The Cheating Culture

Though a familiar tale—greed and graft on Wall Street, lying and scandals throughout government—The Cheating Culture is likely to disturb even the hardened cynic. In this deeply researched work with well-chosen anecdotes and big-picture statistics, David Callahan portrays cheating not as a last ditch alternative, resorted to under severe pressure, but as a fi rst response, so natural, well-integrated and ordinary that it no longer registers as problematic. Cheating, according to Callahan, is as prosaic as it is pervasive. While the debacles at WorldCom, Merrill Lynch, and Enron aren’t news, how about 82 percent of corporate executives admitting to cheating on the golf course? Cheating in schools is also an old story, but how about 95 percent of college-age kids willing to fake a resume? Lawyers are padding their billing hours, doctors are getting kickbacks to push drugs for “off-label” use, accountants are cooking the books, employees are faking expense accounts, and the IRS is estimated to lose $500 billion a year (and climbing) through unpaid taxes. “Again and again,” Callahan laments, “Americans who wouldn’t so much as shoplift a pack of chewing gum are committing felonies at tax time, betraying the trust of their parents, misleading investors, ripping off their insurance company or lying to their clients.” The reason for this, writes Callahan, is that the market economy has become a “Leviathan.” It dominates our ethics and controls our behavior. The outcome is ruthless competition, severe economic anxiety, enormous temptations, and, at the bottom of the scale, anger at being squeezed out. The pressure to cheat is overwhelming. Gating the impulses are only frail moral standards and meager to no punishments. As is often the case, the book’s obligatory prescriptions are less impressive than its diagnoses. Callahan’s proposed reforms—a new social contract (providing a decent minimum wage, greater support for education, adequate medical care, livable communities, enforcement of anti-corruption laws, lessening the infl uence of money in government, and dampening our obsessive consumerism), government and professionally enforced codes of conduct, and teaching ethics from cradle to grave—may strike many readers as Panglossian. A reader may also object to Callahan’s “liberal” analysis and want to substitute alternative explanations—loss of the traditional family that countered market forces, decline in religious allegiance, rise of self-indulgence, and relativism. What remains after the objections, however, is Callahan’s convincing and ominous portrayal of a society where honor and trust have collapsed.