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Colcord bookmarked on 2009-02-04 Philosophy System Dynamics Cui bono
  • age-old problem: corruption

This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 12 Jan 2009, by Matt Kramer.

  • 04 Feb 09
    colcord
    Frank Colcord

    Philosophy System Dynamics Cui bono

    • age-old problem: corruption
  • 12 Jan 09
    mattkramer
    Matt Kramer

    A talk with Lawrence Lessig
    A cutting-edge legal mind turns to an age-old problem: corruption

    By Samuel P. Jacobs | January 11, 2009

    ROD BLAGOJEVICH ACCUSED of trying to sell a Senate seat. Dianne Wilkerson stuffing cash into her shirt. A Harvard doctor taking huge consulting fees from drug companies. This past year ended with a collection of new examples of a very old problem: corruption. Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford intellectual-property scholar recently hired away by Harvard Law School, believes he may have some solutions.

    Lessig, who has built a reputation as a leading advocate for free culture and loosening copyright laws, surprised many two years ago by shifting his attention from cutting-edge Internet law to the broader problem of corruption. At Harvard, Lessig will head up the university's Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, where he will begin a five-year effort to investigate corruption in government and academia.

    He sees both fields as polluted by the emergence of a consulting culture in which professors and advocates, whose independence is crucial to society, regularly take payments from corporations and industry groups for their advice and services. As a result, people presume that money is behind every effort of public policy, and trust collapses.

    Lessig, 47, hopes his project will help change how we think about corruption, moving the focus away from corrupt individuals and toward the bigger systemic question of how society supports and enables them.

    "It might take a long time to solve this problem," he says, "but if you're convinced, as I am, that we have to solve this problem, the fact that it is going to take a long time isn't a reason to delay pursuing it."

    Ideas spoke to Lessig at his San Francisco home by telephone.

    IDEAS: How depressing is corruption these days?

    LESSIG: I think we're getting to the maximum depression point. The reason is I think that institutions that before had a stronger ethic of independence have given that ethic up. I think that we are seeing an erosion of pra

    politics

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