Hello, welcome to this course on Corruption, this is Week 1 Lecture 1. Today were going to introduce ourselves to the subject of corruption. The outline of this course as follows, in Week 1 we're going to talk about what corruption is. What constitutes corruption. In Week 2, we're going to talk about the large effects of corruption, the meta effects, the effects at the level of society. And in Week 3, we're going to go down to the micro-effects. The effects at the level of the individual and of a business firm. And finally, in Week 4, we'll get to the subject that some people find most interesting. And that's how do we control corruption? How can we try to control this phenomenon. The general approach to this course is as follows, each week there'll be four lectures. And at the end of each week, there will be a brief assessment. Basically, trying to make sure that everyone's caught up, that we have a shared understanding of what it is that we're talking about. Today I want to ask one simple question and that is, why study corruption? This is why, people are tired of corruption. And not just in South Africa, where this picture was taken. In the last few days, 1,000 people have protested in the city square in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Thousands of people have protested across Iraq. A million people in the last few days, gathered to protest against corruption in Brazil. And millions of people have taken to the streets to protest corruption in India. I don't know when you're watching this, obviously it's being recorded at a different time than when you're actually watching it. But I am willing to bet that whenever it is you're watching this, somewhere in the world, somewhere at this very moment, a person, people are risking their lives to protest against corruption. They're standing in the rain, they're standing in the snow, they're standing in the dark, they're standing under the sun. They're willing to be beaten, they're willing to risk their jobs, they're willing to risk everything, to protest against corruption. People are tired of corruption and it's not just people. Governments are scrambling to try to understand how do we control corruption. How can they deal with this problem? I'm really lucky, I get to work with some of these governments. Governments that you might not suspect, governments of which you might be cynical. They honestly and sincerely trying to understand how can we get a grip on this. How can we start to control this phenomenon that our people despise and that's undercutting the viability of our government and businesses, businesses all over the world. Businesses are not blind to the costs imposed by corruption or to the popular discontent that is engendered by corruption. And so, businesses are asking themselves, how is it that we can control that employee, that agent, that representative of our firm who thinks they're taking shortcut? Who thinks they're doing something that will get them ahead or will get our firm ahead, which is actually destroying the profitability, the viability and the reputation of our firm. There are a lot of things that are really important in the world, a lot. And there are a number of things that we need to understand to understand the world. But right now, it is impossible to understand the world. To understand this world, as it is, without understanding corruption. I've been studying corruption for 20 years, which is hard to believe. But my job for the next four weeks is to take all the material that we know about corruption and try to condense it, try to make it easy to understand. So that over the next four weeks we can all get a general understanding of this phenomenon so that we can better understand the world. If you're from the United States I also invite you to take a look at my Tedx talk. If you're not from the United States it might not be very interesting so I'm not going to include it in the sessions that we have together over the next four weeks. But if you are, I invite you to take a look. The URL is right there. You can find it on TEDxPenn. So corruption, critical in understanding the world. What we're going to do over the next four weeks is get an overview of what corruption is, what it does and how to control it. Thank you, and I really look forward to our time together.
