Speaker 1: It's great to have back on the program today, Brian Klaas, who's an associate
professor of global politics at University College London and also author of the new
book Corruptible Who Gets Power and How It Changes US.
Bryan, always great to talk to you.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: So, you know, when we think about something like who obtains power in in society,
we could even narrow it down and say, in kind of western democracies, in capitalist western
democracies, there's a lot of different approaches we can look at.
We can look at sort of psychological factors and personality factors about individuals.
We can talk about, you know, the leg up that the economic circumstances that one is born
into might play as a factor.
We could talk about the role of media.
So many different things.
What are some of the or maybe the most important filters through which we can start to think
about who ends up holding power in society?
Speaker 4: Yes.
So I think that the most of the debate around people in power is like a tip of the iceberg
problem where we tend to focus almost all of our attention on the people who are actually
in power, the ones who we can see right at the top of the iceberg.
And the real problem I think we have is underneath the surface, which is the people who don't
seek power.
And so, you know, you think about like a high school basketball team, you never expect that
basketball team to be a representative sample of height in the school.
There's a certain group of people that are going to try out for the team.
The same is obviously true with power.
Now I've looked, you know, the book draws on a wide variety of research, from evolutionary
biology to neuroscience and psychology and so on.
So I started to ask people who study this Is there a power gene?
Is there something in us that causes us to seek power?
And there is a study that shows a significant correlation between a specific gene and people
who end up in power.
But we can't say whether that's because they have certain traits.
They're more outgoing, they're more affable, whatever.
But we do have some evidence that there is some genetic basis to power attainment.
And then of course, you filter that through all the stuff in society where, you know,
I mean, it's obvious that white men are have an easier time getting power in Western democracies,
but also that we seek certain things in our rulers.
And this ranges from everything from evolutionary psychology where we look at, you know, why
is it that we turn to strongman in times of crises?
To this amazing study, I found about basically asking children to pick someone to captain
their imaginary ship and this computer simulation?
And they basically are shown two faces, and there's no other information given they pick
one of the faces to be the captain.
What they don't know is that the two faces are the winner and the runner up of the French
parliamentary elections.
And with astonishing accuracy, they tend to pick the winner, which reflects this horrible
truth that often we have such superficial assessments when we pick leaders.
So there are dozens of reasons why this happens.
But I think we have to acknowledge the problem and the self-selection that goes into power
before we can actually fix it.
Speaker 1: With some of these things, there would be sort of a legitimate question to
ask about.
It's sort of like a chicken egg thing, and I'll explain what I mean when we think about
the alleged corrupting influence of power.
It's often said that absolute power corrupts.
But is there something about corrupt people who are already corrupt predisposed to put
themselves in those positions that kind of reverses the causation?
Speaker 4: Yes, I'll answer it in two ways.
The first is that there's this.
There's this other study that I found phenomenal where it basically asks people to roll the
dice, and it says if you roll a six, you get more money.
If you roll a one, you get no money, right?
So there's an incentive to lie about it.
So they, you know, there's variations of how many people cheat in this, basically.
But what they found was that when they ran this study in corrupt countries like in India,
where being a civil servant is somewhere where you can get off the books pay.
Yeah.
What happened was the people who lied about their dice rolls were disproportionately likely
to want to become civil servants.
They did this at a school.
If you do the exact same study in somewhere like Denmark, it's exactly the opposite.
The people who report their stores, their scores completely, honestly, they're the ones
who want to go into public service.
So a corrupt system draws in corrupt people, and a clean system draws in clean people.
So the system really, really matters.
I talk about this actually in an essay I have out in the Atlantic today with policing in
the United States.
So there's this there's this phenomenon that I think doesn't get enough attention when
we talk about body cameras and trying to change what the police do with police reforms, and
we have to think about who the police are and who wants to become a police officer.
So, you know, I looked at this ad that was used for recruitment in Doraville, Georgia.
There's this town of 10000 people outside Atlanta, Atlanta, and it's I mean, it's a
caricature, right?
It's literally like these guys in a tank driving through in the sort of, you know, the Punisher
logo is flashing on screen about vigilante justice that.
Ross, smoke grenades out, that's you know, that's the image of policing.
I talked to New Zealand's police force and they basically tried to counteract this, so
they ran a multi-year recruitment scheme that use funny videos, made policing look enjoyable.
All about public service had lots of women and ethnic minorities in it, and their applications
shot through the roof for non through the roof for nontraditional officers and their
abuse levels fell at the same time.
So, you know, I think that there is an acknowledgment we have to make that the way we perceive systems
of power really, really matters for who seeks it.
And it's why I'm particularly worried about what's happening in the US right now with
these insane zealots threatening school board members for, you know, mask mandates and so
on.
Yeah, because they're making public service toxic and they're going to ensure that good,
decent people just simply self-select out of systems of power and that we're left with
the people who the insane zealots basically agree with
Speaker 1: putting their hat in the ring, right?
You have that issue.
You also have I mean, it's not necessarily related to what we're talking about here,
but I've pointed out that those who want to hurt public education funded through taxes
love the school board stuff because they see it as, Hey, if if these schools seem really
chaotic, it might encourage parents to say, I'm pulling my kid out, I'm going to do home
schooling, private school, whatever.
Which will, of course, further weaken schools and sort of sort of exacerbate.
Let's go back a little bit to the police thing, because that's interesting.
And you've talked about that there recently.
Two stories on policing have sort of come together.
One is what was sort of increased by the George Floyd protests and questions of police brutality
and bad apples that spoil the that spoil the bunch, et cetera.
We also have the anti-vaccine stuff which is leading to it really doesn't seem like
more than one percent in the worst cases of officers leaving, you know, 34 officers in
New York City out of 36000.
A few emails that came in, people said, Hey, you know, when we talk about the bad apples
that spoil the bunch on the police brutality stuff, it might be the same people who are
now leaving because of the vaccine stuff.
This could be a blessing in disguise.
But that's not really a strategy for dealing with this issue of policing.
What is your sense of?
You know, there's the reform movement.
There is the Defund movement, there's all these different ideas and approaches.
You mentioned one in New Zealand.
That was a very different approach.
How should we be thinking about Big Picture, the issue of policing in the United States
and who is doing the policing?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
So I mean, the stuff I talked about in New Zealand is a first step, which is to say you
need to make the police appealing to normal decent people who want to serve the public
that don't have a military background.
Right?
Veterans are overrepresented in the police dramatically in the US by design, by the way.
And that's not necessarily a problem.
It's just that, you know, if you think that your job is the same as when you were patrolling
in Fallujah, when you're in Ferguson, that's going to be an issue.
You're going to be more likely to be a little trigger happy and so on.
And we need a lot more community officers that have no background in the military and
actually don't want power.
So the recruitment is part of it.
There's other stuff I write about in the book that's about how you sort of deter abuses
for people once they're in power.
You know, I think it is easier to recruit good apples than it is to make bad apples
behave better.
But we do have bad apples in the police.
So what are we going to do?
One of the keys is rotation, so there's a lot of studies that look at how comfort and
sort of closed systems create abuse.
Hmm.
So in police, for example, this is the sort of blue wall of silence and the sort of your
partner will always have your back, even if you're doing something really illegal and
abusive.
So the Metropolitan Police in London, for example, did some work of rotating partners
through regularly, and it had really good results.
And there's also loads of psychological research where you have participants play games basically
in which they can collude in order to win money.
And if you work with the same person through multiple rounds of the game, the odds that
you're going to try to give bribes to win the game go massively through the roof compared
to if you're constantly rotating people through because you have, you know, this sort of fresh
face that you don't know is necessarily on your side.
And interestingly, this data shows the same thing whether they run it in Germany or China
or the U.S..
So, you know, I have at the end of the book, there's this section on 10 ways to fix the
problem.
And they're basically things that all need to happen because there's no silver bullet.
This is a massive problem.
But the point that I'm trying to make here is that we don't think about systems of power
enough this way.
We have to design every single system from the police to politics with the assumption
which is true.
By the way, the bad people are disproportionately likely to seek power, disproportionately likely
to get it and disproportionately likely to be able to stay in it longer than they should.
And so once you take that as the starting point, then you redesign the system and think,
how can we invert that?
And I think nothing has been tried.
I mean, that's the thing that I find so maddening is that all of the debates around police.
I mean, there's some defund movements and so on that have their ideas about, you know,
fundamentally transforming.
Policing, but the rest of them, body camera, I mean, it's a good idea.
But is that really going to solve the problem?
There's a thousand people who are getting killed by cops in the United States every
year.
In New Zealand, there's about a dozen a decade, maybe less than that.
So obviously the population is different, but we have a massive, massive problem on
our hands and I don't think around the edges reforms are going to solve it.
Speaker 1: What are the different fields in which these dynamics are a problem?
And I think police is one that gets a lot of attention.
Politicians and, you know, psychopathy predispositions is sometimes talked about.
I think corporate CEOs is one that gets discussion.
We don't hear about this dynamic among postal workers or nurses, for example.
So like, what are the other fields where these dynamics show up more?
Speaker 4: Well, it's it's very interesting you ask that, because there's there's two
sections in the book where I try to bring this dynamic much closer to home.
And there's one which is a really crazy story about this guy named Steve Rucci, who is a
psychopathic custodian, interconnected in New York and in order to raise rise through
the ranks in his school district, did some crazy stuff.
I mean, he started using explosives and all these years in jail for a very long time now.
And that job, that was just his personality traits so that if you have a psychopath who's
power hungry, you put them in anywhere and they're going to try to rise through the ranks
through any means necessary.
But there's actually, as you say, a trait to this that is disproportionately selective
in certain jobs.
So politics is an obvious one.
But also one that's really interesting is a place where you have power for the sake
of power with no real other benefits.
So I explore this with homeowners associations.
There's a great, a great series of stories that I've discovered and characters that are
very interesting people who basically, you know, it's like this horrible job where you
spend your time trying to impose fines on somebody down the block who put their been
out, you know, 10 minutes too early or something on a Sunday.
Who's that going to appeal to when the pay is either nonexistent or terrible?
Well, it's the person who's power hungry and can't fulfill that.
In another area of life.
So those types of positions are also magnets for power abusers, which is why you get what
we call the petty tyrants effect.
The person who rules over a completely insignificant domain but is going to abuse every possible
ounce of power that they have.
And I think that's something that a lot of people experience in their daily lives
Speaker 1: as a as a general rule are the approaches that are more likely or have worked
more effectively about, as you mentioned with police, it's higher good apples rather than
convert it.
Does that apply universally?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
You sort of need to do all of the above, to be honest, because the problem is not just
the individual, it's also the system, right?
I mean, if you have a good person who goes into a rotten police department, they're going
to probably behave in a rotten way.
And one of the more unusual things that I did that might be of interest here, your viewers
and listeners is I took a ski lesson with Paul Bremer, who ran Iraq in 2003, and now
he's a ski instructor in Vermont or not.
So he's an interesting case study because, you know, a lot of people see him as the villain,
and I understand completely why I mean what he did in 2003.
You know, the record speaks for itself.
But what's interesting about him is that he was previously an ambassador to Malawi and
Norway, and it appears that he did a very good job.
I mean, across most people think that he was really effective and sort of had lots of integrity
in that position and so on.
And then he goes into Iraq, where everything is broken and he's basically, you know, a
de facto viceroy of a dictatorship.
And all of a sudden, everything he has to do is these awful decisions with morally dubious
consequences and so on.
And so I think one of the things that we also have to acknowledge, it's not to absolve people
who do bad things in positions of power, it's that it's more complicated sometimes than
it initially appears and that the system also needs our attention because, you know, I like
to think that I would behave well no matter what.
But you know, you see the evidence from around the world and you take people and put them
in new systems and they do behave in different ways.
There's a study of bankers in Italy where southern Italy is known as being more corrupt
in northern Italy.
Yes.
And the employees who move between the same bank but different branches start embezzling
at higher rates if they're in the south.
So, you know, there's things like that where we can see that it's both the individual and
the system that need our attention.
Speaker 1: This may seem like a sort of divergence, but but I think it could be an interesting
one.
The role of power within other species within the animal kingdom.
What do we know that mirrors Homo sapiens and what?
What differences are there?
Speaker 4: Yes, a great question.
It's one of the most enjoyable parts of the research because, you know, I'm a political
scientist, so I don't spend a lot of time with people who study hyenas and bees and
primates and so on.
But I did for the book.
Yeah, and it was really, really fascinating.
Primates are a great window for us because it's similar in terms of some of the brain
functions and some social structures without the culture.
Right.
And so you can look at how power affects individuals is an amazing study.
I interviewed a professor and doctor out in North Carolina who looks at hierarchy and
drug addiction in macaque monkeys.
Hmm.
And one of the craziest things is that when you basically give monkeys, you put them in
groups of four.
They instantly form a hierarchy from one to four, and then you offer them the choice between
cocaine.
When they push a button and they get intravenous cocaine or banana pellets, they push a different
button and they get banana pellets.
And what's what's amazing about this is that every time you run this study, the top two
monkeys, the one.
Those that are on the top of the hierarchy don't take the cocaine, they take the banana
parts, the ones who are on the bottom basically self-medicate.
Hmm.
And this happens even if the alpha male in this group gets reassigned to another group
of four and then ends up on the bottom, all of a sudden, the exact same thing happens,
so it doesn't matter about the individual.
I also looked at corruption in, believe it or not, bees and wasps.
And it's an amazing story about systems and individual behavior.
I won't go into the whole story, but basically the gist of it is the way the Hive is set
up between different kinds of species of wasps, whether it's transparent or not, whether it's
easy to detect wrongdoing or not by what are actually called police wasps or police bees,
that has a massive, massive effect on how selfish the behavior of the individual wasp
or bias.
And I think these lessons that we have from the animal kingdom are actually quite instructive
because most of the time when we talk about these problems, we're talking about them within
the silos of Democrats and Republicans.
Yeah.
And sometimes it's worth stripping that away and saying, OK, there's some universal lessons
that we can learn, and we might as well draw them from wherever we can, even if it's from
an unexpected place.
Speaker 1: That's super interesting.
Yeah.
And and not that long ago, I read Jared Diamond's book The Third Chimpanzee, which also talks
a lot about sort of the parts that are analogous and parts that are not between humans and
chimpanzees.
And there's there's a lot of different layers to that that you don't really see if the focus
is like American Partizan.
Politics, I guess, is the point that you're making.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think that there's some problems in society that actually can
be solved, right?
I mean, I think we focus on so much stuff that is the Partizan battle of the day, which
makes complete sense.
Yeah, but we can actually make systems of power behave better for all of us.
And that requires some outside the box thinking that might have reference points that aren't
our typical culture wars.
Right?
You know, it's hard to get worked up about, you know, somebody making a point about wasp
corruption, for example.
It's not exactly going to rile you up in the same way.
So and so I think we can draw these lessons.
The other point that I make, by the way, is I, as part of the research for this book I
interviewed, I met with lots of really awful people.
I met with lots of former despots, war criminals, all sorts around the world.
And one of the points that I often make is you would find it super weird if somebody
who was an expert on hyenas never encountered a hyena, never studied one, never went up
to one and observed it.
And yet there's a lot of stuff in politics where these monsters among us still are living,
breathing and willing to talk to people.
So I went to study them to figure out what makes them tick and what power does to them.
And I think we need to do more of that because these problems are preventable.
But we have to sort of strip away some of the sort of preconceptions or revulsion that
we have and start to think, OK, we're stuck with some of these people.
How can we make them behave better?
How can we replace them?
How can we make sure that better people follow them?
And that requires some sort of outside the Partizan frame thinking, I think
Speaker 1: the book is corruptible, who gets power and how it changes us?
We've been speaking with the book's author, Brian Klaas.
Brian, so great talking about this and always really appreciate your time.
Speaker 4: Thanks, David.
Thanks for having me.