The September 23, 2014, Edmond J. Safra Lab seminar was presented by Network Fellow, Carla Miller, and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethic’s Research Director, Dr. William English. Comprised of two presentations, English’s segment of the Lab seminar, “Government Ethics: Past, Present, and Future” provided interesting perspectives on government ethics and education, while Miller’s presentation focused on her career as an ethics official in Florida and her efforts to address institutional corruption in local government. As a former Lab Fellow, English's research centers on the ethical foundations of social institutions, examining how organizations spread ethical cultures and to what extent professionalization accounts for development of ethical standards in institutions. Carla Miller brings decades of experience as an ethics officer in Jacksonville, Florida to the Center for Ethics. She is the Founder and President of CityEthics.org, a non-profit organization that offers online tools and resources to people who want to fight corruption in local government. As a Network Fellow, her work has focused on developing and disseminating tools to help municipalities fight institutional corruption based upon the Lab's research.
Dr. William English began his portion of the Lab seminar by discussing the significance of how institutions are organized in terms of the nature of rules and the organization of information. He explained that one of the most important things that institutions do is to create incentives, such as rewards and penalties; and that these are what tend to shape behavior, giving people the reasons to do or not do something. In this regard, education becomes important because people can only respond to incentives that they know about where it’s clear what actions bring censure or bring rewards.
Moving on, English discussed another significant area of institutions, one that is least understood in modern economics; it encompasses not necessarily formal incentives but a variety of informal norms such as ethical convictions that get people to behave in certain ways despite explicit monetary incentives. To demonstrate this, English played a hypothetical public goods game with several participants of the Lab seminar. In the game, players received $10 and had the opportunity to contribute any amount of their $10 to a public pot of money where the money would be doubled and then split among all the players, regardless of what they chose to contribute. Players kept any amount of the $10 they chose not to donate to the public fund. In the course of the game, which had four players, three players donated all of their $10, while one player chose to hold onto his $10. As a result, this one free rider came out on top with $25 after the public money was doubled and split four ways, while the other players only now had $15. But as English explained, if the game is played long enough, the contributions will eventually go down to zero, as other participants realize the one free rider is making out well; and when this happens, nothing is doubled, and people end up with the $10 they originally started out with. The game’s outcome offers a compelling model of how in social institutions, through some process, if all players contribute a reasonable effort or something normative to the institution as a whole, then all can do well. But there will also always be incentives at the margin for people to defect or maximize their own monetary interests, and at the margins they can get away with this, but over time this ends up causing the institution as a whole to fall apart. This raises the question of how to get people to adhere to a larger institution and its normative aims, despite marginal incentives to defect. One solution is found in the creation of professions, where a legal bar is set and expectations and rules are propagated setting certain professional standards needed to uphold the institution as a whole. Closing his portion of the Lab seminar, English presented empirical findings from various studies that demonstrated how positive ethics regulations that oversee government action, such as an ethics or profession surrounding government employees, might hold promise for making government work for the public good rather than the private good.
For the second portion of the Lab seminar, Carla Miller, an Edmond J. Safra Network Fellow, and President of City Ethics, a non-profit organization that offers online tools and resources to people who want to fight local government corruption, presented on her efforts to develop a set of practical tools for municipal government based on the work of the Lab. Miller began by talking about her background efforts as a Vietnam war activist and her involvement in the women’s liberation movement, explaining how through this work she learned that government can sometimes be unresponsive to people and people need to be mobilized to fight for change. In light of this insight, she chose to attend law school shortly after college. After graduating from law school, she began work as a federal prosecutor in Jacksonville, Florida, which exposed her to a pervasive culture of corruption in local government. After observing many cases hundreds of cases of corruption, and prosecuting elected officials, Miller went into private practice. She successfully lobbied the mayor of Jacksonville to start an ethics commission, which she headed as a volunteer, writing ethics codes and delivering ethics training. This in turn led to the development of her website CityEthics.org, which serves as a national ethics resource for cities. Eventually, these efforts led to the opportunity of becoming the first paid city ethics officer for the city of Jacksonville. To her disappointment, once in office, she met immediate political resistance in her efforts to overhaul lobbying regulations. During this same time, however, Miller uncovered that the mayor’s office was attempting to quietly pass into legislation a $750 million landfill deal without opening the contract up for a public bid, a story that was then picked up by the press and led to the deal’s eventual demise. Miller continued with this segment of the presentation giving an overview of some of the various ethics reforms she’s spearheaded over the years and her success in creating an independent ethics commission for the city of Jacksonville, free from the influence of the Mayor’s office and elected officials.
Closing her presentation, Miller discussed the need for ethics overhauls in cities nationally, and covered some of the problems that will need to be addressed in order to achieve reform. She explained that there’s much confusion when it comes to ethics at the local level in the U.S. and this is partly due to a heavy emphasis on the law. Further, institutional corruption is still not even recognized as a concept. In addition to these problems, ethics trainings and programs are delivered to people who come in with the attitude that they are already ethical, and therefore do not take the training seriously. Moreover, ethics programs also tend to have definitional problems, where people cannot differentiate between key concepts such as conflicts of interest, institutional corruption, general corruption, and various crimes. In closing, she argued that ethics departments need to be proactive about incorporating findings from contemporary research, such as that of the Lab’s, into their programs to make them more relevant. There is a gap between academia and practitioners; most practitioners do not know about current research that would be helpful to their programs and would have no way to access the academic research even if they wanted to. Miller wants to summarize this academic research and post on her site, www.cityethics.org and will do so during her fellowship.