16 April 2002, 929 words
Whether they are found guilty or not, the arrests of the Big Six could well signal the end of official corruption in our society. In saying this, I am making an argument based not only on social intuition, but also on mathematical logic.
Intuition suggests that such high-profile arrests send two important messages: one, that money and power do not place you above the law; and, two, that the society as a whole wants honesty rather than corruption to be the norm.
The mathematics of game theory suggests that, once a society starts down this path, the elimination of corruption is logically inevitable. This has been demonstrated by game theorist Ross Hammond, who in 1999 created an artificial society to model social corruption.
Hammond's artificial society ("A-society") worked like this. It was populated with two kinds of agents: citizens and bureaucrats. Each time a citizen met a bureaucrat, they had a transaction. If both agents were corrupt, both got a payoff. If both were honest, neither got anything under the table. But if an honest agent met a corrupt one, the honest agent reported the corrupt one to an unseen policing authority and the corrupt agent went to jail.
Where Hammond departed from conventional game theory was in making each agent an individual, in that each had different levels of corruption or honesty and each had its own network of friends. Moreover, no agent knew how many reports of corruption would put it in jail, nor how many other agents were corrupt or honest, or what most other agents were doing.
This meant that Hammond's program mimiced the real world more accurately than conventional programs, since most such programs assume that each agent is exactly alike and has complete knowledge of its world. (Standard social science theory, including politics and economics, makes exactly the same wrong assumptions.)
When Hammond ran his program, he found that his A-society always became honest in the long run. It didn't matter what parameters Hammond put in at the start, once the basic rules weren't changed. The societies took different lengths of time to become honest but, counter-intuitively, became so even when the society started off as mostly corrupt.
Economist Jonathan Rauch, in an article about A-societies in the April issue of Atlantic Monthly, explains Hammond's results like this: "Every so often, in the course of random events, a particularly large number of corrupt agents, who happen to have particularly large number of friends who perhaps themselves have large social networks, will be arrested. That, Hammond figures, has a double-barreled effect: it leads a lot of agents to notice that many of their friends are under arrest, and it also increases the likelihood that they will encounter an honest agent in their next transaction."
This creates a feedback loop. The corrupt agents become afraid of being arrested also and so act more honestly and, by acting honestly, they increase the chances of corrupt agents being arrested. "Soon - in fact, almost instantly - so many agents are behaving honestly that corruption ceases to pay, and everyone turns honest," Rauch writes.
In game theory jargon, this sudden change of behaviour is called 'tipping'. And, whatever the limitations of a computer program in reflecting the real world, it is clear that our society is now in the process of tipping. Fascinatingly, other game theory programs suggest that it can take very little to make a society tip.
One program modeled business organisations with agents who were either workaholics or idlers. As the A-firms grew, the addition of just one idler was often enough to make an entire company collapse. Ditto for programs which modeled genocide: just a slight increase in ethnic hostility was sufficient to tip the A-society from stability into a pattern resembling Rwanda or the Balkans.
Reading Rauch's article, several things struck me. One was that much of what was said about how A-societies act echoed arguments made by Lloyd Best about "small interventions" which would, in the fullness of time, have large effects.
Another was the danger posed by the political promotion of ethnicity, as practised by the Sat Maharaj's Maha Sabha or Selwyn Cudjoe's NEAAP, as well as the danger of additional social cleavages caused by fundamentalist Christianity and Islam.
I was also struck by the effect individual action has on the whole society. Not only does an individual's honesty or corruption help determine the norms of the society, but some A-society programs also show that key individuals can have large effects on a society.
The individual I immediately thought of in this context was DPP Mark Mohammed, whose hard-working integrity has almost certainly had more than just obvious repercussions. (By the same token, however, Mohammed's elevation to judge could reverse the trend, unless his successor proves to have comparable ethics and efficiency.) SC Martin Daly also came to mind, as a prominent individual who has stepped out of his crease: in itself a sign of tipping and, simultaneously, an aid to it.
But are we tipping in the right direction? The arithmetic of our public life is not encouraging, especially when you remember that the ethical waffling of the Independent Senators represents the norm of our leading citizens. But it is not public figures alone who tip a society. Even in simple A-societies, it is impossible to make predictions about what interventions would have what consequences. This is also something Best pointed out long ago, and he has also suggested the only rational strategy in such a situation: "play for change".
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh