Corruption vs morality and polarised middle-class families

The general perception about corruption, as explained by an economist, Rose-Ackerman, is that it is a moral category that signifies putrefaction and rot. However, the word 'morality' is very subjective as it varies person to person. The mainstream economists are aware of the subjectivity of morality and focuses heavily on market mechanism where price plays a key role.

Indeed, economists are interested in a particular case where price reflects the true cost of production of a good and labelled this case as an efficient outcome. One of the immediate implications of such market mechanism is that as long as the price leads to an efficient outcome there is no room to discuss morality.

Therefore, one hardly sees that economists are worried about morality. Interestingly, two eminent economists, Shleifer and Vishny, in their seminal paper, define corruption as "the sale of government officials of government property for personal gain". This definition of corruption draws a lot of attentions of the mainstream economists, as one of the implications of this definition is that corruption itself becomes an institution like market where bribery is thought to be a price (we adopt the same concept for the sake of our arguments).

Therefore, the question arises whether bribery leads to an efficient outcome or not. The literature in economics has found that, under certain conditions, bribery that works as "speed-money" can lead to an efficient outcome. If this is so, then few economists suggest making the bribery legal in the economy. However, recent evidence at macro level, as surveyed by Lambsdor? (who worked as the director of statistical work for Transparency International), suggests that corruption not only lowers the economic growth but also increases the income inequality. This conflicting evidence between microeconomic theory and macroeconomic findings remind us of the famous 'Prisoner's Dilemma' game i.e. smart for one but dump for all! Nevertheless, the economists have yet to be reconciled on these conflicting evidence and so far there is little success on resolving this matter.

Moral Limits of the Market: Though I have discussed above that morality is hardly a research topic for the mainstream economists, eminent philosopher Michael Sandel in his seminal book published in 2012, titled "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets," has pointed out the limitation and danger of bringing and analysing every issue under market mechanism where price plays the crucial role. According to him, corruption may arise out of buying and selling certain goods when the certain moral and civic goods are diminished.

For example, a technology known as IVF (in vitro fertilisation) makes it possible to gather eggs from the mother, fertilize them with sperm from the father, and place the embryo into the uterus of a gestational surrogate, who will be paid for such service. The surrogate then carries the baby until birth. She doesn't have any genetic ties to the child because it wasn't her egg that was used. Here, one may think that market mechanism may solve the problem literally by paying price to a gestational surrogate. In reality, it is far from solving the problem as corruption arises by diminishing our certain existing morality about the concept of 'mother'. Similar analogy applies when we use the market mechanism to analyse the corruption.

Indeed, bribery or so-called speed-money leads to diminish our certain moral and civic goods about bureaucratic officials and this may lead to disastrous outcome, for example, polarised society, which we are going to discuss in the next section.

Polarised Middle Class Families: In general, it is the middle-class families who care more about obtaining education and decent jobs; and practising moral, ethical and religious values. The society where bribery is practised frequently sees their certain moral and civic goods about that society reduced. Furthermore, this frequent bribery practice eventually forces them either to pay bribe and sacrifice their moral values or to suffer the consequences of not paying bribe. In other words, the cost of practicing moral values for the middle-class families is very high in this society.

This implies that the coercion starts in the middle-class families in practising bribery which leads to polarisation of the middle-class families where one group of families will be satisfied and another will be deprived. If this is so, then violence, conflict and extremism will start within this polarised middle-class families and spread across society. This might happen if corruption has been persistent in society for a longer period of time.

Indeed, Bangladesh had experienced a massive scale of corruption before 2008. According to Transparency International (hereafter TI) Bangladesh was ranked 7th most corrupt country in the world in 2007, which is by far the highest rank in Bangladesh's corruption history. Although Bangladesh has started to improve her status since 2008, the country is still found at the bottom list of Corruption Index published by TI. Furthermore, the law-enforcement authorities have discovered one of the startling facts that most of those involved in recent incidents of extremism in Bangladesh are coming from highly respected middle-class families. These anecdotal evidences may indicate the polarisation of middle-class families. Although we admit that such polarisation of the middle class may be caused by various other factors apart from corruption, our contribution in this article is to establish our conjecture that there might be positive correlation between corruption and polarisation of middle-class families.

Remedies: If our conjecture is correct, then one also needs to find out the remedy to stop polarising the middle-class families. The key is to eradicate the corruption, in particular, stop the practising of bribery in the governmental offices. Bangladesh Government has already taken a positive step by increasing the salary of governmental employees but this might not eradicate the problem. In addition to that two simple steps can be recommended: (i) Government needs to educate its citizens, in particular the concept of 'citizen-arrest', to prevent the offence and to maintain public order; and (ii) Government needs to nourish and expand the private sector, in particular, the small businesses with minimal government intervention. Indeed, these steps may stop the coercion in the middle-class families in the presence of persistent corruption, which leads to polarisation of middle classes in the first place.

The writer is an academic and lives in Academic, Melbourne, Australia.

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