How to think about corruption when talking about Asian businesses, and Asian tycoons. Part 4 of the Asian Conglomerate series.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/lets-talk-corruption
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/lets-talk-corruption
It means that one skill, present with all of these tycoons, is in reading the nature of power well, and in building alliances with the right group.
Just interesting to note, as someone outside the US, that even in a country with reasonably strong institutions, savvy businessman (cue: Zuck) turns their company’s policies around to align themselves with the current powers.
A logical question that I’ve been pondering: how does the US get stronger institutions over time? I imagine it doesn’t happen drastically.
What makes a country less corrupt over time?
And how is South Korea’s corruption story going?
I still remember the loud support for at-the-time presidential candidate Park Geun-hye in Seoul when I visited 10 years ago. Fast forward to today,
Former South Korean president Park Geun-hye was found guilty in 16 charges, including abuse of power and bribery, and was then imprisoned for 25 years.[4] Another former president Lee Myung-bak was also charged with corruption scandals involving major companies in 2018 and was sentenced to 17 years in jail.[5]
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I’m not a US citizen, so I’ll leave the commentary on what’s going on right now with Trump and Elon and the other CEOs to those who are more qualified to comment.
But I will say that I’ve read many business biographies of US history, and the development of strong institutions throughout the late 1800s to the 1950s was really quite something to see. It always happens in the background, and I’m not 100% sure how it happened. But it’s there. By the time you hit Katharine Graham’s biography, which is deeply intertwined with Washington machinery (her circles with filled with bright young men — it was mostly men — who wanted to serve in the government and make the country better), the US was already very good against corruption.
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The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter (1955) is good background reading on the development of U.S. institutions to pair with U.S. business biographies that overlap with ~1890-1940
It’s a retrospective look at the succession of U.S. political movements over that 50 year period (Populism, Progressivism, The New Deal) which, in part, reacted to and then targeted tycoons and business corruption
The book is 70 years old (good critiques of it are available) and it is political history (so not the best fit for Commoncog discussion) but it is fairly short and readable - a reasonable starting place for the curious
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Oh, thank you thank you thank you!
I was hoping someone would be able to give a book recommendation for this very topic.
Definitely not in scope for Commoncog, but I will want to read this.
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For a more general overview of how institutions develop and become stronger (or decay), I believe the best beginner’s guide is Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay. It’s kind of long but I basically developed 80% of my mental framework based on this. (maybe 15% on Mann’s stuff and 5% other)
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Seconded. They are HUGE books but well worth the time.
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