1. ” in Washington I wasn’t ever smart enough to predict them [ethics rules]. . . things that seemed very ethical to me were thought of as problematic and things that seemed quite problematic to me were thought of as perfectly fine. . . .”

Further evidence, if any is needed, that economists simply do not understand normal human behavior. Economics is an academic study of some alien species, not any human society we know.

2. Jeffrey Sachs seems to have moved on from his Russian experiences: He now seems to be saying that corruption in Africa is nothing to get upset about.

3. Is nepotism necessarily bad? The best US Attorney-General in the 20th century was the President’s own brother.

May I also recommend her Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 1998, 2001)?

I don’t know—that’s how I feel about lobbying rules. My trade association can give someone $100,000 for his election campaign, and publish a list of “most important goals for the next legislative session”—but if I buy him dinner at Outback, its an “appearance of corruption”? Huh?

Myself? Freely admit to being in the know nothing school. Started out there in offshore programming, about which I knew nothing, distributed newspapers, about which less and ended up in the metals trade, about which now I know a lot but then nothing. Put me in the chancers section, a group not directly mentioned above.

Tomorrow will be fine.

“Moscow by then was crowded with foreigners eager to help Russia and get in on the ground floor of a great social and economic change. Entrepreneurs, consultants, lawyers, bankers and academics with foundation grants, as well as fast-buck artists and swindlers from all over the world, swarmed across Russia looking for a piece of the action.”

Certainly got that right although I refuse to comment on which group I belonged to.

The taxation stuff was norml for the time, being paid offshore etc, girlfriends on the company payroll? Standard practice for both western and Russian firms.

Worth noting that others not part of the Harvard gang did very well by being honest and legal (Berkeley Capital, Troika Dialog, the latter run by a friend who was also the owner of the Starlite Diner where so many of the meetings mentioned took place) and others who did very well by not being so. CSFB comes to mind with thir front-running of the order book.

Richard Layard was also out there for a time and could be pretty scathing about the Harvard group. As, indeed, were many of those I knew in the financial world. Beer time gossip was really centered around the fact that if you were going to be corrupt, play by Russian rules, then at least make pot loads of cash doing so.

No, there is actually no mention of this in either my own article or the II one I link to. I think you are wrong on this, but I think I’ll save that debate for a time and place where people are more in the mood to read what I have written.

Apparently in the intellectual big leagues ethics are not a major topic of study or reflection.

And no one should ever let an economist manage anything other than the economics department.