evonomics | People who have lived in corrupt countries will have felt this
frustration first hand. There’s a sense that it’s not about bad
apples—the society is broken in ways that are sometimes difficult to
articulate. But societal norms are not arbitrary. They are adapted to
the local environment and influenced by historical contexts. In our
experiment, the parameters created the environment. If there really is
no easy way to legitimately make money and the state doesn’t have the
power to punish free-riders, then bribery really is the right option. So
even among Canadians, admittedly some of the nicest people in the
world, in these in-game parameters, corruption was difficult to
eradicate. When the country is poor and the state has no power,
transparency doesn’t tell you not to pay a bribe, it solves a different
problem—it tells you the price of the bribe. Not “should I pay”, but
“how much”?
There were some other nuances to the experiment that deserve follow
up. If we had played the game in Cameroon instead of Canada, we suspect
baseline bribery would have been higher. Indeed, people with direct
exposure to corruption norms encouraged more corruption in the game
controlling for ethnic background. And those with an ethnic background
that included more corrupt countries, but without direct exposure were
actually better cooperators than the 3rd generation+
Canadians. These results may reveal some of the effects of migration and
historical path dependence. Of course, great caution is required in
applying these results to the messiness of the real world. We hope to
further investigate these cultural patterns in future work.
The experiment also reveals that corruption may be quite high in
developed countries, but its costs aren’t as easily felt. Leaders in
richer nations like the United States may accept “bribes” in the form
of lobbying or campaign funding and these may indeed be costly for the
efficiency of the economy, but it may be the difference between a city
building 25 or 20 schools. In a poor country similar corruption may be
the difference between a city building 3 or 1 school. Five is more than
3, but 3 is three times more than 1. In a rich nation, the cost
of corruption may be larger in absolute value, but in a poorer nation, it may be larger in relative value and felt more acutely.
The take home is that cooperation and corruption are two sides of the
same coin; different scales of cooperation competing. This approach
gives us a powerful theoretical and empirical toolkit for developing a
framework for understanding corruption, why some states succeed and
others fail, why some oscillate, and the triggers that may lead to
failed states succeeding and successful states failing.
Our cultural evolutionary biases lead us to look for whom to learn
from and perhaps whom to avoid. They lead us to blame individuals
for corruption. But just as atrocities are the acts of many humans
cooperating toward an evil end, corruption is a feature of a society not
individuals.
Indeed, corruption is arguably easier to understand than my fearless
acceptance of my anonymous barista’s coffee. Our tendency to favor those
who share copies of our genes—a tendency all animals share—lead to both
love of family and nepotism. Putting our buddies before others is as
ancient as our species, but it creates inefficiencies in a meritocracy. Innovations are often the result of applying well-established approaches in one area to the problems of another. We hope the science of cooperation and cultural evolution will give us new tools in combating corruption.
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