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Miscellany of a Hundred Eyes
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011
Robert Wechsler
Let's Not Drink to It
Yes, it has happened. Local government ethics has been compared to Prohibition.
According to an article in the La Porte (IN) Herald Argus last Friday, this comparison was made by a superior court judge in town, who said that Prohibition "was intended to increase the productivity of workers ... but all it really did was create more problems.”
The occasion was a draft ethics ordinance for the county. A county council member gave his opinion on the nepotism provision:
It's good to be in favor of prohibiting nepotism that doesn't single out department heads managing their family members.
High-School Cheating and Government Ethics Environments
Rushworth Kidder, the head of the Institute on Global Ethics, has an interesting new post on student cheating and organizational culture. He notes that cheating among high-school students is very high, and is rarely penalized. He quotes Warren Buffett as saying, “In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. If they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”
Kidder notes that these kids are starting to work for companies and governments. Without integrity, "your smart, vigorous workforce will invent so many innovative scams, schemes, and workarounds that things will just freeze up. Their mastery of deception, blame shifting, and mutual protection, which they learned early on, will become legendary. What’s more, they’ll create within your organization a culture of convenience, compromise, and corruption for the next generation."
What can be done about this? Kidder says that you need to be able to say, “things are different out here in the world of work. Unlike high school, we don’t cheat. We live in a culture of integrity, and we’re looking for kids who have the values, the reasoning skills, and the courage to join us.” If you can’t honestly say that, of course, don’t pretend to: Kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away."
In other words, it's time to get to start cleaning up the ship.
Stretching "Conflict" Till It Breaks
Here's a real stretch of an alleged conflict, written up in the Petulama (CA) Argus-Courier on Sunday. An opponent of a shopping center filed a complaint alleging that a council member had a relationship with a developer of the shopping center. His relationship? He receives a pension from the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), which has invested in land acquisitions made by the developer.
Got that? Getting a pension from the biggest investor in the country means an official can't vote on any investments made by the pension board, which invests in just about everything that moves or sits still. That may be the biggest stretch I've seen yet.
Note: For the non-Greek scholars among you, the title of this refers to the fact that both quoted newspapers have the name "Argus" in them, and Argus was a monster with a hundred eyes. Unfortunately, downsizing means that newspapers have only a few eyes left.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
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Yes, it has happened. Local government ethics has been compared to Prohibition.
According to an article in the La Porte (IN) Herald Argus last Friday, this comparison was made by a superior court judge in town, who said that Prohibition "was intended to increase the productivity of workers ... but all it really did was create more problems.”
The occasion was a draft ethics ordinance for the county. A county council member gave his opinion on the nepotism provision:
-
We have good, quality employees that are family members of
department heads. As long as we’re not going to single them out and
keep them from having jobs, I’m for this.
It's good to be in favor of prohibiting nepotism that doesn't single out department heads managing their family members.
High-School Cheating and Government Ethics Environments
Rushworth Kidder, the head of the Institute on Global Ethics, has an interesting new post on student cheating and organizational culture. He notes that cheating among high-school students is very high, and is rarely penalized. He quotes Warren Buffett as saying, “In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. If they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”
Kidder notes that these kids are starting to work for companies and governments. Without integrity, "your smart, vigorous workforce will invent so many innovative scams, schemes, and workarounds that things will just freeze up. Their mastery of deception, blame shifting, and mutual protection, which they learned early on, will become legendary. What’s more, they’ll create within your organization a culture of convenience, compromise, and corruption for the next generation."
What can be done about this? Kidder says that you need to be able to say, “things are different out here in the world of work. Unlike high school, we don’t cheat. We live in a culture of integrity, and we’re looking for kids who have the values, the reasoning skills, and the courage to join us.” If you can’t honestly say that, of course, don’t pretend to: Kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away."
In other words, it's time to get to start cleaning up the ship.
Stretching "Conflict" Till It Breaks
Here's a real stretch of an alleged conflict, written up in the Petulama (CA) Argus-Courier on Sunday. An opponent of a shopping center filed a complaint alleging that a council member had a relationship with a developer of the shopping center. His relationship? He receives a pension from the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), which has invested in land acquisitions made by the developer.
Got that? Getting a pension from the biggest investor in the country means an official can't vote on any investments made by the pension board, which invests in just about everything that moves or sits still. That may be the biggest stretch I've seen yet.
Note: For the non-Greek scholars among you, the title of this refers to the fact that both quoted newspapers have the name "Argus" in them, and Argus was a monster with a hundred eyes. Unfortunately, downsizing means that newspapers have only a few eyes left.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
---
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