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This is a very popular topic in development economics, and there's a rich literature looking at India specifically and developing countries more generally, but
by dworin 13y ago
This is a very popular topic in development economics, and there's a rich literature looking at India specifically and developing countries more generally, but there isn't one definitive theory on the origins of corruption. Here's a quick primer from the World Bank that goes over a number of potential causes: http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/anticorrupt/corruptn/cor02.htm http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/anticorrupt/corruptn/...
Outlining a few, in no particular order, that are probably relevant to your comparison between the US and India (although I don't know India as well):
1) Public sector employees in the United States are relatively well compensated, such that they don't need to supplement their income with bribes, and the fear of losing their job is a significant deterrent.
2) There are laws that prevent politicians from firing civil servants and giving the jobs to their supporters (this was not the case 200 years ago), so patronage networks are less powerful.
3) There are relatively effective checks on large scale corruption through independent layers of law enforcement agencies and a separate judicial system.
4) The state has relatively less control over the lives of ordinary citizens, so there are relatively fewer opportunities to extract rents.
5) There is a very engaged, sophisticated civil society in the US with interests in keeping the rules of the game consistent and fair. Significant corruption will cause a significant backlash from these stakeholders.
6) The institutions in the United States are more established, and have spent more time developing the necessary checks, balances, and management norms that keep them free from corruption.
7) Cultural norms play an important role. There is a theory that knowing the rules of the game and consistently applying them is more important than the level of corruption. In many countries, corruption is simply "the way things are done."
- mtdewcmu 13y agoI think corruption is closer to the natural state of man and doesn't need any explanation. What needs an explanation is how do you get from a natural state of disorder to a society and government that function like clockwork? There's obviously no easy answer, because few countries have done it.
- 3minus1 13y ago> natural state of man why on earth would you assume a static natural state given what we know about evolution?
- dllthomas 13y agoI agree that an assumption of some kind of context-free "natural state" is silly, but I don't think it's what we know about evolution that motivates this. Evolution "says" there probably aren't purely genetic complex differences between people, and that's probably true over long time scales in terms of human history.
- mtdewcmu 13y agoI didn't mean my reference to a natural state to be taken so literally. In this kind of literature, you see lots of references to the Hobbesian jungle, but I don't think many people think it's a scientific concept to be taken literally.
- dllthomas 13y agoYeah, that probably came off a little harsher than I meant it.
- mtdewcmu 13y agoEvolutionary psychology is one of my pet peeves. The notion that evolution determines complex human behaviors like corruption presupposes that humans are guided to a large extent by instinct. What else is a genetically-coded behavior, if not an instinct? You have to accept a world where people think they are selecting a course of action based on situations, but, actually, our orders come silently through instinct, whispering in our ear, calling all the shots, enlisting us to concoct situation-based fictions to cover the tracks. Instinct exists in animals, for sure, but we aren't very close to working out the mechanisms for how genes code for proteins that code for behaviors. How to make a protein that encodes bribery is way beyond our knowledge. I don't think there's any doubt that humans can do things that are not literally written into DNA, so why create such a large role for instinct, which we have almost no understanding of? I think corruption comes from disorder, which is the form things take by default. Self-seeking doesn't need an explanation, because everyone needs to take care of themselves just to exist. People looking out for themselves is an invariant, what varies is how they go about it.
- benhirashima 13y ago"There are relatively effective checks on large scale corruption through independent layers of law enforcement agencies and a separate judicial system." ...unless you have money. then you're untouchable. i.e. the financial industry.
- pc86 13y agoI know you think you're being smart, or cute, or whatever, but this is completely off topic and irrelevant to the conversation at hand.
- tokenadult 13y agoThere have been prosecutions of financial industry wrongdoers in the United States recently, with some convictions. I personally think that more prosecutions are warranted, but prosecutions of complicated criminal schemes take time.