Maybe We’re Not So Very Crazy

I was talking to my girlfriend last night, in my usual service as assistant for the “International Debate” class she’s currently taking and the subject of kleptocracy came up, I believe in the context of a larger discussion about the IMF and World Bank. I don’t rightly recall, actually, but it was something like that.

In any case, I managed to sort of stumble upon this working paper by Oguzhan C. Dincer, Christopher J. Ellis and Glen R. Waddell. Full disclosure, I checked the UO Economics website because Professor Ellis once mentioned to me he was doing some work on kleptocracy and I started wondering what ever became of it. The working paper linked above is on the negative relationship between corruption and decentralization of the power to tax and spend. That is, as power is decentralized there appears to be less corruption. From the introduction:

Recent works by several contributors point to a significant negative relationship between the degree to which the powers to tax and spend are decentralized in an economy, and the overall level of governmental corruption (e.g., Treisman, 2000; de Mello, 2000; de Mello and M. Barenstein, 2001; Fisman and Gatti, 2002a; Arikan, 2004).1 On the surface this is quite surprising, as it might be anticipated that local politicians or bureaucrats would possess detailed knowledge of any opportunities for corruption that might arise in their jurisdictions. They might thus be expected to extract any corruption rents available more efficiently than less well informed national counterparts.

In what follows, we both propose a theoretical explanation for, and find further evidence in support of, a negative correlation between empirical measures of corruption and decentralization. We argue that because there are more independent taxation and expenditure decisions made in a decentralized economy, there are more opportunities for local populations to make cross-jurisdictional comparisons of politician or bureaucrat performance. The poor performance of a government in one jurisdiction might be attributed to a number of factors including corruption. An increase in the number of comparative observations made by the populations of jurisdictions has two effects relevant to the relationship between corruption and decentralization. First, as the number of comparative observations made by a jurisdiction’s population increases the inferences they make about the causes of a particular observed outcome become increasingly precise. Second, as the number of observations increase the likelihood that particular inferences will be arrived at also change. As we shall subsequently see, this latter effect proves to be crucial in generating a negative theoretical relationship between corruption and decentralization.

The rest of the paper goes on to outline the theoretical and empirical case for lower levels of corruption as power becomes more decentralized. This is relevant to libertarians in that it lends verifiable data to our claim that a minimal state with many decentralized branches of power will likely result in the best outcomes. Personally, I also don’t find the conclusion particularly shocking.

I’m sure this has been address elsewhere, but I don’t exactly have the time this evening to educate myself on the last 10 years of kleptocracy research, but I would suspect that centralized authorities would be a bit easier to bribe because you can get more for your marginal corruption dollar. If you have a fixed amount to spend on bribe money, and a whole host of petty bureaucrats to bribe you’ll, obviously, be able to spend less per bureaucrat and thusly have a harder time achieving your ends than you would if you could spend the entire graft budget on the one fellow in charge.

Hey, Teacher Administrator, Leave Them Undergrads Alone

I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about College. Not so much the drunken memories of bad ideas from yesteryear, but rather about the sort of violence problems inherent in the system. There’s a lot sort of wrong with higher education in this country, but having a rather small sample I really can’t claim my observations are perticularly scientific. However, I do think that many of the problems could be solved with a fairly simple solution. I’ll use, oh, the not-at-all-randomly selected University of Oregon.

Now, the University of Oregon is on quarters and required 180 hours for my degree. Of those 62 hours had to be upper-division, some proportion had to be completed at the University of Oregon, 168 had to be taken for a grade (or transfer credit), 45 had to be taken at the University of Oregon for a grade, etc. The University also has, of course, general education requirements. 8 “multicultural” hours, 8 of written English, 16 of “Arts and Letters”, 16 “Social Science”, 16 “Science”, 12 hours of Mathematics for the Bachelor of Science, plus my degree requirements. I, and every other sot at the school, spent basically the first two years of his or her college experience retaking high school. Don’t believe me? The first day in WR122 (the second of two required writing courses, fortunately I’d placed out of the first) consisted of instructions in how to construct a proper thesis statement. Wait, no, excuse me, enthymeme. Yes, that’s right, they tried to teach us to construct logically unsound arguments around which to base papers. Frankly, I’d rather put all of my premises out in the open, thank-you-very-much. In any case, these are the sorts of things one should’ve learned in high school. If one didn’t, that really isn’t anyone else’s problem, and paying customers students should not be made to suffer through that sort of tripe. The same can be said for introductory World History courses, or introductory Science classes of any sort. By the time you’ve had 12 years of schooling, well, you certainly shouldn’t be unsure as to whether or not the Earth goes ’round the Sun. If you are, well, that’s your problem.

And here we have arrived at what I see as the root of the entire college problem: in order to obtain a degree, you are required to sit through what amount to another two years of high school. The material isn’t engaging, and it makes damn sure students are burned out by the time they can take the classes they’re actually interested in. So get rid of it. Instead of requiring all of that crap university wide, require 180 hours, only 30 of which can be taken pass/fail. Allow the individual departments to make whatever requirements they want: so the Journalism school might still require a bunch of the same stuff it requires, but the Mathematics department might keep the same degree requirements that they have now. Rather than “making students well-rounded” by forcing them to sample any number of the bad appetizers the university system has to offer, they would be free to take classes of their own interest and still get a degree in four years.