Transcription
Welcome to EBS Wedan Suup Great Minds. My name is Brian Claus. I'm an associate professor in global politics at University College London.
The United Nations in New York City has diplomatic immunity, is what it's called, for those who represent their country in the United Nations. So, if you are an official diplomat working in the UN in New York City and you commit a crime, officially, you cannot be prosecuted for that crime. And this even applies to illegally parking.
Now, the reason this matters is because over time, diplomats started to take advantage of the system. It was worth about $18 million in total that the city of New York was not getting in parking fines from these diplomats. So, finally, about 20 years ago, the mayor of New York City at the time, a man named Michael Bloomberg, decided to do something about this. And what he did was he changed the rules where he said, "Look, we can't prosecute you, you have diplomatic immunity, but diplomatic immunity does not protect your car. So, we can take away your car. We can tow it away and impound it if you park illegally."
Now, the reason this is important is it's because it looks like what social scientists call a natural experiment. In the first time period, you have diplomats who can get away with anything, the wild west, right? There are no rules. In the second time period, after this legal change has happened, there are consequences for abusing your power. All of a sudden, you lose your car if you park illegally.
So, what happened? What was really, really amazing here was that in time period one, when there are no rules, then the abuse of power is totally correlated to cultures of corruption. In other words, the people who represented countries where corruption was rampant, places like Egypt and Yemen and Chad in sub-Saharan Africa, many of those countries, they had on average about 100, 90 parking tickets per diplomat, right? It was like an absolutely crazy situation where each diplomat had hundreds of parking tickets that they were not paying. On the other end of the spectrum, you had countries that were less corrupt, Norway, Japan, etc., where there were low levels of illegal parking. Their their diplomats had one or two or zero parking fines per diplomat.
So, all of a sudden, at the beginning, when there are no rules, no consequences, you have a sort of bifurcation, a divide by corruption in the culture. Then, when you have the enforcement where all of a sudden consequences are imposed, everything changes overnight. And the way it changes is that all of a sudden, the diplomats who are from places like Egypt and Yemen that used to be parking illegally, immediately converge and start behaving like those who are from Norway and Japan. In other words, the enforcement, the accountability changes the abuse of power completely.
So, when the rules are very lax and people can get away with stuff, they tend to be divided by cultures. Then the system is very, very important. But then, if the system changes its rules and imposes penalties on abusive power, you can get uniform good behavior just by imposing accountability on people who are already abusing their power.
But interestingly, and I I love this little bit of the study, this little last wrinkle, if you had the people who are from Japan and Norway living in a system where they could get away with it for a very long time, so in other words, if they were in New York City for a long time before the accountability and the legal change was imposed, they started to park illegally more. So, the people who are from these cultures that did not have corruption started to think, "I can get away with this. I can actually behave illegally because there are no consequences."
So, that teaches you a really important lesson about human society. It's one of the most important lessons about power. So, now we get to the very big question: Does power corrupt? Long ago, a man named Lord Acton said it did. He had a quote that said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." And this is sort of the folk wisdom around power. It's what most people think when they think of power and how it changes people. So, we do know that power corrupts.
But there's another realm of power we haven't talked about yet that we need to cover, and that is what if there are some people who are just absolutely not suited for power, no matter what? And there are, and they're called psychopaths. And these people have traits that are often referred to as the Dark Triad. Now, the Dark Triad has three parts. Part one is psychopathy, or being a psychopath. Part two is Machiavellianism, which means the ends justifies the means in your thinking, and you think, "As long as I get my goal, I can do anything I want to achieve it." And part three is narcissism, the idea that the world revolves around you.
These traits are highly correlated with each other. So, people with the Dark Triad have elevated levels of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. And when they combine, they're extremely, extremely destructive in systems of power. And they're particularly destructive for two reasons. One is because those people are obsessed with gaining power. They have an innate thirst for power. And second, they're very, very good at getting it. And the reason they're good at getting it is because the two words that are most associated with psychopathy of all the words that you can imagine to describe them is superficial charm.
Everyone who studies psychopaths, many people I spoke to who are neuroscientists or psychologists or work in forensics, criminology, they all talk about psychopaths and they say superficial charm, which means they can get people to like them in very short stints of time. And the answer is because they can blend in and appear to be well-intentioned, well-meaning individuals when they need to. And that's tied to a concept known as empathy. So, normal people, we have empathy switched on by default. Psychopaths are exactly the opposite. They have empathy switched off by default. And that means that they can only decide to turn it on when they need to. And when they do turn on their empathy, they're pretty good at passing as a normal psychological profile of a person. And that convinces people that they're actually harmless. And in fact, they're very, very harmful.
Now, if you think about the way we design systems of power in the modern age, think about what we do. We have the job interview. We have the election. What are those? Those are the times where superficial charm is going to serve you best, right? Because all you have to do is make someone like you for a short period of time.
Now, unfortunately, psychopaths are not curable. It's something that's actually wrong with a part of their brain known as the amygdala. And as a result of this, the solution is not to reform the system with a psychopath in charge. It's to get the psychopath out of power. And so, we have different remedies for different problems. For ordinary people, we need to design systems better so that power works effectively by attracting and promoting the right people into positions of leadership. But when it comes to psychopaths and those with the Dark Triad, it doesn't matter whether power corrupts because they're already corrupt. They're already unsuited for power. And all that we can do is to try to get them out of power as quickly as we possibly can and to block them from obtaining power in the first place.
In modern society, very few people are happy with our systems of power. As a political scientist, I have never had someone come up to me and say, "Your job is obsolete because we already get this right. We've already figured out how to make power work effectively for everyone." And in fact, a lot of people tend to look up in society to our leaders and think, "We could do better. To think that we could have better people in charge of us."
So, the task is to figure out how to reform the workings of power, the the dynamics around power, so that it it attracts and promotes the best people in society. How can we do that? Well, the first thing to think about is why is that not happening already? And as we've already seen, that's partly because of what we talked about as self-selection bias, that certain people gravitate towards power like moths to a flame. These are the kinds of people that we describe as power-hungry, right? Which we do not want to be in charge of our societies, and yet end up there very, very often. And those people are making a cardinal mistake of the way they think about power. They think about power as a goal in itself. That power is the ultimate aim of someone who wants to become powerful for the sake of it.
What we need in society are people who view power as a tool, a tool to help other people, a mechanism to make other people's lives better, rather than something that's just good for the individual who becomes powerful. And too often, the exact opposite happens. So, how can we figure out how to make this work better? Well, the first thing I would say is we need to design systems of power with the worst possible person in mind and then work backwards. So, if we already know that people are drawn to power like moths to a flame when they should not be in power, people who are psychopaths, Machiavellian thinkers, narcissists, etc., we should design systems that anticipate that that person is going to try to get power. And then we should put in safeguards to ensure that they don't. And then we should try to find ways to weed out those people who already are in power.
And at the same time, we need to attract people to power who don't want it in the first place. There is a sort of a lot of wisdom to the notion that a lot of the best people who could wield power effectively are those who don't want power in the first place. So, how do we solve that problem? Well, there's a few things that I think we should do. The first thing is, I think I think we need to think a lot more about randomness and how we can use the power of randomness to both attract people into power and to punish those or hold them accountable when they abuse their power.
Now, imagine that you're a cop in the New York City Police Department, and you get a phone call and it says, "Go to this crime scene." So, you go into this place and you see that there's $220,000 on the table and a whole bunch of drugs that are worth a lot of money. Now, what you don't know is that this is a fake crime scene. And that the fake crime scene has video cameras that are hidden in the walls, as well as microphones that are hidden in the ceiling. And what they're doing is they're doing what's called an integrity test to try to see whether the police officer is going to abuse their authority and steal some of the money or take some of the drugs for themselves. But the really genius part of this is that it's completely randomly selected, which means that any police officer can be subject to this at any time.
Now, that magnifies the effect of this because real crime scenes might actually be imagined by the police officers as being fake. This had a rippling effect throughout the force because every single time that an NYPD officer went to a crime scene in the future, they thought to themselves, "Are there cameras? Is somebody watching me? Are there microphones in the ceiling?" And as a result, they behaved better. So, you got a system-wide reform out of just 500 randomized tests. That is the power of randomized oversight to ensure that people behave well when they're in positions of power. We should do randomized integrity tests for politicians and for police officers and so on. And you don't need to do it repeatedly. You just need to do it once. So, maybe it's not for the right reasons, maybe they're just worried about getting caught. But the end result will be the same. It will clean up the system. So, that's the power of random oversight to expose corruption and abusive power.
On top of this, I think we need to think more carefully about how to recruit people into positions of power. And Stans had a problem, which was that nobody wanted to become a police officer. So, when they recruited, they would barely, they were barely able to actually get the number of officers they required. And that meant that 100% of people who applied got put in uniform. Now, this manifested itself in a particularly destructive way because all of the police officers in Stans at one period were convicted felons. All of them had been convicted of serious crimes.
Now, the way to solve this problem is to make sure that when positions of power are advertised and when you're recruiting for them, think carefully about how you can widen the scope of the pool of applicants to make it as deep as possible. Then, on top of this, we need to think about rotation. Now, what I mean by this is that you need to rotate people through positions of power so they don't end up getting too comfortable. This is very, very important because abuse of power tends to happen in places where where those who work together become become so comfortable with each other that they trust that nobody will blow the whistle on their bad behavior.
So, how do you solve this problem? It's very simple. You just make sure that every six months, a different person joins the team because that person cannot be trusted. They're new. And there's a very high risk when someone joins a system of power that if they are upset about the violation of ethical standards or the corruption that's ongoing, they'll say something. And just that risk, that threat, is very, very important as a deterrent.
One of the questions that I would ask someone who is trying to apply for a senior job in a company or is trying to become the leader of a country is this: "What would it take for you to think that you are no longer necessary in power?" In other words, "What specific goal do you want to achieve that once you achieve it, you would step down?"
Now, in ancient Rome, there's the story of Cincinnatus, who was a person that was asked to become powerful, to take over for a short period of time. And he did take power on two different occasions. And in both instances, after he achieved his goal, after he managed the crisis, he stepped down. And the sort of saying is that Cincinnatus went back to his farm, where he really wanted to be. So, for him, power was a burden. And that's how power should be. Power should be uncomfortable. It should be something that we don't necessarily want to relish because the decisions you make when you're in power inevitably hurt people. They hopefully help a lot of people, but anyone who's powerful is making decisions that have distributional consequences. There are some winners and some losers. And by creating those losers, you have responsibility. So, power done properly is something that weighs on the consciousness and and conscience of a powerful individual. It is something that weighs you down and keeps you up at night. If it doesn't, you shouldn't be in power.
So, the question is, what do we do? The answer is, we reform systems. We build on what we've already gotten right. We try to make sure that we empower those who have a track record of doing the right things in power. And then we from the bottom up redesign systems to attract, promote, and ensure that the best among us end up in those positions of authority.
Now, every so often, Cincinnatus will arise among us, the person who just happens to be in it for the right reasons. I don't think we should put the fate of our societies on a bet that ultimately is about luck. I think instead, we should make our own luck. And that means that we make Cincinnatus. We don't wait for him to come off the farm.