Neoliberal orthodoxy defines corruption as existing only in the public sector

Evidence

Another major reason the economics profession has managed to dodge the bullet of the crisis is that its default stance toward conflicts of interest is much closer to that of the financial industry than academic biomedicine in the grand continuum of professional governance. Orthodox economists tend to see nothing wrong with conflicts of interest, since they have generally subscribed to the precept that market arrangements are capable in principle of monitoring, restricting, and resolving any such conflicts in the course of normal operation. Readers of this volume will recognize this as a corollary of the basic neoliberal precept that the market is a superior information processor to any other human or institutional intermediary when it comes to the revelation of knowledge. This has the curious implication that, whenever the economic orthodoxy has written about the “problem of corruption,” it parsed the problem as besetting only those individuals working in the public sector. Since everyone else employed in the private marketplace is known to be motivated by private gain, and the market turns that into public welfare, then by definition, there are no conflicts of interest in the private sector, only lax imposition of contractual protections. As usual, MPS economist Gary Becker boiled this down to a pithy epigram in his Business Week column: “if we abolish the state, we abolish corruption.” — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 595

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The move is dense and paradigm-level: because the market is idealized as a superior information processor, conflicts of interest are definitionally impossible in the private sector — a self-sealing belief that explains why the economics profession never saw its own crisis contribution.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘If we abolish the state, we abolish corruption’ — how a single theoretical precept immunized an entire profession against recognizing private-sector conflicts of interest.
• XREF: Connects to the market-as-information-processor motif throughout Hayekian/MPS thought (emerging markets efficient).