The CRIMINOGENIC Environment

August 6, 2010

A criminogenic environment is a steal from pathology, a pathogenic environment, an environment that spreads disease. In this case, it’s an environment that spreads fraud. And there are two key elements. One we talked about. If you don’t regulate, you create a criminogenic environment because you can get away with the frauds. The second is compensation. And that has two elements. One is the executive compensation that people have talked about that creates the perverse incentives. But the second is for these professionals. And for the lower level employees, to give the bonuses. And it creates what we call a Gresham’s dynamic. And that just means cheaters prosper. And when cheaters prosper, markets become perverse and they drive honesty out of the market.

William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One (2005) teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri — Kansas City (UMKC).   He was the executive director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007.   He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

We now have the entitlement generation as CEOs.  They just plain feel entitled to being wealthy as Croesus with no responsibility, no accountability. They have become literal sociopaths. So one of the things is, you clean up business schools, which right now are fraud factories at the senior levels, right?

They create the new monsters that take control and destroy massive enterprises and cause global economic crises, cause the great recession. And very, very close to causing the second Great Depression. We just barely missed that. And there’s no assurance that we’ve missed it five years out.

Although Black focuses on financial corruption, the same “criminogenic environment controls healthcare, pharmaceuticals, housing, the media and local, state and federal legislators.

Moyers interviews William Black (2009)

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Moyers interviews William Black (2010)

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