Ethics Codes & Reform

I never know where I'm going to find something that inspires a blog post on local government ethics. This time it was an essay by Tim Parks in the March 8 issue of the New York Review of Books, as well as on the NYRBlog.

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.

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 realize they're doing it. She portrayed the process by which we act as broken into three phases:  prediction, action, and recollection. In the first and third phases, we tend to think in terms of values.

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 concept of ethics. That is, in the business world, loyalty to one's supervisors (or clients) and to the company is the most important thing. In government, loyalty should be to the public. Of course, this is not loyalty as we know it, so loyalty should be suppressed as much as possible.

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 academic definition.

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 Kansas City, MO), many ideas that were discussed are applicable to local government ethics.

It's not every day that a neighboring town makes the front page of the New York Times. It's especially surprising when the reason is, at heart, a local government ethics problem.

The Blind Men and the Elephant is an ancient Hindu fable that illustrates the tendency for a person to think that he has grasped the whole of a situation when, in fact, only a part of it is understood. This will be shown to be the case with government ethics programs based on a study of twelve municipalities of varying populations in the United States. It is a global concern that, as a result of inefficient, wasteful and corrupt dissipation of limited resources, services are diminished and the public trust lowered.

According to an article in Parsippany (NJ) Life, a Parsippany school board member filed an ethics complaint against himself with the state's School Ethics Commission. Is this odd course of action the best way to bring transparency to the school board, an institutional rather than personal problem?

I came across a decision in Patty Salkin's Law of the Land blog today involving a federal statute that allows federal prosecution of those who give gifts to local officials in amounts greater than $5,000.