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<\/p>\nNote: It looks like we’ve missed our monthly “cutting-edge research” installment, but I haven’t forgotten…there was just no peer-reviewed articles dealing primarily with the Church this month! Hopefully to be continued next month.<\/p>\n
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One of the more<\/span> interesting studies<\/span><\/a> in political science was the famous diplomat parking paper. In New York City and Washington DC one often sees vehicles with blue-plated tags that signal that its owner has diplomatic immunity. Among other things this means that they can basically park where they want and they don\u2019t ever have to pay traffic tickets. Researchers measured how many traffic tickets each country\u2019s diplomatic corps received and plotted it against various empirical measures of corruption, finding that they strongly correlated; if you live in a country that has been empirically scored as being corrupt you tend to incur a lot of traffic tickets that you have no intention of paying, whereas diplomats from less corrupt countries tend to obey parking rules even though they don\u2019t have to.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This provides evidence that some countries are more corruption-tolerant than others. Yes we have our issues too, but it\u2019s a bit gaslighty to pretend that bribing the cop in Russia or Mali will be met with the same response as bribing the cop in, say, Sweden. (When my parents were on a mission in Russia they explained that in Russian culture you\u2019re sort of a jerk if you don\u2019t offer the police officer a bribe. The man has a family to feed after all, or as a member stated \u201cthey pay them enough for their bread, that is what they need to do for their butter.\u201d)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The fact is that different countries have different tolerances for different kinds of corruption, and there is a boatload of empirical evidence for this, not just the parking study. Perhaps the most well-known, established indicator of these differences is Transparency International\u2019s <\/span>Corruption Perceptions Index<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So what does this have to do with the Church?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Church runs an extremely tight ship financially. No objective, honest appraisal of Church finances would conclude that it has a corruption or embezzlement problem; you have to really want to see it to see anything there. When the slush fund came to light I remember mentioning it to a person of another faith that has had its own share of bona fide financial scandals, and they were sincerely confused. It went something like this.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI thought I saw something about that. A leader stole money?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n