ToS edit barryclark#3

Fixed formatting and added links

_posts/2014-12-06-thieves-of-state.md

@@ -5,8 +5,6 @@ title: Corruption: All Things to All People
 
 I saw Sarah Chayes speak at Politics and Prose last Wednesday to promote her new book, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security. The (mostly positive) [Washington Post review](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/01/16/does-a-corrupt-government-breed-political-violence/) sums up Chayes’ case as follows: 
 
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 > "The target of her zeal is government corruption around the world — an old challenge but one she recasts in urgent and novel terms. The trouble with fraud and bribery and the rest is not simply their moral evil or economic toll, Chayes argues. The real danger is that an abusive government can elicit violent responses, including religious extremism, putting the survival of the state at risk. The case she makes is anecdotal but alarming."
 
 Read a few of Chayes’ examples of the “abusive government” that she witnessed in Afghanistan and you’ll have a good idea how it produces so much seething, impotent rage, even if that rage isn’t always and everywhere transmuted into violence.
@@ -15,9 +13,9 @@ Recently, though, it’s become somewhat fashionable to make the case that a lit
 
 The problem is that “corruption” means so many things to so many people that it no longer makes sense as an analytical category, if it ever did. Something is corrupt if it is no longer in its proper state, so to define corruption we have to first hash out the proper state of things; debating corruption, in other words, means debating everything. “Corruption” is not a term of art but a bedrock concept, kind of like “injustice” or “progress”. No one is waiting on an analytically rigorous, ideologically neutral definition for “injustice”, and “corruption” is in the same boat.  
 
-This is how it can simultaneously be true that corruption is an “Anglo-American fetish”, as Chris Blattman describes it, and a major driver of all sorts of social ills. The worry that elected officials are skimming a few dollars off the top or that a handful of cronies are on the government’s payroll might be particularly Anglo-American; the systematic, rage-inducing, day-in-day-out extortion that Chayes describes is not.
+This is how it can simultaneously be true that corruption is an [“Anglo-American fetish”](http://chrisblattman.com/2012/11/01/the-blind-spots-in-the-un-development-agenda/), as Chris Blattman describes it, and a major driver of all sorts of social ills. The worry that elected officials are skimming a few dollars off the top or that a handful of cronies are on the government’s payroll might be particularly Anglo-American; the systematic, rage-inducing, day-in-day-out extortion that Chayes describes is not.
 
-Consider an example closer to home than Nigeria or Afghanistan: James Michael Curley, the undeniably corrupt four-time mayor of Boston who spent part of his last term in a federal prison for mail fraud. While Curley cultivated the image of a lovable rogue – his first prison stint came after taking the civil service exam in place of a constituent, memorialized in the slogan “He Did It for a Friend” – but he also destroyed lives and demagogued viciously when necessary to get his way. The favors he handed out to constituents and allies were financed by shakedowns of the business community, a practice that drove firms away from Boston and wrecked the city’s tax base for decades to come. But Curley was also a populist hero for a reason:
+Consider an example closer to home than Nigeria or Afghanistan: James Michael Curley, the undeniably corrupt four-time mayor of Boston who spent part of his last term in a federal prison for mail fraud. While Curley cultivated the image of a lovable rogue – his first prison stint came after taking the civil service exam in place of a constituent, memorialized in the slogan “He Did It for a Friend” – but he also destroyed lives and demagogued viciously when necessary to get his way. The favors he handed out to constituents and allies were financed by shakedowns of the business community, a practice that drove firms away from Boston and [wrecked the city’s tax base for decades to come](http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/curley_effect_1.pdf). But Curley was also a populist hero for a reason:
 
 > “Lincoln freed the slaves; Curley got the scrubwomen off their knees. It was his defining humanitarian gesture: before Curley was mayor, the cleaning women had had to scrub the marble floors of City Hall on their knees. Declaring that a woman should go down on her knees only when praying to god, Curley got them long-handled mops…That was the main thread in Curley’s public life: doing little things for little people who repaid him in votes and gratitude, and who as the years went by and they tasted something of the world’s indifference, magnified manifold the value of the little thing Curley had done for them, their parents, or their friends until it became a big thing – the stern lecture that made a husband swear off drink, the job that saved a family, the gift of a turkey with all the trimmings that brought joy to a dreary Christmas.” (Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, pp. 13-14)