Governance

Corruption and the Appearance of Corruption

A distinguished public official is discovered to have financial interests in a company that recently won a government contract. The official insists there is no connection between the two facts. An investigation is conducted. The investigation finds no direct evidence of a quid pro quo. The official is cleared.

And yet.

Something has been damaged that the clearance does not repair. The public’s confidence in the integrity of the process has been diminished, and that diminishment has real consequences that outlast the investigation, the news cycle, and the official’s tenure.

On the Useful Fiction of Utopia

People have been arguing about whether I meant Utopia literally since the day I published it. The answer – which I offered at the time, and which has been consistently ignored – is: that is not the right question.

The right question is not whether I believed a perfect society was achievable. I did not. The right question is whether the act of imagining one serves a purpose. It does, and the purpose is indispensable to political life.

The Distance Between the Podium and the Ground

There is a distance – measurable, observable, and damning – between the place where poverty is discussed and the place where poverty is lived.

At the podium, poverty is a policy challenge. It is a line item, a percentage, a target for reduction. It is discussed in terms of programs and metrics and five-year plans. The language is clean. The rooms are air-conditioned. The speakers are well-fed.

On the ground, poverty is a mother choosing which of her children eats today. It is a clinic with one doctor for four thousand people. It is a school where thirty students share ten textbooks, half of which are outdated. It is not a policy challenge. It is a daily negotiation with survival.