America, Compromised

by Lawrence Lessig Narrated by Stephen R. Thorne

Overview

"There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are." So begins Lawrence Lessig's sweeping indictment of contemporary American institutions and the corruption that besets them. We can all see it-from the selling of Congress to special interests to the corporate capture of the academy. Something is wrong. It's getting worse.



What Lessig shows, brilliantly and persuasively, is that we can't blame the problems of contemporary American life on bad people, as our discourse all too often tends to do. Rather, he explains, "We have allowed core institutions of America's economic, social, and political life to become corrupted. Not by evil souls, but by good souls. Not through crime, but through compromise." Through case studies of Congress, finance, the academy, the media, and the law, Lessig shows how institutions are drawn away from higher purposes and toward money, power, quick rewards-the first steps to corruption.



America is on the wrong path. If we don't acknowledge our own part in that, and act now to change it, we will hand our children a less perfect union than we were given. It will be a long struggle. This book represents the first steps.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

11/05/2018
In this provocative analysis, Harvard Law professor Lessig expands upon a series of lectures on “institutional corruption”: the notion that the presence of good people inside an institution is not a guarantee of it serving its intended purpose effectively and fairly. He asks readers to move beyond simplistically viewing ethics as “the project of naming the good and the right so as to rally us against the wrong.” He insists that the “greatest harm in our society” comes from the “moderately rich,” who enable evil by making and tolerating compromises in a variety of professions, including psychiatry and the academy, in pursuit of financial rewards. Lessig also argues that the profit motive has led private credit-rating agencies to shade their conclusions to maintain their clientele, the need to fund campaigns has resulted in undue political influence for donors, and individuals making practical financial decisions participate in these compromised systems. Lessig judiciously uses specifics to buttress his case, as when he reports that bank swipe-fees—the amount retailers pay when customers use debit cards—dominated Congress’s floor and committee time in 2011 “because it was lucrative for congressmen’s campaigns.” This treatise is a conversation-starter, not a guide to solutions; readers interested in those will find a more detailed and action-oriented analysis in Steven Brill’s Tailspin. (Oct.)

Norm Ornstein

"America, Compromised is about the country in the Trump era, but not about Trump. Indeed, Lessig would have written much the same book if Hillary Clinton were president and if Democrats had control of both houses of Congress. His focus is not on bad people doing bad things, but on how incentives across a range of institutions have created corruption, with deleterious consequences for the nation. . . . America, Compromised join[s] an impressive array of books and essays that may, someday, have a future intellectual historian using them as examples to lament the fact that his or her contemporaries are not as eloquent or important as the group that arose in the Trump era to combat the threats to our way of life."
 

Cory Doctorow

"Lessig lays out a working definition and theory of corruption that is at once simple and comprehensive, a devastating argument that America is racing for the cliff's edge of structural, possibly irreversible tyranny."
 

Library Journal

09/15/2018
Americans have lost trust in core institutions such as Congress, the media, higher education research, and the law, according to Lessig (Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law Sch.; Free Culture). He believes the cause is "institutional corruption" and charges that Americans themselves have compromised certain standards and are now facing the consequences. For example, Lessig reflects on the intention of the framers of the Constitution that Congress should be "dependent on the people alone" and laments that because Congress members are focused on raising campaign funds, it no longer meets that requirement. He examines how deregulation of investment ratings in banking oversight contributed to the 2008 financial crisis and how academic research has become dependent on outside grants from for-profit entities with an interest in obtaining favorable results for their products or services. In each analysis, Lessig recommends solutions to restore Americans' trust, but each requires attention and actions by citizens and organizations to demand accountability. VERDICT Readers concerned about the integrity of the country's core institutions will be enlightened—and perhaps even inspired to take action—by this erudite analysis.—Jill Ortner, SUNY Buffalo Libs.

Kirkus Reviews

2018-08-13

A Harvard law professor presents the case that America has become structurally compromised with a pervasiveness that transcends individual corruption.

In a book based on a series of lectures, Lessig (Republic Lost: 2.0, 2015), co-founder of Creative Commons, focuses on how the country's institutions are no longer serving the purposes for which they were designed. They have succumbed to third-party interests: wealthy, corporate, market forces, all of which have vested interests in helping the rich get richer. "My belief is that we have allowed core institutions of America's economic, social, and political life to become corrupted," writes the author. "Not by evil souls, but by good souls. Not through crime, but through compromise." In our current situation, wealth exerts its influence wherever such influence can manifest itself, from campaign financing that restricts the choices of candidates from which average Americans can choose to academic research funded for the benefit of those doing the funding. Lessig also shows how pharmaceutical companies have compromised the profession of psychiatry, promoting the dubious concept of "chemical imbalance" that can be balanced by prescription, and how market forces and technological disruption have transformed media in general and journalism in particular, catering to the appetite for junk food where democracy demands nourishment. The author is more convincing in his case against "institutional corruption" than in finding the solution. As he writes in the chapter on the media, where he suggests that journalism might better become more transparently partisan, some readers might think his proposal "seems just nuts." Similarly, his borrowing of a proposal for "deliberative polling"—leaving discussions of issues and nominations in the hands of 1,000 or so randomly selected yet representative participants—isn't likely to be adopted any time soon. Yet the book has value in showing how much that ails America isn't illegal or even unethical but systemic.

The diagnosis rings truer than the cures.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171045463
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/14/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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