How to Make Power Less Corrupting: Post-Trump new ideas for keeping authoritarians out of the Oval Office--and the squad car.

• Date: 01 November 2021
• Author: Taub, Jennifer

Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

by Brian Klaas

Scribner, 320 pp.

Does power corrupt, or does it attract the already corrupt? Are scoundrels and tyrants created by corrupt institutions, or are they just born that way? With enough power, would almost any of us skim riches or torture enemies? These compelling questions are the centerpiece of Brian Klaas's Corruptible. To solve these and other puzzles about power, Klaas, a professor of global politics at University College London, travels the globe introducing some of the "cult leaders, war criminals, despots, coup plotters, torturers, mercenaries, generals, propagandists, rebels, corrupt CEOs, and convicted criminals" he has interviewed. The result is a fascinating look at how power is dispensed by heads of state, police forces, school administrators, and pretty much anyone else who has authority over others. His tour of rulership styles yields the depressing fact that humans being humans, tyrants will probably always be among us. But in the tradition of Nudge, authored by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, or The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, Klaas suggests ways in which we can steer people in the right direction. The U.S. Constitution was written in the belief that without checks and balances, tyrants would rise. (And the past four years show they can, even with a multitude of constitutional safeguards.) Klaas wants us to think about how we can make any abuse of power--not just, as the title may imply, forms of corruption such as bribery--less likely.

We eagerly drink in the details of his bistro conversation with a daughter of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the former dictator of the Central African Republic, who was rumored to have served human flesh to his guests. We share his amused disdain for petty tyrants like a school facilities director in Schenectady, New York, who plotted violence against his rivals and whistleblowers. It's not only stories, though. Klaas elucidates complex concepts, exposing readers, including this one, to scholarly research about human behavior that he draws on to address core questions about what leads to corruption. Such literature reviews can be excruciating in the hands of a dull author, but Klaas lays out the academic tableau clearly. He weaves together research about the Neolithic revolution with recent studies about gender bias when reviewing resumes. His historical examples are telling. King Leopold II's progressive reforms in Belgium in the...