The Ethics Recession:

Reflections on the Moral Underpinnings of the Current Economic Crisis

By Rushworth M. Kidder

Publisher: Institute for Global Ethics

Publication date: March 2, 2009

Price: $13.95, Paperback

Pages: 136

ISBN: 978-0-615-27535-2

Overview of THE ETHICS RECESSION

The book’s first section, titled “The Ethics Recession,” focuses sharply on the financial crisis itself—where it came from, how we can understand it, and how we get out of it.  Here, Kidder reflects on our progress in redefining ethics away from mere compliance and into values, and he comments on the sudden jolt that has shifted moral progress from an evolutionary to a revolutionary process.  He calls on us to respond to the crisis not simply by creating more ethical individual leaders but by building more ethical organizational cultures.  

His opening chapter—“It’s the Culture, Stupid!”—lists ten attributes of a “culture of integrity” essential for helping corporations and governments regain the public’s trust.  The closing chapter—“Fighting Ponzi with Ponzi?”—asks whether we are capable of “building a self-sustaining, steady-state economy,” or whether, like the eponymous Charles Ponzi of the 1920s, we are “shackled to a requirement for constant growth as the only way to keep our system afloat.”  Among our most useful tools, Kidder argues, may be “a caveat of inexplicable wealth—an instinct, intuition, or hunch that sends up warning signals whenever things look too good to be true.”  

In Section 2, “Ten Challenges,” Kidder identifies some specific mental constructs that impede our ethical progress.

• short-termism
• a compliance mentality
• endemic corruption
• uncontrolled technology
• lack of political will
• black-and-white polarizations
• deliberate anonymity
• workplace intimidation 
•  a tolerance for the high costs of low integrity
•  lousy decision making

“Until we get a handle on each of these challenges,” he writes, “we will not have addressed the fundamentals that drove us headlong into the ethics recession.”

Section 3, “Why Integrity Matters,” offers some reflections on what makes us care about ethics in the first place. It starts with a reading of the falling moral barometer, followed by a pair of chapters on two central questions for our age:  “Is Ethics Futile?” and “Why is the News So Negative?”  The chapters that follow seek to provide positive answers to those questions by sharing examples—some as large as Hurricane Katrina, others as small as a Maine garage—that elevate integrity, expand openness, and contemplate the possibility of perfection.