In uniform

Corruption - 10. With understanding ...

October 1, 2008 George Satarov

We move along the axis of time even further from the Great Flood and, like a head to the pool, we throw ourselves in our times-the transition period that began in the late 80s of the last century and continued, alas, by this time. Inside this period, we will sort through the causes of corruption, starting with the most general and ending with the mention of quite specific. (I will not mention, perhaps, the vicious nature of man. After all, this reason explains everything in the world and does not intend to be obsolete. If only with the human race?)

I'll start with the most common circumstance. Social thinkers have long drawn our attention to the fact that any transitional periods in society are accompanied by the growth of all kinds of vices. This was the first to notice the wise and kind Chinese, leaving us a wish: "God God forbid you to live in an era of change." Significantly later, two great sociologists - the Frenchman Emil Durkheim and American Robert Merton - introduced and applied the concept of anomia. This is such a state of society and the state, when the consensus is weak, there is a lack of faith in the common values, the goals are unclear, the legitimate means of achieving their achievement are uncertain, the normative and moral framework of the hostel, the institutions that protect formal norms and provide legitimate means to achieve the necessary goals are sharply weakened. Does this remind you of anything? Right. As if it is written about us. But not only about us. Any society falls into this state (to varying degrees, true) during a period of serious changes, when the old system of norms is collapsed - formal and informal, and the new one is only created. It turns out such a normative failure, a pit into which all the impurity of human deviation flows. It is no coincidence that “anomia” literally means “without norms”.

A brief anamal history of the anomic society, given above, can be reduced to an even shorter diagnosis: the inefficiency of the state and social relations. And you already know from the previous articles of this cycle (see the article “Corruption-5”) that corruption is always a consequence of inefficiency. So we get, as evidence of the theorem: "Once corruption is a consequence of inefficiency, and in transition periods ineffectiveness is growing, then corruption should also grow in the transition period." That we are observing. And we live with it. By the most "I can't." And tolerate.

There may well be a suspicion that all the above only abstract theoretization. By no means. Let me remind readers an example from a previous article: on the purchase of entrepreneurs from the state in a private order of services to protect their property at the beginning of the transition period. The second example will be my next plot: not only the fact of the transition period is important, but also how it is carried out - a transit strategy (reforms, in other words). Ineffectiveness of transit as a special case of ineffective control also gives rise to corruption. I will explain this extremely important thesis.

We belong to the host of transit countries that had the misfortune to carry out transit in the logic of the so -called “Washington consensus "(Although we did not fully follow the standard set of recommendations, especially in terms of tax reduction). It is usually believed that the inefficiency of the “Washington consensus” is determined by a list of specific macroeconomic measures. This is not the case, which is confirmed by the presence of alternative programs of economic reforms with the equally low efficiency. In fact, the depravity of all these programs is different: they all carry the stigma of high modernism ; They are ineffective not by a set of measures, but by the naive conviction that social nature obeys orders given, for example, in the form of the adoption of laws. The set of measures is not as significant in these strategies as the method of their implementation, which Academician Polterovich called the “transplantation of institutions”. What is the essence of this method? What is his logic?

The logic of transplantation of institutions as a transit strategy is based on the next banal reasoning (I am now investing these words in the donocory’s mouth): “Look, what are poor, ineffective, corrupt. Now let's see how rich we are, effective, honest. Why so? Yes, very simple. Because they have what institutions are wrong, and we have such, others, the right ones. So we need to transfer our institutions to them. ” In the same way, recipients, inspired by the successes of donors and envious of the latter, also reason. And we ourselves reasoned that way at the start of transit.

The feeling of fruitfulness of such a strategy stems from many thousands of practice of transferring objects of material and then spiritual culture. But if the paper, the Aristotelian worldview or fast food were vaccinated quite calmly, then a nuisance occurred with institutes in the 20th century. The efficiency of their transplantation turned out to be fantastically low. But amazing successes achieved the inefficiency of management and, therefore, the growth of corruption. And the latter led to many other negative consequences, which we will talk about in the following articles. A loyal, doomed or cynical attitude to corruption, the lack of a policy of counteraction to it spurred pathological processes. As a result, scripts like Indonesian or Nigerian became typical. Therefore, there is no need to be surprised that now we are in terms of corruption by the neighbors of these countries.

The essence of the problem is that Western civilization did not construct, but raised its institutions. Growing was not controlled, but it was a process of natural drift like a phylogenetic. In his course, one institute inherited another, in parallel, the environment that was adequate to this institute (including other institutions) was formed, the consciousness of people, their ordinary informal practices, etc. This led to the fact that the Nobel laureate Douglas North, touching the economic institutions, was forced to say: "We know how our institutions are arranged, but we do not understand how to construct them." The ideas of evolutionary growth, the “maturation” of economic and legal institutions of capitalism is preached by another Nobel Prize laureate, Friedrich Augustus von Hayek: “... an extended order ( as the author calls the set of institutions of a market economy - Satar ) did not have developed as a result of the realization of a conscious intent or intentions of a person, but spontaneously: it arose from uncontrolled followed by certain followed by certain followed. traditional [...] practices. "

My readers, familiar with the previous series “Transit”, remember my description of the example proposed by James Scott in his wonderful book “The Good Intentions of the State”, which concerned the comparison of the natural forest and artificial landings . Naturally formed forest has the ability to resist adversity - from wind to pests. An artificial forest is vulnerable and quickly degenerates.

The same thing happens with transplanted institutions. The governing of the vast majority of projects for the transition to a market economy is generated by the fact that the social environment, into which the new institution implants, rejects it, digesting, distorting and adapting it to its needs. Example: In a market economy, the bankruptcy institution is used to reorganize ineffective owners. In Russia, with the help of bankruptcy, companies of effective owners are captured. Another example is the revival of the ugly features of the Soviet judicial system (subordination of the executive branch, an indictment, telephone law, etc.) within the framework of the new judicial institutions of Russia. These effects of rejection of new formal norms with old informal norms are manifested, in particular, in growing corruption as a result of the inefficiency of institutions.

The two main problems determine these effects. The first - we extremely poorly understand the social soil, to which we transplant a new institution. At the same time, we do not know how to describe the properties of the social soil on which this institution is successfully functioning in donor countries.

The second - no institution on its native social grounds exists in isolation. He is closely interconnected with other institutions, with the history of its development, with public consciousness, with traditions, informal practices of people, etc. Therefore, the isolated transfer of the institute to other soil without taking into account these connections inevitably leads to its distortion and is fraught with a bouquet of negative effects.

That's what is funny and what is related to standard transit projects with projects in the spirit of high modernism. First: these projects are moving about good by the ideology of high modernism. The second: the collapse of these projects is a consequence of our extremely wretched knowledge about a social order and an extremely low, often destructive opportunity to influence it with a frenziness bordering on a mania of greatness regarding our own ability to manage social processes. This equally applies to both the donors of transplanted institutions and recipients.

“They don’t roll,” as they say, attempts to explain the failures of transit projects with someone’s evil will. We are not ready to admit that our stupidity, limitation, non-education, along with conceit, are far from outweighing any evil will. To meet an obstacle built by someone’s evil will is much more honorable, more worthy, more pleasant than to bury into the impurity that arose as a result of our own stupidity. So we come up with conspiracies, without tearing off the rakes we threw yet from our own heels.

It remains to dwell on the last eight years, marked by the rapid growth of corruption. It should be recognized that almost any corruption pathology of today's Russia has sprouts in the previous Yeltsin era. And that time, and the current community of the manifestations of corruption, which from the Soviet turned into a capitalist one, is related. Yeltsin freedom also manifested itself in the freedom to search for corruption methods of enrichment. Putin's time did not offer anything new. Only a change in scale. The capture of the Yukos is just a borrowing by the highest power of the practice of crooks of medium-sized scale, capturing candle factories in the late 90s. There were also cases of buying ministerial posts under the late Yeltsin. Now it has become a generally accepted practice with rare exceptions, and the record achievements of the cost of fasting (known to me) have grown 150 times (!). There is only one difference between two presidents. In the era of Yeltsin there was anxiety about the fact that, as the journalists constantly wrote, "crime goes into power." Now differently (though journalists write about it timidly and rarely): power has become criminal.

The question, therefore, is this: why new types of corruption existed, but did not grow in that era of “chaos”, as they say now, but multiplied like rabbits in Australia, under Putin. The answer is banal. It directly follows from our analysis of the principal-agent model. I ask readers to return to the article "Corruption - 4. Interesting." And you will understand everything yourself: it's all about the instruments of external control over the bureaucracy. Under Yeltsin, they existed: a strong opposition; influential free press; freely working public organizations; The system of checks and counterweights, frail, skewed, but working. And the power itself was very transparent at that time. They could not reduce corruption, primarily because they did not do it. But they limited the sharp increase in corruption. Putin's regime destroyed these tools. The bureaucracy became uncontrollable and began to work in its main mass exclusively for itself. This determined the frantic increase in the scale of corruption, which abandoned us, together with our oil, rockets, billionaires in the backyard of modern civilization.

Specialists probably drew attention to the next gap of this text. Speaking about the causes of corruption, I did not say a word about the inefficiency of courts, law enforcement system, the Institute of Bankruptcy and other duty things, which can be read about in standard anti -corruption aids in sections explaining the causes of corruption. I agree with all these considerations. But the statement like “institute x works badly” is not a diagnosis; This is just an anamnesis. Just like the joyful words of the doctor after palpation: “And you have a friend’s liver at all!” From the first statement it follows that it is necessary to improve the work of the Institute X; From the second statement we can conclude that it is time to treat the liver. But in both cases the question arises: "How to do this?" I don’t know how it is in medicine. Maybe there you can treat the liver there without knowing the reasons for its pathology. But social pathologies cannot be treated without understanding their origins. And to harm is easier to simple. That is why I devoted all the last four articles to the indigenous reasons for our today's pathologies that determine the ineffective work of institutions, which in turn leads to an increase in corruption. We will see at the finish of the cycle how these reasoning work when we begin to discuss the capabilities and methods of counteracting corruption.

And the next two articles will be devoted to the negative consequences of corruption, the losses that we carry because of our indifference to it.

To be continued

Author - President of the Indem Foundation