I guess I’m engaging in the “ritual slaying of the elders” in which professors often indulge. Having gone after Paolo Mauro in an earlier post, here I want to take on (a small part) of Robert Klitgaard’s work.

Klitgaard, who is one of the giants of academic anticorruption research over the last half-century, once pithily (and influentially) summed up his perspective on the causes of corruption in a “corruption formula”: C = M + D – A, or (to put this back into words): “Corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus accountability.”  (The formula originally appeared in Klitgaard’s 1975 1988 book, Controlling Corruption.  You can find a more recent version here.)  Much as I respect Klitgaard’s work, I think this anticorruption “formula” is not merely trite, but affirmatively misleading and therefore dangerous.

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