[mr_luc]

The author might be assuming public knowledge that some kinds of corruption in the United States, for instance, are getting worse:

See [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/28/report-transparency-int...

Also, it might be hard for them to mention the strongest examples of brazen corruption in leadership without being accused of being political, so I don't blame the author for using the even-handed examples drawn from all quarters -- which does make it easier to characterize as cherry-picked noise -- when the thesis of the article is that leadership, a necessarily tiny fraction of the 1% in the public spotlight, are growing increasingly shameless.

But the author well could have mentioned certain boundary-pushing, prosecution-taunting illegality by political actors in the United States, including actions rescued only by equally brazen presidential pardons -- actions in the public sphere that are almost without precedent.

Those kinds of actions, so few in terms of data points, could be characterized as 'noise' for their rareness, but the author's thesis (which seems sufficiently plausible not to be discounted out of hand) is that extremely brazen action by different kinds of leadership are at least leading indicators of institutional inability to deal with corruption and wrongdoing, preceding spillover into society at large -- and that maybe, due to the outsized impact that leaders have on society, those actions have an element of influence or causation.

Well, a thesis like that doesn't, to me, mark the author as being morally dubious himself for having it.

If a society is getting more corrupt, over the short-term, (see [1] for proof that at least some well-informed people think this one is), then an increasing number of individual members of society will be corrupted.

The author simply draws an obvious corollary that we may not have considered: hey, reader -- we are among those members of society. We should assume that we can, and will, be influenced if corruption increases, or if we're exposed to very public and visible examples of it.

That may be uncomfortable to consider, but I'm glad the author helped us consider it. Is it really only other people, other people's children and families, who are corrupted if they live and grow in a society in which corruption is on the rise?

(It's clearly an opinion piece, and I'm not sure how HN-ish it is, but it doesn't seem like a particularly trashy one to me)

[jjoonathan]

> I don't blame the author for using the even-handed examples

This dude had to cherry pick harder than an industrial farm machine so that he could all but ignore the elephants in the room.