Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

David Callahan

Author, Commentator, Lecturer, and Think-Tank Founder, Senior Fellow at Demos, a public policy group based in New York City, Editor of the blog and media site CheatingCulture.com, best known as author of The Cheating Culture and The Moral Center

"Cheating thrives where unfairness reigns, along with economic anxiety. It thrives where government is the weak captive of wealthy interests and lacks the will to do justice impartially. It thrives where money and success are king, and winners are fawned over whatever their daily abuses of power."

"I started writing the Cheating Culture few years ago when the corporate scandals like Enron and WorldCom exploded onto the headlines. Reading the papers, I was struck by the fact that so many respectable executives – upstanding citizens, by any measure -- were implicated in wrongdoing. In fact, the scandals involved not just a few bad apples in a few rogue companies, but hundreds of corporate leaders. As well as top accountants, investments bankers, and lawyers. I wondered what is going on here. Many explanations for the scandals focused on institutional causes, like the way that corporate boards had been filled with cronies or the failure of independent auditors to blow the whistle or changes in compensation practices that had loaded up CEOs with too many stock options. Clearly, all these were important. But the explanation for the scandals that intrigued me most came from business executives of an earlier era, the so-called greatest generation who had run corporations in the 1960s and 1970s. What I heard from these former CEOs is that corporate America had become so corrupt because our nation’s values had broadly changed over recent decades. And that, simply put, greed and dishonesty had become more acceptable at the highest levels of U.S. society, and particularly in business. "

"Beyond looking all the corporate scandals – the worst scandals we’ve seen since the Robber Baron era a century ago – I looked at cheating by more ordinary people. For instance, I learned that tax evasion in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past decade. It’s now about $350 billion a year. I learned that theft or fraud by employees is the single biggest form of crime in the United States. It adds up to over $600 billion a year. I know that problem is also quite acute here in Canada. I learned that ethics of many doctors are not what they should be, that pharmaceutical companies often use money and gifts to tempt doctors to neglect the interests of their patients. I learned that we might as well just erase from the computers all baseball statistics from the past decade, given the explosion of steroids in major league baseball. And I learned that cutting corners started very early indeed. According to surveys, between two-thirds and three quarters of U.S. high school and university students admit to some cheating. Earlier this year, the first major study of cheating among Canadian students wa"

"If we want a more ethical society, we need to create a fairer society. When people believe in the rules, they’re more likely to follow them. It’s that simple. C"

"The research on these programs suggest that they help young people think outside their own narrow self-interest and focus more on the common good.. What we need to now is to scale up these efforts to a much larger level. Is to naïve to imagine that we can change the values of young people and thus change the culture more broadly? I don’t think so. Not at all. Time and time again, through history, we’ve seen young people play a pivotal role in ushering in new eras of idealism and reform. And when – not if – we see the backlash to this recent era of corruption and cynicism take full flower, I guarantee that young people will again be on the forefront of efforts to change the culture. And more than anything perhaps, this is a reason to be optimistic about the future. "