[patrickbuckley]

I agree with you. Another way of saying this is that corruption is a property of human nature.

It seems that the most persistent problems we face often are. We can change our system of economic organization and politics but in the end the system is made up of individuals. Individuals who have all the same sort of flaws and who struggle with their human nature. It takes a lot of will and effort for a person to behave honestly and ethically. The interaction of peoples behaviors and the system they are in is a two way street.

I guess what I am saying is that we need to do the hard work of behaving better ourselves if we want to make our industry, community etc a better place.

[claudiawerner]

> I agree with you. Another way of saying this is that corruption is a property of human nature.

Although this may be correct, it could also be the case that some systems nurture such "corruption" more than others. Changed societies produce changed people. For example, the widespread desire for fame only arose around the start of the 15th century but it really does seem quite natural to us now. A famous economist once wrote,

>Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and as such, eternal.

[logfromblammo]

It is not a property of human nature. It is endemic in human societies. That hair splits easily, if your knife is sharp enough.

We tolerate the corruption that comes with certain societal structures, because we gain more by having them than we lose from the corruption. You can't scale anything to national or international size without introducing a principal-agent problem.

[dvtrn]

It is not a property of human nature. It is endemic in human societies.

Pardon me, but I'm not immediately seeing the distinction, maybe I've read the statement wrong and found the wrong conclusion. Can you clarify/unpack that statement a bit? If it's not a property of human nature, how is it then endemic in human societies?

Does not the second sentence you're offering here completely betray the first?

[Retra]

The moral constraints on a human person are not the same as those on a human society. To say corruption is a property of human nature is to suggest that everyone is willing to be a source of corruption, rather than to suggest that everyone can be made to support the corruption of others under certain conditions.

[logfromblammo]

Assume, only for the purposes of argument, that 10% of all humans would betray trust for personal gain.

In a close-knit, tribal society, limited by the human brain capacity for maintaining personal relationships, where everyone knows everybody else, it is not very profitable to betray a trust. After the first time someone does it, many of their peers revoke their trust, and that person then has to re-earn enough of it to reneg again. Each time, it becomes harder to get ahead.

In order to grow societies of larger sizes, we instituted trust-by-default relationships, just to make goods move from the loading docks. If human nature is 90% trustworthy, this is 90% safe. The remaining 10% can be dealt with via retaliatory mechanisms: bond revocation, lawsuits, arrests, etc. As long as the individual responsible can be identified, and punished, there is significant disincentive to reneg.

To grow larger still, we instituted pseudo-anonymous legal fictions. We started doing business with companies, instead of people. This provided an opening for the renegade 10%. They could let the company establish trust, take control of it or a portion of it, betray the trust for personal gain, and let the corporate shell take the brunt of retaliation--if anyone ever even found out about the betrayal. The type of person who would become corrupt is drawn to positions that are corruptible: the bosses of businesses and bureaucracies, and the cronies and collaborators of those corrupt bosses. The ultimate goal of a corrupt person is to be the fox in charge of a henhouse--nay, in charge of a whole poultry farm.

Whenever we rely on structure rather than people to manage societal complexity, the structures may be attacked whenever no one else is looking. The corporation cannot refuse to do as the CEO demands, as it has no will of its own. You can't watch everyone all the time; we just can't afford the costs of that kind of labor, that only humans can do. And whatever human oversight mechanism you may institute can then be infiltrated by the corrupt 10%, who can collude to profit from failure in oversight.

Qui custodiet custodes? It's corrupt cop-watching cops, all the way down.

It's like an auto-immune disorder. How can your body possibly defend itself from its own immune system, at the same time as all the foreign pathogens? So the corruption becomes endemic, because there are not enough people watching to keep everybody honest all the time.

If you put out a tray of goods with a price label and honor box, 90% of people will pay the correct amount if they take something. It only takes one renegade to empty the tray, break open the honor box, and ruin the whole thing for everyone. Or even just to take goods from the tray without paying, one at a time, until the profits are all gone. It's not worth paying someone to watch one tray. So set up a camera to watch it. That just adds a separate camera-disabling step for the renegade. Put up a camera-watching camera. The renegade tapes a photo of the tray-watching camera over the lens, disables it, then loots the tray. It's an arms race. The only way to win is to put another human in the loop, and the instant you do that, you have to pay them, and then your profit margin is shot. Besides that, there's always the 10% possibility that the person you pay to watch your tray is a corruptible individual, and they'll just go halfsies with the tray-looter.