Corruption: why it isn’t always about money

On power that isn’t yours alone, privileges without a name, and the question of when you can truly call something corruption.

Picture a cake on the table. It’s a birthday, the room is full of family and the coffee is ready. Someone has to cut it, and everyone is looking at you.

At that moment you have more power than you think. You could give yourself a generous slice. You could slip your favourite nephew an extra piece. You could give the aunt who is always late the thin edge, the bit where the cream has slid off.

Not a penny changes hands. Nobody pays you and nobody is bribed. Yet everyone at the table feels what is happening. Whoever gets the smallest slice usually says nothing, because it’s only cake. She remembers, though.

That small moment holds everything this article is about. The others handed you the knife because they trusted you to share fairly. Power almost always works like that: it is borrowed. A director, a civil servant, a chair or a parent is given a say over something that isn’t theirs alone. Abuse of power begins the moment someone forgets who they borrowed that power from.

Still, most people hear the word corruption and think of bribes. Is it only about money? Or also about the privilege someone quietly grants themselves, while others pay the difference?

Corruption doesn’t start with money

It’s no surprise that corruption makes you think of an envelope. Money leaves traces. You can count it, find it in a bank account and put it before a judge. The image of a note slipped under the table is so clear that it overshadows everything else.

Transparency International, an organisation that has studied corruption around the world for decades, uses a strikingly short definition: the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.¹ The word money does not appear in it.

Put simply, it means this: you were given something because others were counting on you, and you used it for yourself or for your own circle. According to Transparency International, that can also mean favours in exchange for services, or jobs and contracts that end up with friends and family.¹

The word itself says so too. Corruption comes from the Latin corrumpere: to destroy, to spoil, and figuratively also to seduce or to bribe. Inside it sits rumpere, to break.² So with corruption, something breaks, and usually it is trust.

Once you look at it this way, you see the gain take many forms. A place on a waiting list that suddenly moves up. A permit that comes through faster for an acquaintance. A job for a nephew when there were better candidates. A rule that is strict for everyone except the person applying it.

This kind of abuse of power is hard to see, because it hides behind a tidy form or a word like tailor-made. The fact that it can stay hidden is exactly what makes it so tempting. More than 2,300 years ago, a Greek philosopher told a story about this: about what people do when nobody can see them.

The ring of Gyges

In Plato’s Republic, a long conversation about justice, a young man called Glaucon tells an old legend.³

Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia. After a violent storm and an earthquake, the ground split open where his flock was grazing. He climbed down into the chasm and found a hollow bronze horse with little doors. Inside lay a dead man, larger than any ordinary person, wearing nothing but a gold ring. Gyges took the ring and climbed back up.

Some time later he was sitting with the other shepherds. While they talked, he happened to turn the setting of the ring towards the inside of his hand. Suddenly the others spoke about him as if he were no longer there. He had become invisible. When he turned the setting back, they could see him again.³

What did he do with that power? He arranged to be sent to the court as a messenger. There he seduced the queen, killed the king with her help and took the kingdom.³

Glaucon draws a harsh conclusion. Give a just person and an unjust person a ring like that each, he says, and they end up in the same place. Nobody keeps their hands off other people’s things when they can take whatever they want unseen. Whoever thinks they can do wrong safely, does it.³

Then he says something that is exactly about abuse of power without an envelope. The height of injustice, says Glaucon, is to be thought just when you are not.³

What does he mean? First, take the magic out of the story. The ring does not have to be made of gold. Anything that means nobody sees you or checks on you works like that ring. A decision you never have to explain to anyone. A meeting without minutes. A position in which nobody dares to ask why.

Glaucon is really asking an uncomfortable question: are people honest because they are good, or because they are being watched? He thinks the second. Take away the onlookers, and almost everyone takes more than their share.

Ask yourself honestly. Imagine you had a ring like that for a week. You surely wouldn’t kill a king. Would you still pay for everything, though? Would you never skip a queue, or forget to buy a parking ticket?

Then his final line, about the height of injustice. An ordinary thief takes something and is sometimes caught. The people he robbed at least know what happened. Far worse is someone who takes while looking just. Their victims have nothing to point to. They feel that something is wrong, while everything seems to follow the rules.

That is the heart of corruption without an envelope. Whoever accepts an envelope can be caught. Whoever arranges their advantage through a tidy procedure no longer needs a ring. They are already invisible, because everything looks fair.

Plato had Glaucon say this to challenge Socrates. In the rest of the book, Socrates tries to show that justice is good for a person in itself, even when nobody is watching. Lawmakers did not wait for that answer. They looked for a way to disable the ring.

A judge who had to pay 12 times over

That search is older than Plato. In the Louvre in Paris stands a column of black basalt, more than 2.25 metres tall. Around 1750 BC, King Hammurabi of Babylon had 282 legal judgements carved into it, on family, property, trade and work.⁴

One of the first rules concerns the judge himself. If a judge has given a verdict and set it down in writing, and it later turns out to be wrong through his own fault, he pays 12 times the fine he imposed. He is publicly removed from the judge’s seat and may never sit in judgement again.⁵

The text does not mention bribery, only a mistake through his own fault. Even so, it already holds an idea that belongs to abuse of power: whoever decides about others must be able to be held to account. Even then, power was borrowed.

Some 1,400 years later, the Greek philosopher Aristotle thought about it again. In his Politics he compares the ways a city or country can be governed: by one person, by a small group or by many.⁶ You might expect him to say which of the three is best. He doesn’t. In his view, each form can turn out well or badly, depending on one question: for whom is it governed?

A king who rules for his people is, for him, a good king. The same king ruling only for himself he calls a tyrant. The same goes for a small group or a majority. Whoever serves the common interest governs well. Whoever serves only their own interest has gone astray.⁶ You can ask that question at home too, or in a club: does this decision serve everyone, or mainly the person making it?

Aristotle also saw how people cling to power. In the past, he writes, everyone took a turn in office. One time you looked after the others, the next time someone else looked after you. In his own day, though, people wanted to stay in office permanently, because the office and the public purse brought them advantage. He makes a dry joke about it. It was as if those rulers were ill and only stayed healthy as long as they held office.⁶ He means that they stayed for what the position gave them, and less and less for the people they served.

Elsewhere in the same book is a short sentence that still hits home: most people are bad judges in their own case.⁶ Think of an argument with a brother or sister when you were young. You were certain you were right. So were they. As soon as it is about ourselves, our judgement quietly bends towards our own interest. So you don’t have to be a bad person to share unfairly. It is enough to decide about your own advantage with nobody watching.

Over all those centuries, the temptation stayed the same. What changed were the ways of limiting it. Yet one question remains, closer to home. How does someone who sees themselves as honest still drift in that direction?

The privilege disguised as merit

Take a sports club, with a clubhouse, volunteers and a committee that meets on Tuesday evenings. The chair has done this work for 15 years. He has given countless evenings and weekends without getting anything back. The committee decides who gets the best training times and who goes to the tournament. On paper, everything is in order. Yet the best places end up strikingly often with his own family and friends. Parents who ask are told kindly that, sadly, it won’t work out this season.

Is that chair a bad person? He doesn’t think so himself, and that is the problem. The organisational researchers Vikas Anand, Blake Ashforth and Mahendra Joshi studied why decent people take part in unfair practices. They noticed that big fraud cases in companies often involved people known as upstanding: active in their community, generous to charity, caring parents.⁷ People like that need a story that lets them justify their actions to themselves. That is called rationalising.⁷

One of those stories they call the metaphor of the ledger.⁷ A ledger is the big account book in which a business records what comes in and what goes out. The chair keeps a ledger like that in his head. On the left is everything he gave: 15 years of free evenings, wet Saturdays on the touchline, phone calls on Sunday mornings. On the right is what he got back: almost nothing. In his own books, the club owes him. A better place for his grandson then doesn’t feel like favouritism. It feels like a small repayment.

The treacherous part is who keeps that ledger: only him. Nobody ever agreed that his effort would be repaid with priority. The parents who miss out don’t even know there was a bill. He is bookkeeper, auditor and recipient all at once.

So the advantage becomes invisible, even to the person taking it. The Roman orator Cicero wrote about this in 44 BC, in a book on duties that he wrote as a letter to his son.⁸ He considered this form of injustice the worst of all:

Of all forms of injustice, none is more flagrant than that of the hypocrite who, at the very moment when he is most false, makes it his business to appear virtuous.

Cicero

Translation by Walter Miller (1913).

Cicero and Glaucon, centuries apart, say the same thing: the heaviest injustice is the injustice that looks tidy. The person who feels it most is the one who keeps getting a little less.

Who pays the bill

Think back for a moment to the aunt with the thin edge of cake. She said nothing. At home she may have wondered whether she was overreacting. It was only cake, wasn’t it?

That is often how abuse of power without an envelope feels to the person who has to carry it. There is no proof, only a pattern. You see it, but you find it hard to name. You start to doubt yourself. Am I too sensitive? Am I asking too much? Am I just jealous? After a while you stop asking. Some people go quiet, others become cynical, and others drop out. That is how something breaks that no money can buy back: the trust that effort and honesty matter. That breaking is the corrumpere the word comes from.

Can such a quiet privilege be compared with the envelope that is entirely normal in some countries? The skeleton is the same. Someone holds borrowed power, uses it for themselves, and others pay. One pays with money, the other with opportunities, time or trust.

Yet they don’t always weigh the same. Who pays the price, and how vulnerable is that person? Is there pressure or coercion? Does it happen once, or is it a system? A small thank-you afterwards is different from a payment without which you won’t be helped.

In countries where a teacher or civil servant earns too little to live on, the system plays a part too. The economists Caroline Van Rijckeghem and Beatrice Weder found more corruption in developing countries where civil servants earned relatively less. Even so, in their view salaries would have to rise enormously to eradicate corruption by that route alone.⁹ A system that underpays its people carries part of the responsibility. The individual remains responsible for what they do. Both are true at once.

You could even argue that the quiet privilege in a wealthy country has less excuse. Someone in poverty who accepts a gift can point to a system that has let them down. Someone in comfort who arranges a privilege can do so far less.

When can you call something corrupt?

Not everything that feels unfair is corruption. That distinction actually protects the people who raise real injustice. Whoever calls every setback corruption weakens the word, just when it is needed.

A few words help here. A conflict of interest means you have a stake in a decision you have to make, for example as a councillor voting on your brother-in-law’s building plan. According to the OECD, the international organisation for cooperation on economic policy, that is not corruption in itself. It can lead to it if it is not handled properly.¹⁰ Favouritism is giving someone preference because you like them. Nepotism is giving family preference. A chaotic committee can also simply be clumsy, without anyone gaining from it.

With a person, then, you look first at what they did, and only much later at who they are. Four questions take you a long way:

1. What was this person entrusted with, and on whose behalf?
2. What was that power meant for?
3. Who gained from it, and who carried the burden?
4. What do I know for certain, and what would change my mind?

That last question is the hardest and the most honest. Whoever only seeks confirmation is no longer investigating a suspicion, but defending a conclusion.

With a company or a club, what counts most is what happens after something comes to light. Is it put right, or is it protected and passed on to newcomers? According to Anand and his colleagues, that passing on is the step by which an exception becomes a culture.⁷

With a country, the most caution is needed. The best-known ranking measures how corrupt the public sector appears in the eyes of experts and businesspeople. It does not measure how citizens experience corruption themselves.¹¹ A low score says something about institutions and oversight. About the baker, the teacher or the bus driver who does honest work there every day, it says nothing. People are not their country.

That last point showed itself in an unexpected place: on the streets of New York.

The ring that was taken away

Thousands of diplomats work at the United Nations in New York. Until 2002, thanks to diplomatic immunity, they did not have to pay their parking fines. In effect they were wearing the ring of Gyges, only in a parking space. Those who paid anyway did so purely out of conscience.

The economists Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel looked at who kept parking properly. Diplomats from countries with a high corruption score had clearly more unpaid fines. Habits from home travelled with them. Then came 2002. The authorities gained the right to confiscate the number plates of offenders, and the number of unpaid fines fell sharply.¹²

That is the hopeful part of this story. Glaucon was right that invisibility tempts people. The reverse is also true. As soon as a decision becomes visible and has consequences, people behave differently, wherever they come from. Abuse of power is not a fate that belongs to a people or a character.

What does that mean for you? Almost everyone holds borrowed power somewhere: as a parent, in a club, in a classroom, in a group chat where you plan the arrangements. If you have something to share out, try the test of swapped names. Take a privilege you gave or received, and imagine someone without connections in that place. Would the same reason still stand? If so, make that reason visible. Then you do what Gyges never did: you let yourself be seen.

Do you keep hearing that, sadly, it won’t work out? Then a calm question helps more than indignation: on what grounds? With that question you ask for light, without accusing anyone.

Ask yourself one uncomfortable question as well. Would you reject the same exception if you benefited from it yourself? That question makes your judgement fairer, and your voice stronger.

Back to the birthday. Someone has to cut the cake; that won’t change. Power does not disappear, and it doesn’t need to. What matters is that whoever holds the knife keeps remembering whose it is. Power is always borrowed.

From whom have you borrowed power, and when did you last look at who got the smallest slice when you shared?

The examples in this article are general and do not refer to any existing person or organisation. This article provides general information and is not legal advice.

Related reading

• Power and judgement: who judges the judge?
• Manipulation: your brain is not an honest witness
• Intelligence is not enough

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Sources

The numbers in the text refer to this list.

1. Transparency International. (n.d.). What is corruption? https://www.transparency.org/en/what-is-corruption
2. Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.). Corrupt. https://www.etymonline.com/word/corrupt
3. Plato. (n.d.). The republic (B. Jowett, Trans.), Book II. The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html (Original work written ca. 360 BC)
4. Musée du Louvre. (n.d.). The Code of Hammurabi. https://www.louvre.fr/en/the-code-of-hammurabi
5. Hammurabi. (n.d.). The code of Hammurabi (L. W. King, Trans.). The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamcode.asp (Original work ca. 1750 BC)
6. Aristotle. (n.d.). Politics (B. Jowett, Trans.), Book III. The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.3.three.html (Original work written ca. 350 BC)
7. Anand, V., Ashforth, B. E., & Joshi, M. (2004). Business as usual: The acceptance and perpetuation of corruption in organizations. Academy of Management Executive, 18(2), 39–53. https://doi.org/10.5465/AME.2004.13837437
8. Cicero, M. T. (2014). De officiis (W. Miller, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47001 (Original work written 44 BC; translation originally published 1913)
9. Van Rijckeghem, C., & Weder, B. (2001). Bureaucratic corruption and the rate of temptation: Do wages in the civil service affect corruption, and by how much? Journal of Development Economics, 65(2), 307–331. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-3878(01)00139-0
10. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2003). Recommendation of the Council on OECD guidelines for managing conflict of interest in the public service (OECD/LEGAL/0316). https://legalinstruments.oecd.org/public/doc/130/body-text.en.html
11. Transparency International. (2025, February 11). The ABCs of the CPI: How the Corruption Perceptions Index is calculated. https://www.transparency.org/en/news/how-cpi-scores-are-calculated
12. Fisman, R., & Miguel, E. (2007). Corruption, norms, and legal enforcement: Evidence from diplomatic parking tickets. Journal of Political Economy, 115(6), 1020–1048. https://doi.org/10.1086/527495

Images: Code de Hammurabi, roi de Babylone; face avant by Mbzt, CC BY 3.0. Roman busts with Cicero by Bradley Weber, CC BY 2.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons, resized and converted to WebP.

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