I For as long as human beings have had governments, they have worried about public corruption. The Hebrew Bible warns repeatedly that those in authority — especially judges — should not take bribes, “for bribes blind the clear-sighted and upset the pleas of those in the right.” The Arthashastra, a third-century Indian text on the art of statecraft, cautioned that just as one cannot avoid “tasting honey or poison on the tip of the tongue,” government officials will inevitably be tempted to steal public money for themselves. Countless other examples — from classical Greece and Rome to Imperial China to the Islamic empires of the Near East — testify to the pervasiveness of public corruption across cultures and across time. Indeed, from the ancient world up through today, corruption has been a central concern of statesmen, philosophers, and journalists — and the undoing of powerful figures and the catalyst for major reform movements. Anxiety over corruption also figures prominently in culture across the centuries — from Shakespeare’s Brutus accusing his friend Cassius of having “an itching palm, to sell and mart your offices for gold to undeservers” to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton rapping that “corruption’s such an old song that we can sing along in harmony.” And yet the problem of corruption, for all its ubiquity, is often neglected. Perhaps most strikingly, for a very long time the international development community — a shorthand term for the various government agencies, multilateral institutions, and non-governmental organizations focused on improving the well-being and opportunities of the residents of poorer countries — paid scant attention to corruption. This may have been due in part to the belief that corruption, while immoral and unjust, was only marginally relevant to economic development. The comparative lack of attention to corruption was also related to concerns about the political sensitivity of the issue: to talk about corruption is almost always to talk about politics. Indeed, at the World Bank in the 1980s and early 1990s, officials rarely uttered the word “corruption” in public, and referred to it behind closed doors as “the C-word” — a nod to the fact that this was a problem that everyone knew existed but agreed should not be discussed openly. Roughly a quarter-century ago, this began to change. As is often the case, the process was gradual and the causes complex, so it would be a mistake to attribute the emergence of anticorruption as a central international development issue to any one person or event. Still, at least symbolically, a breakthrough moment occurred in October 1996, when James Wolfensohn, then president of the World Bank, gave what came to be known as the “cancer of corruption” speech. Addressing the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Wolfensohn declared in no uncertain terms that to fight global poverty, organizations such as the Bank needed to promote “transparency, accountability, and institutional capacity,” and, more specifically, “to deal with the cancer of corruption.” Though Wolfensohn did not dwell on the issue — his remarks on corruption took up less than two minutes of his address — he did provide a succinct explanation of why corruption was a development issue: “Corruption diverts resources from the poor to the rich, increases the cost of running businesses, distorts public expenditures, and deters foreign investors.” Today such a statement would be unremarkable. But back in 1996 it was a big deal, especially since, as Wolfensohn later recounted, he had been warned shortly after the start of his presidency not to talk about “the C-word.” He ignored that warning — and, crucially, he did so by reframing corruption not as a purely political or moral issue, but as an issue that directly affected economic development. Corruption was now squarely on the international development agenda, and it remains so to this day. Over the generation since Wolfensohn’s speech, leading multilateral organizations, including the World Bank, IMF, United Nations, and OECD, have paid increasing attention to this issue, forming divisions and sponsoring projects devoted to anticorruption activities. We now have an international anticorruption agreement, the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), to which most countries in the world are parties (even if compliance is uneven at best); there are also regional anticorruption agreements in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. Donor agencies, such as USAID, the UK’s Department for International Development, Germany’s GIZ, Sweden’s SIDA, and many others, support extensive anticorruption programming. Anticorruption, in short, is on the map. But despite this progress in the cause of anticorruption — the more sophisticated conception of it, the protocols and agreements — the idea that the international development community should make the fight against corruption a high priority is not universally accepted. Among the many objections to the emphasis on anticorruption as an integral part of international development, I want to highlight — and debunk — three quasi-myths that have gained more traction in these debates than they deserve. I call these ideas quasi-myths, rather than simply myths, because each of these them does have a kernel of truth. But each of these three arguments is, on the whole, more false than true, and more misleading than helpful. 
The first quasi-myth is that corruption is a culturally relative concept, such that practices that wealthy Western countries consider corrupt are acceptable in other societies. The familiar refrain here is that in some cultures what “we” would consider a bribe, “they” would consider a gift — or more generally that Western norms regarding the line between the public sphere and the private sphere do not apply in many non-Western societies. Thus, the argument continues, when organizations such as the World Bank or USAID or the OECD promote an anticorruption agenda in developing countries, they are in fact imposing a set of values that are inconsistent with local customs and traditions. In its strongest form, the argument accuses those promoting an international anticorruption agenda of engaging in a form of “moral imperialism,” or even that these efforts are intended to advance Western economic interests
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence