Corruption vanishes from the radar

There used to be tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of researchers on this subject in academic, national and international bodies. Punch "bibliograhies of anti-corruption" into google and you will be amazed at the number you will find.

Here are a couple of recent ones – first one focusing on developing countries and then a 2022 one from the UK Centre for the Study of Corruption

I've had a file on the subject for the past couple of decades – but, in the last few days, I've 

downloaded another hundred papers and a fair number of books. Much of the literature, 

however, suffers from three fundamental problems -

• few in the West considered – until very recently - that this was a problem for their 

societies – it was rather something affecting developing or ex-communsi countries. 

The policy-makers therefore had no real interest in the discussion or outcome – was seen instead as an academic issue

• most of the literature is addressed to academics – not to the general public. As a whole, 

therefore, it doesn’t explore the causes or possible solutions in a manner accessible to 

the citizen  

• most of the literature was based on a false theory -  as usual one influenced by economists 

who have a perverse view of human nature. They assume that we are calculating machines 

– always measuring costs and benefits and making rational decisions. Here is how I traced the approach of various disciplines a few years ago

How Corruption is treated by the various academic disciplines…..

Discipline	Core assumption
Sociology	Struggle for power
Economics	Rational choice
Political science	Rational choice (at least since the 1970s)
Geography	Factors such aș contiguity, latitude, natural barriers and culture affect development
Public management	Mix of economics, politics and sociology
Anthropology	shared meaning, myths
Political economy	draws upon economics, political science, law, history, sociology et al to explain how political factors determine economic outcomes.
Psychology	Self-image, sexual drive, mythology

Anthropology (and sociology) emerge from this as the most useful disciplines. 

And this is demonstrated in their approach to the issue in such books as -

Corruption – anthropological perspectives edited by D Haller and C Shore (2005) 

useful collection of case studies
Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy; Janine R. Wedel 

2009. Another anthropologist’s take
Confronting Corruption, building accountability – lessons from the world of international development 

advising L Dumas, J Wedel and G Callman (2010)

Corruption – a very short introduction L Holmes 2015 a rather disappointing overview

Unaccountable – how anti-corruption watchdogs and lobbyists sabotaged america’s finance, 

freedom and security ; J Wedel (2016) 

Making Sense of Corruption Bo Rothstein (2017) one of the clearest expositions – 

this time by a Scandinavian political scientist

comment from Patrick Cockburn on the corruption of the British political class

And the world seems to have lost interest recently in the issue

A Corruption Resource
How the Council of Europe saw the problem a few years ago 
Readings on corruption and governance – a 2022 annotated bib
Why Corruption Matters (UK government 2015)
working papers from the UK centre for the study of corruption
How the UNDP saw the problem in 2004 
a very curious paper looking at the development of corruption strategies 
comabting corruption in the 21st century  heywood
Rethinking Corruption in an age of ambiguity 
Understanding Corruption and how to curb it 2021 
analysing the AC strategies of the 26 top-ranked countries - 2018

Turning Points

The last post may have confused some readers since it moved too quickly from a focus on 

central and eastern europe to an expose of the western system - the basic argument being 

that it was “out of balance”.  It started by noting that few people had ever imagined that 

communism would collapse; that most writers had been exploring the opposite process - of 

capitalism giving way to socialism. 
The fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communist regimes gave rise to the literature 

of transitology but it was 30 years before we got a full reckoning of its effect on both Eastern 

and Western societies in The Light that Failed – a reckoning by Ivan Krastev and Stephen 

Holmes (2019) – a book which suggested that many of the new entrants to the European Union 

in 2004-07 were inflicted with an inferiority complex and the old members with hubris.

Jared Diamond's Upheaval – turning points for nations in crisis which came out the same year perhaps offers a better explanation in suggesting that countries have a variety of ways to respond to crisis - viz

1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis

2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something

3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be

solved

4. Getting material and financial help from other nations

5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems

6. Building national identity

7. Honest national self-appraisal

8. Historical experience of previous national crises

9. Dealing with national failure

10. Situation-specific national flexibility

11. National core values

12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints

Inasmuch as there's now a deep sense of crisis everywhere, it's helpful to use this framework t

to think about how societies should be responding to the present polycrises.
People shy away these days from prediction – it’s got a bad name for having so many 

failures to its name. The favoured option is scenarios (to which probabilities are attached) 

with four scenarios normally being on offer. So here goes for my scenarios for the future

• “Transhumanism” – being the name given to how AI will be extended to our human 

bodies. Here’s a helpful video about it

• Dystopia?

• Utopia – which is probably be a form of Socialism

• ??

NB

Diamond's book has received mixed reviews – this website collects them all

https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/upheaval-turning-points-for-nations-in-crisis/

Books which ask what individual crises might tell us about national futures are rare. The only other one I know is Life – and how to survive it by Robin Skynner (psychiatrist) and John Cleese (1993)

In Transit

It was 1999 when I published a book with this title - used as a calling card in Uzbekistan when I started what was to be an 8 year stint in Central Asia, with Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan following after 3 years. It’s a felicitous title since it is about a western “change agent” applying what he had learned about public admin in UK government to a very different environment. The change from a “communist” system to a “capitalist” one was one which noone had really theorised about. The sovietologists who inhabited the ituniversity departments of Soviet Studies soon found use in the new field of “transitology” Many theorists, however, had considered the opposite process, from capitalism to socialism. And still do – so far without convincing electorates although progressives can blame corporate media’s “divertissement” (such a lovely French word!) which has had two profound social effects

• diverting citizens’ attention with spectacle of scandal and entertainment (Mander; Postman)

• breeding alienation from their fellow man (jeremy gilbert)

Between 1950 and 1980, we had an effective and balanced system in which each type 

of power – economic (companies/banks etc), political (citizens and workers) and legal/admin/military 

(the state) – balanced the other. None was dominant.
Deindustrialisation, however, destroyed that balance – more specifically it destroyed the power 

which working class people had been able to exercise in that period through votes and unions 

has been undermined. Mintzberg’s Rebalancing Society  captures this argument best.
In its place a thought system developed - justifying corporate greed and the privileging 

(through tax breaks and favourable legislation) of the large international company.

• All political parties and most media have been captured by that thought system 

which now rules the world

• People have, as a result, become cynical and apathetic

• Privatisation is a disaster – inflicting costs on the public and transferring wealth to 

the few

• Two elements of the “balanced system” (Political and legal power) are now supine 

before the third (corporate and media power). The balance is broken and the dominant power 

ruthless in its exploitation of its new freedom

• It is very difficult to see a “countervailing power” which would make these corporate elites 

pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us

• Social protest is marginalized - not least by the combination of the media and an Orwellian 

“security state” ready to act against “dissidence”

• But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project need more detailed exposure

as well as its continued efforts to undermine what little is left of state power

• We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against privatisation - 

existing and proposed

• to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed

But the elite - and the media which services their interests - noticed something was 

wrong only when Brexit and Trump triumphed – in 2016. But that was simply the 

point at which the dam broke – the pressure had been building up for much longer.

 If we really want to understand what is going on we have to go much further back – 

not just to the beginning of the new millennium when the first waves of populist anger 

started - but to the 1970s when the post-war consensus started to crumble – as Anthony 

Barnett, for one, most recently argued in his extended essay “Out of the Belly of Hell” (2020)
The demos have been giving the Elites a clear warning – “your social model sucks”. 

We may not like some aspects of what the crowd is saying – for example the need for border 

restrictions….but we ignore its message at our peril. So far I don’t see a very credible Elite 

response. Indeed, the response so far reminds me of nothing less than that of the clever Romans 

who gave the world Bread and Circuses. Governments throughout the world have a common 

way of dealing with serious problems – it starts with denial, moves on to sacrificial lambs, 

official inquiries and bringing in the clowns - and finishes with “panem et circenses”

OVERHEATED

It’s been a year since I last did a couple of posts (here and here) on climate change – but a combination of book downloads on the subject and Europe’s present heatwave is the prompt for another post. The books are first “Power – limits and prospects for human survival” by Richard Heinberg which came out in 2021 and then Five Insights for avoiding global collapse by Gaya Herrington which was published in 2022 (and can be read in full by tapping the title)

Heinberg has been writing about our overreliance on fossil fuels for a couple of decades 

but I find his book a bit too glib. Herrington is a much younger writer and starts with an 

explanation of the systems approach - with due tributes to Dona Meadows and her Thinking in Systems book. 

Admittedly, thinking in systems can be quite overwhelming sometimes. If everything is connected, where does one start to make any change at all? And how, if it is not as simple as pressing a button? There is a way to still make a difference, but not with force. Influence, rather than strength, is the key to making a lasting impact when working in a system (p11)

We are living in the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, and partially because of our encroachment into wildlife habitats, 2020 brought us a seemingly sudden pandemic that completely disrupted our already feeble sense of normalcy. What many of us initially thought would be over in a few months, lasted years. And at the time of writing, Russia’s war in Ukraine has us heading into winter with renewed anxieties around geopolitical and energy security. Our world is full of tipping points, counterintuitive conjunctions, and inertia.

Harrington's 5 insights are a bit underwhelming -  

• Acting as if we are not connected has brought the world to the edge of collapse

• growth is the cause of society’s problems

• We need to fundamentally change society’s priorities if we want to avoid significant declines in our current levels of well-being

• this is urgent

• the end of the growth objective doesn’t mean the end of progress

But these podcasts will tell you more -

https://open.spotify.com/show/3sNUjJdtw4dsNb5jtkukHq

https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/57-gaya-herrington

https://danske-podcasts.dk/podcast/leadership-and-the-environment/643-gaya-herrington-part-3-five-insights-for-avoid

My fellow blogger Dave Pollard put it nicely in a recent post

Thanks for the inspiration to a number of collapsnik writers who have been musing helpfully on this subject, particularly about personal and collective human agency, about our human propensity to obfuscate and put out of mind truths we don’t want to deal with, and about our inclination for disingenuous wishful thinking — particularly Erik Michaels, Indrajit Samarajiva, Jem Bendell and Tim Morgan.

It’s great to be reading the work of others who appreciate that there are no answers to such predicaments, nothing to feel ashamed about, and no one to blame, and that it’s enough to just try to understand and explain what is happening. I think we owe that much to ourselves, all of us doing our weary best, and I think we owe it, too, to the future inhabitants of this planet, human and/or more-than-human, that will live with the mostly unintended consequences of our efforts and our presence here.

The editorial of the current issue of the New Statesman has responded by reminding us that

Twenty two of the hottest years since records began in 1850 have occurred in the last 23. 
Since 1950, the number of floods has increased by a factor of 15 and wildfires by a factor of seven.
 In 2003 an estimated 70,000 people died as a result of a European heatwave. Across the world, 
five million deaths a year are now linked to abnormally hot and cold temperatures. Climate change 
is not only a catastrophe for the generations to come – it is one for us today

For 50 years, scientists have been warning us that we were outstripping planetary boundaries

 - “Limits to Growth” came out in 1972 and sketched various scenarios. 

Vested interests fought back and rubbished the scientists – encouraging cynicism and fatalism.

 We can – and do – rationalise our reluctance to change our habits but it’s only in the past decade 

that books started to appear to explore this reluctance.
Last August I recommended some books  -

• Living in Denial – climate change, emotions and everyday life” Kari Norgaard (2011) A researcher returns to her Norwegian roots to spend a year exploring what one town felt about climate change

• “Active Hope – how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy”; Joanne Macey and Chris Johnstone (2012) A philosopher and social psychologist team up to develop an important idea about hope (about which St Augustine did not say - "Hope has 2 beautiful daughters – anger about how things are – and courage to ensure they do not remain so)

• How to have impossible conversations; Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (2019) a rather formulaistic book

• “Still Hopeful – lessons from a lifetime of activism”; Maude Barlow (2021) an admirable activist in issues such as water and globalisation offers some lessons from her work

• “Saving Us – a climate scientist’s case for hope and healing in a divided world”; Katharine Hayhoe (2021)

and this is a quite excellent little article on why we have chosen to ignore the climate crisis https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/a-postmortem-for-survival-on-science-failure-and-action-on-climate-change-35636c79971e