Most of us came to this university to learn something great. Tired of facts and formulas from high school, we wanted to learn something we could use, and we wanted to use this knowledge to help our friends, family, neighbors, country and world. Pollution, poverty, Hurricane Katrina relief, deficient bridges or even the mortgage crisis – you name it, and students here want to solve it.
But the prevention of each of those problems wouldn’t have required anybody with a university degree. Their solutions can’t be found in a textbook or a dissertation. And every day, honest people work to solve these problems without thanks. What tool are they using? Ethics.
Pollution could be greatly reduced if each of us, not just big businesses, considered the implications of what we consume from the environment and each other. Many working people aren’t earning a living wage; is it ethical to hire people for such low pay? What if the Army Corps of Engineers spent some extra money to fortify the levees in New Orleans? Or, if our local governments took the politically unpopular step of allocating more money to road and bridge maintenance? And now we know that some bankers falsified information to secure mortgages for customers, all in the name of profit.
In some respects, we take ethics for granted. We forget that our whole economy is based on trust. Columnist Jay Nargundkar wrote last spring about kiva.org, a website that helps you lend money to entrepreneurs internationally. To date, seven of these businesses have defaulted on their loans. Most of these seven have been forced out of business by scams, internal theft and dishonest business partners. In the U.S., we are largely free of these problems through legal protections, which give a strong ethical foundation for a strong economy.
But at the same time, we are surrounded by unethical people. Lender Kourosh Partow, formerly of American Home Mortgage, is off to jail for falsifying mortgage application information. His lawyer pled for leniency on the defense that the entire mortgage culture suffered from “a blind eye mentality.” Thankfully for our legal system, this defense didn’t do Partow much good.
I guess you’re thinking that you should go into a work environment where people don’t have to make tough calls that pit ethics against profit, like academia. Too bad you would be wrong. The most glaring lack of ethics that I’ll discuss today comes from a university economics professor. His name is John Lott, and what he did is so egregious, you might just laugh.
Lott created an online alter ego named Mary Rosh, who would log on to Amazon.com and review his books with five-star ratings. As if this wasn’t enough, “Mary Rosh” then slammed Lott’s academic opponents with one-star reviews. Then, in June 2000, Lott-as-Rosh went on to quote Florida State professor Gary Kleck in another five-star review of Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime.” The following day, an “anonymous” reviewer from Philadelphia (later shown to be Lott) blasted Gary Kleck’s own book with a two-star review. Lott was eventually discovered after signing his name to the alias “Economist123”, which he had also used to anonymously praise his own books. The sleuth work in discovering Lott is not only important for exposing unethical activity; it’s also noteworthy as the only time in history that bloggers have contributed something to our society.
The world has enough great minds, but it may not have enough great minds who always consider the ethical implications of their decisions. Ask your professors about ethical issues in their fields. It’s something they probably would be happy to discuss, unless, of course, they’re busy maintaining a collection of online personas for self-praise.
Daniel Marcin is a senior mathematics and economics major. He can be reached at dmarcin@umd.edu.
