Book Reviews | City Ethics

Resources & Learning April 30, 2014

Three Personal Myths That Hamper Our Ethical Decision-Making, and a Fool-ish Solution

Laura Hartman and Crina Archer's essay "False Beliefs, Partial Truths: Personal Myths and Ethical Blind Spots" (January 2012) provides a valuable new view on how our blind spots hamper our handling of ethical matters. Double Blindness Their first valuable observation is that, "[i]f left uninterroga…

Resources & Learning April 15, 2014

Spring Reading: "Perlmann's Silence" and Self-Justification

Self-justification is an important element in ethical misconduct, cover-ups, and officials' public denials and explanations of conduct. It aids and abets our blind spots. It is a sign of weakness, anxiety, and fear more than of poor character Self-justification is something each of us engages in. S…

Ethics Codes & Reform April 7, 2014

The Need for a Taxonomy of Institutional Corruption in Local Government

"The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became — though even to use words like 'corrupt' or 'sinister' made serious pe…

February 5, 2014

Winter Reading: Zephyr Teachout's "The Forgotten Law of Lobbying"

The draft of Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout's new essay, "The Forgotten Law of Lobbying," which will appear in Election Law Journal, looks at the history of how American courts have viewed lobbying. This history provides a valuable perspective on lobbying, making it more clear what it is abo…

Local Government Practice December 9, 2013

Nudging and Government Ethics

I've been writing a lot about government ethics and behavioral psychology over the last few years. I consider some of the findings of behavioral psychology, especially about blind spots, essential to understanding what leads to ethical misconduct and, therefore, essential to ethics training, ethics…

Resources & Learning November 15, 2013

Is the Principal Cause of Ethical Misconduct Within Us?

I'm reading an excellent novel right now: Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi, translated from the Italian by Michael F. Moore (Ecco, 2004, 2011). The narrator has just learned that his boss stole money from the company they worked for. He was very close to his boss, and saw nothing in him that would l…

Resources & Learning October 23, 2013

A New Report and New Book on State and Federal Ethical Misconduct

The Privatization of Economic Development A fascinating report has just been published by Good Jobs First, entitled "Creating Scandals Instead of Jobs: The Failures of Privatized State Economic Development Agencies." Good Jobs First describes itself as "a national policy resource center for grassro…

Resources & Learning September 17, 2013

Summer Reading: The Ethics Challenge in Public Service

I recently read the latest, third edition of The Ethics Challenge in Public Service: A Problem-Solving Guide by Carol W. Lewis and Stuart C. Gilman (Jossey-Bass, 2012). This is the second most popular text used in Public Sector Ethics courses, mostly in Public Administration programs. Most of the b…

September 12, 2013

Summer Reading: Richard Painter on Ethics Reform III

This is the third of three posts on how Richard W. Painter's recommendations for federal ethics reform in his book, Getting the Government America Deserves: How Ethics Reform Can Make a Difference (Oxford U.P., 2009), may be applied to local government ethics programs. Lobbying Lobbying is not as b…

August 2, 2013

A New State Integrity Index Report

Two weeks ago, the Better Government Association-Alper Services Integrity Index was published, the first since 2008. It grades each state's conflicts of interest, freedom of information, open meetings, and whistleblower-protection laws. As far as it goes, this is an excellent report. It sets forth …

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