On his book The Despot's Guide to Wealth Management: On the International Campaign against Grand Corruption
Cover Interview of November 19, 2017
In a nutshell
Twenty years ago, if a leader from a
country like Nigeria looted billions of dollars from his own country and
stashed the money in the United States, the US had no moral or legal duty to do
anything about it. Now, however, there is an international, moral, and legal
rule prohibiting one country from hosting money stolen by the leader of another
country. In response, the book asks three questions. First, why is there a new
prohibition on hosting foreign corruption proceeds? Second, how well does this
new rule work? Third, given that there is still a lot of this kind of dirty
money crossing borders, how could we make this rule more effective?
Most studies of corruption are about how
money is taken; this book is about where it ends up. The kind of corruption I
am interested in is kleptocracy. Literally, in a ‘rule by thieves,’ leaders and
their families take huge sums of money from the countries they rule, often
further impoverishing some of the poorest populations in the world. Usually, most
of this money does not stay at home. Instead, corrupt rulers either spend or
stash their ill-gotten gains in places like London, New York, or Switzerland.
The new rules aim to break this cycle of looting, laundering, and
under-development by following the money trail, seizing illicit wealth, and
trying to return it to the victims.
In The Despot’s Guide to Wealth
Management, I argue that the new rules to counter kleptocracy potentially represent
a huge change. Many, perhaps most, state leaders are corrupt, so the world effort
to hold them accountable is a sea-change in the conduct of diplomacy and international
politics. But the gnawing doubt is that the rules aren’t really working.
Leaders are continuing to steal, and their tainted funds are still ending up in
the four host countries that I studied in detail: the United States, the United
Kingdom, Switzerland, and Australia.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Twenty years ago, if a leader from a country like Nigeria looted billions of dollars from his own country and stashed the money in the United States, the US had no moral or legal duty to do anything about it. Now, however, there is an international, moral, and legal rule prohibiting one country from hosting money stolen by the leader of another country. In response, the book asks three questions. First, why is there a new prohibition on hosting foreign corruption proceeds? Second, how well does this new rule work? Third, given that there is still a lot of this kind of dirty money crossing borders, how could we make this rule more effective?
Most studies of corruption are about how money is taken; this book is about where it ends up. The kind of corruption I am interested in is kleptocracy. Literally, in a ‘rule by thieves,’ leaders and their families take huge sums of money from the countries they rule, often further impoverishing some of the poorest populations in the world. Usually, most of this money does not stay at home. Instead, corrupt rulers either spend or stash their ill-gotten gains in places like London, New York, or Switzerland. The new rules aim to break this cycle of looting, laundering, and under-development by following the money trail, seizing illicit wealth, and trying to return it to the victims.
In The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Management, I argue that the new rules to counter kleptocracy potentially represent a huge change. Many, perhaps most, state leaders are corrupt, so the world effort to hold them accountable is a sea-change in the conduct of diplomacy and international politics. But the gnawing doubt is that the rules aren’t really working. Leaders are continuing to steal, and their tainted funds are still ending up in the four host countries that I studied in detail: the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Australia.