until they are targeted by bureaucratic or political corruption.

  2. Postagoras says:

    Every time the government is ripped off by another conniving company, an additional bit of red tape is added to the process. Then the companies charge the government for the work done by the folks who deal with the red tape.

    The taxpayers lose.

    1. KevinJ says:

      You’re right, but of course the reason for the additional red tape is because media/politicians seize on the rip off to make points with their audiences.

      Then, not only are there more regulations and regulators, but those regulators get defensive and worry more about how their actions look than what their actions do…

      1. Postagoras says:

        I don’t agree. Sure, there are some high-profile messes that get publicity. But there are huge numbers of federal contracts. I was talking about the companies seeking out and taking advantage of loopholes in mundane, un-sexy efforts, not fighter jets.

        In these cases it’s the poor schlubs in sub-sub-department XYZ that have to deal with the contractor and add the red tape for the next one.

        1. KevinJ says:

          I understand what you’re going for. It’s just that, when I was in government service, I had way too many bosses more worried about “How would this look in the Washington Post” than whether it was the right thing to do – usually admitting we’d made a mistake, and fixing it.

          So I speak from (unpleasant) experience…

  3. Wren Jackson says:

    But how much of that worry is “I don’t want to look bad” vs “I need to protect my people”?

    I have had lots of things in my career that have had results pushed by the second statement.

  4. Lorien E. Phippeny says:

    This is as excellent a revealing of corruption
    as can be . All the Democrats, starting with the President, would find their lives easier from reading this blog. Please direct them to it if you
    can find a way to do so !

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