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New York City has long had a problem with United Nations diplomats who park wherever they want and claim diplomatic immunity when ticketed for breaking the parking laws. In one recent five-year period, diplomats racked up more than 150,000 unpaid tickets resulting in over $18 million in unpaid fines.
Here we see a microcosm of how human governments are often weak and inefficient and what is essentially wrong with human governments.
Raymond Fisman, research director of the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School, and Edward Miguel, associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an illuminating book about economics and governments titled Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations.
In their book they observe: "The central lesson from New York City's parking travails with diplomats is that reformers of government institutions-whether local officials or World Bank hotshots-must be aware that values and social norms can undermine their attempts at change.
"In other words, altering the law is unlikely to be sufficient in the presence of a pervasive culture of corruption. Corrupt behavior is deeply engrained in culture and no small matter to root out" (2008, p. 120, emphasis added throughout).
Another sobering assessment of human governance comes from Dr. George Friedman, founder and CEO of Stratfor, one of the world's leading private intelligence and forecasting firms. In his 2009 book The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, he states: "What I have tried to do in this book [is] to sense the twenty-first century with geopolitics as my primary guide. I began with the permanent: the persistence of the human condition, suspended between heaven and hell" (pp. 250-251).
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