Efficiency is good, but sometimes friction is better. This is a basic statement of the argument made in a New York Times op-ed piece yesterday by Barry Schwartz, a psych professor at Swarthmore best known for his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Schwartz was focused on finance and busi…

At the Institutional Corruption conference sponsored by Harvard's Safra Ethics Center last Saturday, Ann Tenbrunsel, co-author of Blind Spots (see my blog posts on this book), noted that people act not only against what is written in ethics codes, but also against their own values. And they don't r…

At the Institutional Corruption Conference sponsored by Harvard's Safra Center last Saturday, Bruce Cain, a professor at UC Berkeley, pointed out that the permeable boundary between government and business (and, I would add, business law) brings into government many individuals who have a different…

Lawrence Lessig, who heads the Safra Center and hosted the event, started by defining institutional corruption as: A situation where influences within an economy of influence tend to weaken the effectiveness of an institution, especially by weakening public trust of the institution. This is an acad…

On Saturday, I attended a one-day conference on Institutional Corruption sponsored by the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University (videos of it will eventually appear here). Although local government was scarcely mentioned (there was one image of a painting that portrayed the 1930s machine in…