The Temptation Test
Corporate employees are less corrupt than government employees, someone said. Are they?
Whenever I am sitting with bunch of folks, someone will complain about the breathtaking corruption of government officials, the bribes, the delays, the maddening abuse of power. In the next breath, they’ll hold up their own world, the corporate world, as a kind of model. “We work hard,” they’ll say, “we compete, we build things. We aren’t like that.”
On the surface, it seems true. Your average software engineer or marketing manager isn’t demanding bribes to do their job. But comparing the two and concluding that one group is inherently more virtuous than the other is a mistake. It’s a flaw in the test itself. What we’re really talking about is not a difference in character, but a difference in opportunity structure. Think of it as a system’s “corruption attack surface.”
A government clerk’s job is to be a gatekeeper, giving them a massive attack surface for bribes. A software engineer has almost none; they have no regulatory power to sell. Claiming moral superiority for avoiding a temptation you never faced is meaningless. It’s like a designer who only uses pre-built libraries boasting about their bug-free code.
If you want a fair test, compare those who face similar temptations: a senior bureaucrat who can write policy and a C-suite executive who can award a nine-figure contract. At that level, opportunities for wholesale corruption. Lobbying, fraud, are rife in both worlds. The corporate world suddenly looks less pristine.