This past April I was fortunate enough to attend a wide-ranging discussion at the Stanford Business School of what the growing power of global capital and the declining trust in government institutions means for the future of capitalism and democracy.

Not surprisingly corruption emerged as a major theme.

Speakers examined everything from the failure of multinational corporations to enforce their own ethics codes to the rise of a profession devoted to helping corrupt officials hide stolen assets to the OCED’s failure to crack down on Italy’s breach of the Antibribery Convention.

A link to the conference papers is here. My summary of what was said about the transnational spread of corruption and measures to curb it, published on the ProMarket page of the University of Chicago’s Stigler Center, is here.

An extraordinary app, NotebookLM, converted the summary into a dialogue explaining the summary and exploring its implications.  It is here.( A physicist friend had raved about how NotebookLM made his technical papers understandable to lay audiences. I didn’t believe him until I heard the dialogue it created off the summary. I am astonished at the result.)